Architecting Great Websites, User Interface

Contents

The User Interface, or UI, is the communication between the computer and a human being, or in the case of the web the mechanism of communication between the website and the visitor. A “good” user interface can mean that the design fulfills a visitor’s expectations. A “bad” user interface only gives you few clues about where you are or what you’re supposed to do, leaving you with the sensation that you’re drowning and don’t know which way is up!

Since the user interface is what every user or visitor of your website experiences first, last and during their visit, it is imperative that you get it right. Unfortunately, it’s not a simple case of making it look pretty (although you can get away with that for 5 page marketing sites) and you have to take into account relevant information about your users (for example demographic and sociographic information) as well as how you want the website to translate their visit into something of value to both them and to you.

Another way to look at the user interface is as a tool for the website to translate the technical workings (the site engine) into a useable form for the site visitor. It’s an effective abstraction of technology into useable systems. A good UI should almost feel invisible to the end user, making the website or system almost effortless to use, but a poor UI will have the opposite effect and turn visitors away.

Poor UIs are most easily noticeable in highly functional sites, such as eCommerce or online (hotel) booking systems where low sales volumes often point to something wrong with the UI. The bottom line is that the more complex the technology, more effort and skill is required to hide or abstract the system from the user and make it easy to use despite the underlying complexity.

As an example, I was trying to find out the prices for a hotel for a business trip to Manchester recently, and I had to go through 4 separate pages of form filling before I was finally told that the dates were not available. As a result, no prices were displayed as prices are dynamically allocated based on availability, and I found that I had to go through all 4 pages again to guess other dates that might be available so that I could finally get the prices I needed. After about 4 attempts, I finally phoned the hotel and found out the information I needed and booked the room. So what was the point in the online booking system, and I wonder how many bookings they actually get from it?

In my case, I had flexibility in the dates I needed, but the system itself constrained me to working around it and insisting that dates were the be-all and end-all of the booking. It would have been nice to have a calendar on the site so that I could enter basic information like the type of room, occupancy and number of nights and see what was available during the period. I could then use the calendar tool to access the booking form for the relevant room or find out prices.

As you can see, with a little innovation and by offering the visitor options on how they want to interact with your technology, you can have a more successful user interface than just following convention and consequently increase conversions, sales or whatever your business goal for the system/website is.

In the next episode we’ll look at Graphic Design.