How UI Illustrations Improve UX | Fireart Studio
Digital illustrations and UX. They seem to be an unordinary mix. Although, this combination can bring additional value to a mobile app and its user experience.
UI designers often employ digital illustrations in their designs to provide a better user experience. Illustrations help you convey complex ideas, transfer information, set a positive mood, and engage a user. In this article, we will discuss the ways to use illustrations in UI design to improve UX.
Transfer Information More Efficiently Than Through The Text
You can use illustrations in tutorials and onboarding screens of mobile apps. It will help you make a process of interaction easier, smoother, and faster. You can use illustrations to explain the following:
- Various pricing packages.
- The meaning of the error message.
- Items included in the product plan.
- Or simply to welcome users.
Your explanations will work much better if you accompany them with digital illustrations since the visuals are faster perceived than text. They break down difficult information into simple scenes that are easy-to-understand.
Engage Users During The Journey
The user experience is an exciting journey that is full of incredible interactions and designs. Applying digital illustration to your user interface design, you can make this journey even more impressive and enjoyable. Particularly, it is helpful to use them on welcoming and onboarding screens that are almost the first user’s interactions with a mobile app.
Here you can see welcoming screens of the app with straightforward yet lovely illustrations. From the first interactions with an app, these images provoke absolutely new feelings, set a positive mood, and start building customer trust and loyalty.
We also like how MailChimp has used illustrations in the onboarding process. They have a very simple sketchy style and present all the ideas in an easy-to-understand form.
Create Dynamic User Experiences
By adding a little bit of motion to illustrations, you can make the user experience even more attractive and interactive. Animation empowers you to craft dynamic experience and present a bran identity truly creatively.
We would like to introduce the web design we have created for a traveling app. It features prominent illustrations that have been later animated and turned into a beautiful cover-video for a web app.
Moreover, by using more creative microinteractions accompanied by engaging mini-illustrations, you can make this application more “alive,” unique, enjoyable, and helpful to people.
An excellent idea is also to gamify some UI elements. It will make an app dynamic-looking, add some spirit of competition and the inner drive to users.
Boost the Aesthetic Appeal of The User Interface
Digital illustrations improve the user experience by default, even if they don’t perform specific functions. Mostly, they help to make digital products look more appealing, add a feeling of uniqueness and originality to them, and create a positive user’s mood.
However, there are also other uses of digital illustrations in user interfaces with convenient user experience, namely:
- You can use digital illustration to emphasize brand identity. Using an appealing illustration throughout a mobile app or a website, you can help your brand stay ahead of competitors. And if you combine it with the excellent microcopy that matches the brand message, you will generate a memorable experience for everyone who visits your site or uses your app.
- You can craft a mascot to represent your company. Illustrated mascots are often used in UI design for this. Eye-catching mascots can help marketers build strong brand recalls. Some examples include GitHub’s Octocat, Trello’s husky, and Mailchimp’s Frederick von Chimpenheimer.
- To delight users. Beautiful, funny, and lovely illustrations on a website or a mobile app take a user’s right to the essence of a brand.
Conclusion
Digital illustration is a perfect way to add to your mobile app even more beauty, emotion, and clarity. It improves user experience by setting a more positive mood, a more personal connection between a brand and users, and smoothing the user’s negative experience.
It adds even more value to a mobile app or a site by the user experience your site delivers by getting the main point across faster than text, engaging the user through their journey, creating dynamic brand experiences, and boosting the aesthetic appeal of the user interface.
Originally published at https://fireart.studio on March 11, 2020.
