Our rigorous user interface design process places the user at the heart and carefully considers their interactions with the site. User interface designs must not only be attractive to potential users but also functional and intuitive.
User interface design dramatically influences the usability and user experience of a website or application. If an interface is not adapted to suit its users or is overly complex, they will become frustrated.
A good interface design makes it easy for users to quickly extract what they need. This means they’ll burn fewer calories using your site and improve conversion. It’s pretty obvious, but we need to really understand your users, their needs and objectives for visiting your site. We can then build the most effective interface.
We start the user interface design with an architectural blueprint/wireframe. This is a quick and simple visual representation of the application’s layout. We use lo-fi (low-fidelity) or scamps (line drawings) to get the process underway, and then work these up into hi-fi wireframes.
We create a style guideline of the main elements of the design, for example, colours, fonts, iconography, graphical elements and layout styles.
We continue to work up the wireframes using the style guide to deliver a full set of interface designs for the different templates and modules, at different viewport sizes, ie desktop, tablet and mobile.
We design and plan the interactions so that transitions, hover states, movement, loading, fades offer the most benefit to the user. Micro-animation is a common trend that not only looks great but can help users by providing feedback and signposting. It also helps to showcase the personality of your brand.
We often build hi-fi prototypes so that the interface can be fully tested before going into final production. This is where we start to get a real feel for how the interface is going to work.
The final step of the UI design is to build the interface using the latest coding standards and best practices. This will likely include a combination of HTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, Vue.js and Angular.
The new site can now be used very easily by all members of the internal team as it is so intuitive and therefore requires minimal training. Only one or two members of the team could use the old website due to the amount of time it took to train people up! Our events team report that setting up events on the website has reduced man hours by half as it so intuitive to use.
Antonia Stratford – Head of Public Affairs and Communications, UKinbound
Thanks to Granite 5, we now have an excellent accessible and innovative platform in Vital Tech for showcasing developments and trends in assistive technology. I'm very excited for its future potential.
Darren Paskell – Technology Information Champion, Thomas Pocklington Trust
This is one of our most interesting sites, it's a great example of what can be achieved when the client is prepared to push the boundaries and we get the opportunity to dial the creativity up to 10. The site offers a fresh and unique experience and we love it.
Christian – Lead PM, Granite 5
