What Designing Over 10,000 UI Screens Taught This Veteran Creative
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Design isn’t something you can pick up from reading a textbook. It takes more than one try to build a masterpiece that you’ll be taken seriously for, and involves several rounds of trial-and-error.
Jon Moore, Co-Founder at UX Power Tools and Senior Design Partner at product agency Innovatemap, has worked on over 10,000 UI screens in the span of his career, and if there’s one takeaway from it, it’s that trends don’t have to be followed so fervently.
Check out five things Moore learned from his design career thus far and read his full article with five more points on Medium.
1. Prioritize your design criteria
Focus on the fundamental aspects of your project before working on to the frills. Moore says he swears by one analogy: “No one cares what color the stitching is on the leather seats of your fancy concept car if it doesn’t even have wheels yet.”
2. Animations aren’t key
Animations are undoubtedly cool, but they won’t make or break your projects. Moore points out that some of the best products in the world are scant of animations—think Google, Salesforce, and Medium.
First and foremost, work on building quality user experiences, “then you can spend all the time you want making a cute little menu button that morphs into a McDonald’s ‘Big Mac’,” Moore explains.
3. “Templatize” your projects
Moore says he successfully created 52 screens for a client, even developing a workable prototype, in just a week-and-a-half. The proposed system was fully customizable too, and could be tweaked according to the brand’s tone.
All of this wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t made templates out of his earlier work. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel—if a project of yours has succeeded before, it will likely work again.
4. Consistency isn’t just user-friendly, but also convenient
Consistency is a UX rule that allows platforms to be more understandable, and thus adoptable, for users. What many creatives might not know is that it’s time-saving.
If you create a button symbol and use it from start to end in a project, all your buttons will not only look consistent, but you’ll also pick up speed because you don’t have to make new ones from scratch.
5. User value isn’t just important, it’s just about everything
Screenshot via Craigslist
Looks aren’t important when you bring value to your users. Case in point: Craigslist. You likely won’t applaud it for its aesthetics—and somehow, it has a value of US$3 billion.
All in all, user experience is a priority; user interfaces are afterthoughts. You can read Moore’s full post on Medium for five more tips.
[via Medium, images via various sources]
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