UI Design Checklist

Looking for UI Design Checklist?

UI, short for User Interface, is a critical consideration regarding relevance, aesthetics, and functionality. It establishes the contact point between digital devices and human users through various components.

An interface consists of multiple elements, broadly outlined in four categories –

1. Input Controls (example – buttons, text fields, checkboxes)
2. Navigational Elements (example – slide bar, back arrow, search field)
3. Informative Components (example – progress bar under visuals)
4. Content Containers (example – accordion menu)

Invisibility is the ultimate staple of a perfectly designed and implemented UI for websites and/or apps. Users can completely ignore or notice nothing unusual about the UI because everything works perfectly.

And that’s what a good UI is all about. Despite UI being the first thing to encounter, nobody cares when there’s nothing to complain about. Instead, the user feels seamlessly engaged to act based on content.

The checklist for a proper User Interface design isn’t very long, given the fundamental features. However, there are many concerns involved in every basic fact. Knowing these facts will help you get a head start.

Visual Consistency

Maintaining a uniform pattern of all elements across the entire web/app interface delivers consistency. Design consistency or more accurately, visual consistency establishes control, familiarity, and reliability. It involves using a standard set of elements to provide a seamlessly engaging experience for the users.

Achieving the perfect consistency for the visuals often concerns the following best practices:

1. Defining a detailed set of guidelines for all the involved elements.
2. Using standardized components equally to create a familiar interface.
3. Implying a proper color palette with primary and secondary colors.
4. Creating a responsive layout for multiple screen sizes and resolutions.

Elements to control consistency primarily revolve around iconography, layout, typography, and color. A great advantage of using standard elements saves time, cost, and effort during product development. It also promotes an intuitive experience with outweighing benefits against all the challenges involved.

Usability

Above everything else, a web/app must be useful for the target audience by meeting the user\’s needs. Usability is all about ‘easy to use, navigate, and understand’ from the viewpoint of every individual user. It not only involves providing usable content but also faster completion of user actions on any device.

Some of the basic heuristics (aid or assistant) to comply with web/app usability involves:

1. Recognition over Recalling
2. Flexibility with Efficiency
3. Minimalist yet Aesthetic Design
4. Control and Freedom
5. Documentation and Help
6. Standardization and Consistency
7. Optimal Error Prevention
8. System Status Visibility

Since psychology is a crucial part of these factors, detailed research on the target audience is obligatory. Otherwise, you may find it difficult to adjust to the actual requirements of viewers. It’s also important to justify the acceptance of your product or service. Good usability eventually results in good feedback.

Responsiveness

It’s the process to turn the website adaptive to any device or more specifically, any screen size. Nearly everyone owns a smartphone through which the majority of people access the internet. A responsive website obviously ranks higher on Google’s mobile-first indexing, pushing your overall SEO.

Two must-consider responsive design elements are:

1. Breakpoints: It concerns three viewports – desktop/laptop, tablet, and mobile/smartphone.
2. Visual Content: It revolves around size, loading time, and quality of images, videos, and GIFs.

Flexibility, Graphics, Minimalism, Prioritization, Buttons – are vital facts to achieve responsiveness. You can’t expect to reach a large audience by sticking to one version of your website only. Allowing the site to switch devices while adopting the screen is what makes the website more reachable to users.

Color

A meaningful color pattern instantly creates an impression that impacts engagement and interaction. The color palette and color system are the two hand-in-hand concerns while gearing up for web colors. A palette comes with specific colors whereas a system organizes the chosen colors in the visual range.

Applying proper color combos to represent and trigger emotional/psychological responses includes:

1. Understanding Color Variations
2. Choosing from the Color Variations
3. Implementing the 60-30-10 Rule
4. Adopting Photos to Create Palette
5. Applying the Contrast Effectively
6. Using Steadfast Naming Convention

There are primary, secondary, and supplementary/accent colors in terms of available variations. And you better look into the potential audience to achieve an engaging visual experience for everyone. Although coloring a website seems an interestingly easy task, developers have to use UI tools for custom colors.

Typography

It’s all about using fonts in distinctive styles and structures to convey messages and trigger emotions. Don’t confine typography to choosing a nice font to represent the writings for audiences. It extends well beyond that, starting with a neat typeface. It instantly allows users to scan the webpage upon entering.

And the compulsory design element always consists of the following basic components:

1. Font
2. Typeface
3. Alignment
4. Hierarchy
5. White Space
6. Contrast

Readability and Scalability are the two prime metrics directly associated with typography. Likewise, you are free to choose from the infinite font options. But it’s a must to ensure the font’s compatibility with search engines. Adopting scalable, vector, or outlier fonts enables users to enlarge and reduce the size.

Testing

The checking mechanism for any software upon initial development makes UI testing a crucial segment. It’s necessary to ensure that all the desired requirements are met accordingly. There are several testing types – GUI (Graphical User Interface), CLI (Command Line Interface), and VUI (Voice User Interface).

UI Test for a developed but not launched site is more like a complete suite, fundamentally featuring:

1. Functionality
2. Visual Aspects
3. Response
4. Performance
5. Usability
6. Accessibility
7. Compliance

It also concerns multiple test scopes, measuring the justification of a simple yet essential process. You can go for manual testing when the features are rather simple. On the contrary, opting for automatic testing comes with obvious benefits. Any issues detected during testing must be fixed before launch.

Wrapping Up

Everything mentioned is connected to one another, making UI a complex hierarchy of aesthetic features. It takes more effort, time, and investment to put all facts in order. Otherwise, users will start noticing the disruption while browsing your app/site. And the interface design will require a costly alteration.

Contact Tectera a web development agency in Toronto to design website.