What Does Illustration Mean for Experience Design?

By Jimi Chen, Product Designer @ Chewy

In the Information Age, our lives are full of digital products and services. Many technology companies bring us convenient experiences through excellent design. Still, some users feel these experiences are boring, tedious, and full of long text. Luckily, in recent years, more companies have started to embrace illustration as an important part of their designs and create distinctive experiences within their products.

Why use illustration?

“A picture is worth a thousand words”

In digital experience design, a good illustration has the power to convey complicated ideas with a few simple visual elements. It helps the designer tell a story and deliver information in a streamlined way.

Illustration can express brand value

Learning from some successful branding design examples, we know most successful brands have a unique personality. However, a digital product has to be functional. It can’t fully convey a company’s value to customers through its user interface. How can product designers create functional products with visuals that communicate brand value to users?

Some people find illustrations are a perfect solution to this problem. Illustrations show the brand value through easy-to-understand images. Illustrations should be a collection of visuals that tightly integrate the mood and style that clarifies a company’s promise, often with a nod to user experience. At Chewy, we believe a good illustration strategy can help us take our business to the next level.

Illustration attracts users

Illustration makes a big difference in overcrowded content feeds. Marketer Jeff Bullas cites that content with relevant illustrations gets 94% more engagement than content without relevant illustrations. This is because humans have a remarkable ability to remember pictures. People can accurately remember more than 2,000 pictures for several days, even if they only see the images for a few seconds. Based on this, we believe illustration can help take users from a frustrating experience to a delightful one.

Illustration can guide users

How would you feel if you had to read a 10-page instruction manual to understand how to use a new product? Since visuals can easily tell users a story, we can turn onboarding into a tutoring process. Illustrations can explain a workflow, process, or any abstract actions in a product and lead users to an amazing experience.

When to use illustration

Landing page

Wealthfront is an automated investment service firm that helps customers optimize their finances. Its landing page uses illustrations to emphasize how much better customers’ lives could be with Wealthfront’s services.

Empty states, such as a 404 page

Snips uses illustrations to keep users engaged on this error page, even during a possible disconnection.

Instructional content

Cuberto uses illustration for their Exchange App’s onboarding pages.

When users start the interaction, they set the goals they want to achieve, such as buy and sell cryptocurrency, keep assets in a digital wallet, and trade. These illustrations help visualize how the product functions in a bright way.

Illustration at Chewy

Here at Chewy, we value the customer experience and we’re always working to create a better experience for our users. Our product design team is encouraged to constantly think big about how people use our products and how we can bring more happiness to pets and pet parents. We’re always pushing ourselves to optimize workflow and improve customers’ impressions of our designs.

Recently, Chewy’s design team began to create an illustration style to address company’s business need. We are exploring potential styles and look forward to implementing them in our products soon!

by Jimi Chen

Product Designer @ Chewy

If you have any questions about careers at Chewy, please visit https://www.chewy.com/jobs