5 Design tips to help create effective User Interface Designs

Simple ideas that I wish I knew when I first started out as a UI Designer

Design is hard. Not only are designs created to solve a problem, they should, ideally, make people happy and smile along the way. Design is a skill, it’s a craft, and it’s a craft that does not always come easy.

Great designers take an idea, iterate and move the needle forward slightly in a new, forward direction. This is not plagiarism, this is an art. The most ground-breaking designers however, they take leaps. They design things we did not know we even wanted — until they designed it.

I’ve been a designer for many years now and I’ve been fortunate to design within different domains. For the last decade, I’ve worked within User Interface Design & User Experience Design.

Designing user interfaces can be challenging as there are numerous responsibilities we adopt as the designer. We require our user to fulfil their goal. We’d like to guide them to completion in a timely manner. We want to reduce learning and cognitive effort. We want to improve recognition. And we want them to experience joy. Whether their interaction is serious, fun, mandatory or a consequence of boredom, ultimately we want them to at least have a pleasant experience with our…