When you’re designing a website, it’s vital that you get the user interface (UI) design right. Users experience your site – and, by extension, your brand or business – through the lens of the UI, meaning that you should spend time making your UI design as effective as possible.
That’s why the idea of visual communication is crucial for UI designers. Visual communication is all about taking a holistic approach to your communication with users, making the most of your visual elements to get messages across to your customers. This can be a great tool for boosting the usability of your website.
In this practical guide for UI designers, we’ll explore the meaning of visual communication, discuss its benefits for UI design, and explain some top tips for using visual communication on your website.
What is visual communication?
Let’s say you’re looking for a blog post to learn more about how to use customer reviews to improve customer experience. While the title might help you determine whether the post is full of good customer service reviews examples, the initial visual impression of the page will also have an important role in your decision to keep reading.
The same is true for many different parts of a website, whether that’s a product page or a contacts section: a key way that you can communicate with users is through the visual side of the UI.
Visual communication prioritizes this aspect of UI. It is all about carefully using graphic elements and design to communicate ideas, emotions, or instructions.
These visual elements can come in many different shapes and sizes. Data visualization, color choices, and using iconography are just some examples of visual communication for UI design.
Benefits of visual communication in UI design
Now that you know a little bit more about the meaning of visual communication, you might be wondering why it’s so important for UI designers to get it right. Here are the biggest benefits of visual communication in UI design.
It can improve accessibility
When you’re building a website, you want it to be accessible to as many people as possible. However, if you’re solely reliant on communicating through text rather than images or data visualization, it can be difficult to get your message across to all of your users.
After all, your users will arrive at your website with lots of different backgrounds and abilities – users who don’t use English as their first language, for example, may struggle to access a website that is entirely reliant on text rather than incorporating visual communication, too.
2. It supports other forms of communication
Visual communication will also support other types of communication. Elements such as infographics combine text and visual communication, helping to make the words more memorable. Visual communication can also take the form of videos, which can be particularly engaging. High-quality, compelling video content can significantly boost user engagement.
From a UI perspective, the visual layout of a website is an integral part of how users interact with the site itself. You need to consider your visual communication when you’re trying to get users to a certain message from some copy or instructions.
3. It strengthens brand identity and consistency
When you’re working with website UI, visual communication is a vital part of how that website conveys your brand identity. Whether it’s using a brand color scheme or ensuring that your website’s typography reflects the intended values of your brand, this can be a great way to make sure that your UI contributes to customers’ understanding of your brand.
It’s important that all of your customer-facing materials, such as websites, adverts, and social media posts, have a clear design consistency. This helps users familiarize themselves with your business, boosting the recognition and value of your brand.
4. It enhances UI usability
Finally, visual communication is a great way to make your UI more intuitive and easier to use. Design patterns, graphical selections, and images can be great ways to make your UI as effective as possible. This helps to enhance the usability of your website – something that we’ll examine in more detail in our next section.
Visual communication in UI design: Best practices
The importance of visual communication should be pretty clear by now. However, how can you practically start to use visual communication to improve the intuitiveness and usability of your UI design?
Use iconography
Iconography can be a great way to convey your ideas without having to resort to words, increasing the accessibility and simplicity of your website. When using icons, you should have different approaches for different aspects of your site.
A product page for an IP phone system, for instance, might be made more identifiable by an icon depicting a cloud and the WiFi symbol. By using this sort of icon for all of your main products, you’ll make it easier for users to identify the page that they want to click on.
As well as these bespoke icons, you should also have a simple and consistent use of iconography when you’re designing the core navigational aspects of the site. Use home icons, magnifying glasses for the search function, and a gear icon for the site’s settings so that people can quickly find the function that they’re looking for.
Consider emotional responses
Although you might associate UI design with technical skills and tasks, you need to remember that the emotional impact of your UI shapes how customers interact with your website.
Designers considering visual communication should think about the emotions that they want to cultivate in the user: a light color scheme, for instance, tends to be associated with feelings of calm and trust. This can be really useful if you think that this emotional response suits your products or brand.
It’s clear how this helps to boost the usability of your website: if the emotional response of your users is positive, they’ll find it much more enjoyable to use the site’s interface.
Make the most of imagery
Imagery is another key tool for UI designers when it comes to visual communication. However, you need to remember that imagery isn’t just there to make your site look attractive or break up your web pages. Instead, you should use images to help users understand the content.
You might want, for instance, to leverage photography that demonstrates a product during use. This helps customers visualize your products and makes it easier for them to find the website pages that they’re looking for.
Another form of imagery that you should consider is data visualization. If you want to explain a point using data or numbers, it often helps to put this on a simple graph. This UI choice makes it much easier for customers to better understand your data.
Choose typography carefully
When you’re choosing how to present text, you need to do more than simply follow the most recent graphic design trends. Your fonts should be simple to read, while also ensuring that users can navigate across the website easily.
Although you should have consistent typography across the site in order to build a clear brand identity, it’s also beneficial to use slightly different fonts or sizes to aid navigation. For instance, you could use specific typography to distinguish menus at the top of a page from the page’s main content.
To further enhance usability, you could use color shifts in your typography. This is when the color of a font changes to signify an interaction, which could help make navigation easier for some users.
Have a clear visual hierarchy
Probably the most important aspect of visual communication for UI is the visual hierarchy of your website. This is essentially the process of organizing the visual content on your website according to what the user should see first of all.
Think of a typical blog post like this. It begins with a heading and is then followed by different types of subheadings. The visual hierarchy of this approach is clear, as the eye is immediately drawn to the heading before anything else.
Visual hierarchy is important for all types of web pages. For instance, a product page should obviously have a clear image and description of the product. However, you should also place the cart icon fairly high up the visual hierarchy – making it big and ensuring that it stands out will encourage users to complete the purchase.
Improve UI design usability with visual communication
When you’re designing the UI of your website, you need to consider how the UI communicates with your users. Prioritizing visual communication is a great way to enhance usability as it impacts everything from content accessibility to site navigation. It’s a crucial tool when you’re making it as easy as possible for people to use your website.
So, do you want to use visual communication to improve the usability of your websites? A great place to start is with our UX/UI Design Bootcamp – an immersive program that will quickly improve your UI skills. Start learning today!
