Why your websites UI is ruining your UX

First of all lets explain what UI and UX is. UI is User Interface and UX is User Experience and one without the other is just an impossibility really!

Consider the body and the mind. The body’s User Interface are senses; touch, smell, seeing, listening and taste. The body’s User Experience is the mind and the emotive reaction you feel when you’re stimulated by all the User Interfaces or in this case senses.

Now, imagine how it would feel to have no taste or without a sense of touch or being unable to sense smell or worse blind and deaf. Without one of these senses you would be considered to have a disability and  the same applies to web design.

The UI can be made up of a multitude of elements, for example – layout, colour, hovers, clicks, load times, words, grammar, language etc.  If one or more of these doesn’t feel right, used poorly or is frustrating the user this is why your website’s UI is ruining your UX.

Here are just a few reasons why your websites UI is ruining your UX:

  • layout is too cluttered and confusing the user
  • no separation of important areas of a site
  • multiple columns that distract the users
  • colour pallet is too extensive
  • aggresive colours are used when friendly colours should be used
  • poor use of colour contrast making things difficult to see
  • no correlation between call to actions or buttons and links that do things
  • no indication to the user when buttons or links are hovered
  • too many images on a page inhibiting load times
  • too much text to read in a given visible area
  • there are too many words on one line making left to right tracking difficult

As designers it’s really important to get the UI working well. These are the senses that make up the whole UX as an entirety. However if you get your User Interface working it will certainly be the defining factor in making or breaking your User Experience.