Good UI Design: Make It Easy, Show Me You Care

Here are three trends that would make User Interface more effective in future;

Trend #1: Try It Now!

An excerpt from an upcoming book by Luke Wroblewski, "Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks," posted on A List Apart helps to point out the issue with sign-up forms on the web. When you're recommended a new web service to check out, Luke writes "you arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form. We can do better."

Instead of forcing users through a dreadful sign-up process when really they just wanted to take a look, he promotes the idea of "gradual engagement." After you play around with a web service and get an idea about what it does, you can then choose to take the path to complete your profile in order to create an account, save your work, share the results of your creation, etc.

Luke uses a few examples to make his point: one, Geni, an online family tree creation tool lets users make a family tree as soon as they visit the web site. Of course, as you fill out your name, you also enter in your email, so while you're busy building your tree, you're also being sent an email from the service, reminding you of your account details if you ever want to return to work on your tree. However, this vague "did I just create an account?" design may have worked for Geni, who generated 5 million profiles in 5 months, we would argue that it should be more obvious whether you are creating an account or not.

Trend #2: We Really Care

Another trend spotted in the wild is UI design that shows customers that the company cares about them. Take Samatha Warren's experience with Wufoo, an app that helps you design and build online forms. After finding herself in need of tech support, she noticed an odd form field on the Support Request page: "Emotional State."

The drop-down included choices like excited, confused, worried, upset, panicked, and angry.

Trend #3: “Only show me what’s relevant”

The “Only show me what’s relevant” trend. Many sites have started small, maybe not with a lot of information and functionality. After a while they start to add more and more and the UI gets more and more crowded. Now I think we are starting to see sites that only show the user what he needs at the right moment. For example the Wordpress (the blog platform I’m using) admin area is quite crowded when writing. In the next release (just released) that is coming up they have done really good work of only showing what is needed. Absolutely in the right direction. I believe that contextual navigation and functionality is the future.