Websites
Examples of sites with no-frills UIs
Require as little input from the user as possible to provide the user with the desired output
- Rather than requiring a user to create an account, you could just track their browser.
- WhatsApp creates accounts solely based on the phone number of a user.
Using solid, strong colors to draw the user's attention
- Gmail →
- Notice how there are only two areas on the page where they use strong colors as the background: the 'Compose' button and the 'Search' button. And those are really the two most-common actions that a person would be expected to take (aside from reading the list of emails and clicking into one of them). It reminds me of how I would underline the key phrases in my resume to draw the reader's attention to them more quickly.
- Contrast that with this:
, where there are three elements with strong solid-color backgrounds. The selected-template doesn't even correspond to an action that the user would take from this screen, so it seems to go totally against what Gmail did. And I don't think users will be clicking 'Delete' so much that they'll benefit from having such a strong visual guide to that element. I think the 'Save' button makes sense; that seems like a button the users will be clicking a lot from this screen. I think it might also make sense to just have a single 'Add Template' button instead of several of them, and to make that element have a strong solid background.
Show how the user compares to other users as a gentle push
- LastPass →
- I like how it tells me how I stack up against other users.
Things that can make your website look like crap
Many times in the past I've had the frustrated experience of looking at a website I've created and saying to myself, "This looks like crap, but I don't know exactly why, and I don't know how to fix it."
- There may be too many colors
- Look for every possible source of color and try to get rid of colors until you only have like 3 or 4.
- Even small things like the borders on textareas and inputs, and the colors of buttons, will contribute to a general sense of "this doesn't look good" if they don't match the 3 or 4 colors you want to use.
- Look for every possible source of color and try to get rid of colors until you only have like 3 or 4.
- You're using standard fonts (Times New Roman, etc.).
Examples of bad UI
- Needing to scroll down to find the main content of interest on a page.
- Examples:
- Yahoo Answers:
- I need to scroll down to find the answer on a particular page.
- Yahoo Answers:
- Examples: