It’s not your imagination; digital products are getting worse. Every day, a big social media or digital service announces either price increases or a feature that will make users’ experiences notably worse (cough, AI). For a while, it has been a race to the bottom to see how many awful features users will put up with before they shut down their accounts for good.
As a designer, this environment is not why I got into UX design. Our mission is to make experiences better, not more bloated and exploitative. What can we do?
For me, I went back to the basics of how I got into web design in the first place. Yes, that was in the 90s when there was much more, shall we say, variety in how websites looked. Never mind sites built in Flash, which I know most of you haven’t considered in years. Things back then were more visual, sometimes in an annoying way, but sometimes in a compelling way.
Could we, as designers, take what we know now about usability and use our expertise to create better visuals?
Earlier this week, I wrote about the history of the Google Weather Frog and how much smaller it became over the years, until today with the Frog being removed from the Weather app altogether.
For me, checking the weather got a lot more boring, but it also took me more time. If I couldn’t see that the Frog was playing outside or huddled in his mushroom house, it took me longer to process if the weather was going to be nice or not: the human brain can process images much faster than text.
Images in sites and apps help us understand what’s going on. Digital experiences can be very confusing, and images can help us find our way. With this in mind, here are three places where you can include images to improve your user experiences:
- Onboarding: your product is probably not as intuitive as you think. You’ve been building your product for a while, so it’s intuitive for you. Someone looking at it for the first time will likely have trouble understanding what’s going on. Adding a few onboarding screens to a user’s initial experience can go a long way. Adding images to those screens can help even more.
- Empty states: this goes along with user onboarding by considering what screens could look like when there is no data. This is a great place to coach your users on how to add things to your system. There is also ample space to add a visual to help people understand.
- Object cards: this is not a "traditional" illustration opportunity, but having visually distinct looks for your cards (or table rows) can do a lot to help users understand your product. This is one of the fundamentals of Object-oriented UX; objects that are different need to look different. Wouldn’t you be confused if you ordered a coffee and a pastry at a coffee shop and both your drink and pastry arrived in large bowls? The same concept applies to digital experiences. In so many design systems, a single card layout visualizes multiple objects in a system, and users end up confused. Taking the time and attention to how things are uniquely represented in your system pays off in better experiences for everyone: your team and your users.
Some of us remember Microsoft Clippy or the dog mascot from the original Pets.com and may believe that adding visuals is goofy. But some companies are making good use of visuals, such as Duolingo. Looking at your system objectively to find ways to tell your story quickly is always going to be a great investment.
If you want to learn more about how adding visuals to your product will improve your team's and your user's experiences, get in touch.
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