Bring Functional Beauty Along with User Experiences
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We all know one fact that we are starving for attention of our targeted users on the web for our web products. Our competitive market forces us to create products that are attrselected and compelling to grab the instant attentions of our users. In other words, we need to beautify our products with various ways and concepts like visually appealing design, giving it an aesthetic look, etc.
However, our eye candy graphics and beautiful UI elements alone are not sufficient to meet our website or web application’s goals such as conversion or deliver our messages righteously through beautiful information architecture. Thus, you simply have question that what we need additionally. Well, common psychological principles are teaching us that every user comes with an intention and if our product is meeting that intention they perceive it as a useful one otherwise, they abandon immediately without making further interactions.
Functional Beauty
Therefore, we can say that functional beauty can out weight aesthetic and functional beauty can achieve through usability and user experiences together. If you look at the success of Apple, it seems based on only “customer experiences first and technological advancements follow afterwards” principle. Thus, your success formula of your web design is to bring functional beauty in your design of a web product or software.
Steps to Achieve Functional Beauty
Now, ultimate question is that how to achieve this functional beauty for our web products or software by-and-large. There are some simple steps to achieve a definite functionally beautiful product and they are:
Usability of Product:
You may have notice that Craigslist is an ugly product, but is highly successful in terms of monetizing its owners. Why is it? Its uniqueness, simplicity, and usability may render it useful for many. Therefore, usability is the first step for a successful product concept or development and we can achieve that through very simple metrics like:
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Good Performance: if your users are meeting their goals consistently with flawless functionality as well as undisruptive or error free interactions you may say your performance is good and your users will never feel frustration or disengagements at all.
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Seamless Interactions: keeping or engaging users on our software or web product is the most essential goal of our design therefore, managing prompt and useful feedbacks through effective navigation, warning messages, instant and relevant notifications are unavoidable for seamless interaction designing.
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Conventions: we human beings are strange here because we need some uniqueness and innovation in each product though never ready to face any unfamiliar experiences. Thus, familiarity in each interaction is our priority. If we don’t want to go on conventional ways we need to guide our users on each step of our product usage through various ways. In short, we can’t create only beautiful interfaces with strange UI elements and functionality, familiarity is our priority.
Ingenuity in Design
As stated above we are striving for uniqueness and innovations in our product experiences and looks, but need to balance the usability at first hand. In many cases, we need to go beyond the conventional ways and bring some new ways to use or explore the product, which are unfamiliar for our users. Therefore, we need to design our product such a way that it proves self learning/teaching and guide its users easily to use it effectively without causing any disengagement or frustration.
If we can do these successfully with our product, if it would have ingenious properties that will keep our user deeply engage throughout their journey on the product and make them addictive or fan of our product. For instance, Window 8 and Discovr products are great examples of gestural interactions without a single button. These all make users curious and create positive emotions towards our products.