A Complete Guide to Creating a UI Design System for Your Website in 8 Simple Steps
Projected to exceed 3.693 billion USD by 2028, the global market for UI design is fast growing. The main reason is that website design is the main impression for 94% of users. A good UI design increases conversion rates by 200%.
Thus, having a UI design that suits your brand image, and is functional and navigable is the need of the hour for brands.
What is a UI Design System?
With a focus on aesthetics, UI focuses on creating an interface design (across devices) that users find interactive and easy-to-use. When designed and implemented well, UI improves the usability of your website and drives user engagement, making your website more productive.
Whether you want to make your website fun, interactive, or informative, the right UI design will help you achieve your website goals.
Definition of a UI Design System
Using a collection of standards, patterns, and interactive design, a UI design system aims to provide users a consistent experience across digital products and platforms. When it comes to designing a website, the UI design system standardizes the way the multiple pages have been designed. This reduces the time taken to recreate each page.
Why Do Websites Need a UI Design System?
In websites, visual consistency is a key and helps maintain uniformity. An intelligent UI design system ensures that:
- Your website is scalable.
- It is easy to implement changes and make updates.
- Collaborative work is easier between the developing team and the designers.
- You can control quality over the website.
Benefits of a UI Design System
Across all software systems, the use of UI design system has gained popularity due to the following reasons:
- Makes a website unique and can act as a USP.
- Make your website reflect the brand image.
- Creates a better user experience.
- Reduces the risk of losing knowledge when losing a team member.
- Improves the speed and responsiveness of your website.
- Draws more users to the website.
- Facilitates easy navigation across web pages.
- Makes it easier to convert customers and boost sales.
Preparing to Build Your UI Design System
Whether you want to revamp your website or deploy a new one, the best way forward is to pick a design that resonates with your brand. This carries over from the interface that you have to the tone that you use. 61.5% of designers state that clients will leave a site due to poor structure and navigation.
Thus, you need to decide whether to keep your current layout, start from scratch, or merge some existing elements with a new design. Audit your current website, and identify elements that can be useful and those that need to be scrapped.
To add, a key component to having the UI design is identifying your target audience. A website catering to the professional sphere will be vastly different from that catering to Gen Z consumers. Pick a design that works well for your target audience. Once this is done, you are ready to get started.
8 Simple Steps to Create a UI Design System
Though UI design has a broad scope and can involve a lot, you can take a piecemeal approach with the following steps:
The more haphazard the design, the higher the bounce rate* for a website. Lay out a guide that outlines every aspect from scope to design to usability. This will help create uniformity between the multiple pages. Further, this should be device compatible since 50% of users visit the mobile website of a brand instead of downloading an app.
* Bounce rate: The percentage of unengaged sessions. The user stays on the website for less than 10 seconds, does not view any other page in the website, and there are no key events.
Pick a typography that makes your content stand out and easy to read. Further, using the brand colors on the website creates a link between the brand and the website. To add, the content (images, texts, links, etc.) should be spaced properly to create an appealing style.
The best way to do this is to create a visual guide before the developers start working on the website’s design.
Take all the functional/decorative items such as input fields, menus, buttons, and images. Sort through them to identify what is usable and what is not.
Once you have what is useful, create a repository from which you can pick components as required.
Test how interactive your design is. This includes the hover effects, button animations, sliding images, pop ups, menus, drop downs, etc. Check their functionality and response time. Faster websites have 11% higher conversion rates and increased engagement by 20%.
To increase the target audience base and ensure that people have an easier time navigating your website, it needs to meet the accessibility standards. This ensures that people, whether differently abled or otherwise, can use the website. This means being perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Make sure that the website sticks to the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and can be scaled up as and when required.
Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, and InVision are some of the top tools that can help test your website at the design and prototype stage. Pick the tool that suits you best to run all the checks before roll-out.
A firm belief of 83% of users is that websites should provide a seamless experience no matter the device. No matter the target audience, websites need to be usable, consistent across the pages, and accessible via different devices. During the testing stage, you need to keep this in mind.
Some of the most important checks for a website before roll-out are usability, readability, layout consistency, performance, security, and device compatibility. Check all aspects of the website, from response time to formatting before the website is deployed.
Website development is not a one-and-done job. Create a route via which the website can be updated regularly to keep up with the security protocols that are deployed as well as other changes that are implemented across the internet. Further, this ensures that the website remains compatible with the different browser versions.
Examples of Effective UI Design Systems
Whether you want to build your own UI design system or use one already in use as a model, you need to be aware of some of the best UI design systems available. Our list includes the below:
- Google Material Design System
An easy-to-use system, its main features include Starter Kits for designers, Design Source Files, Themes, Layout, Typography, Mobile Guidelines, and more. Thus, it has turned out to be the preferred choice for many.
- Apple Human Interface Guidelines
Emphasizing user experience and with an extensive design system resource, it simplifies UI design. This makes it useful for advanced designers and novices alike.
- Atlassian Design System
Accounting for brand values and using digital experience to increase productivity, this system tracks every step and offers agile practices in product development.
- Polaris by Shopify
An easy-to-follow style guide, this makes effective use of design elements for a better user experience.
- Carbon Design System by IBM
To meet the needs of large corporations, this tool is more targeted toward businesses that work in the professional sphere such as consulting, finance, IT, and others. Further, it offers integration with tools such as Adobe and Sketch for designers as well as developers.
Common Mistakes often Faced in UI Design
70% designers state that poor design and response time is the biggest reason why clients leave a website. For the best user experience, make sure to avoid the following:
- A mismatch in design across web pages.
- A tough-to-navigate interface.
- Having a poor touch target (for mobile devices).
- Formatting errors such as poor typography, bad iconography, alignment issues, etc.
- Not having a balance between text and images.
- Focusing on uniqueness but not usability.
- Not testing the website properly before deploying.
Conclusion
Your website needs to reflect your brand image, being one of the first things your customers will see. Hence, it needs to be as flawless as can be for an excellent user experience.
Having the right UI design system is a must when it comes to addressing this. Revamp your existing website with the steps listed in this guide or create a new, more functional website for your clients.
Sources:
https://www.goodfirms.co/resources/web-design-research-small-business
https://www.hostinger.in/tutorials/web-design-statistics#Responsive_Web_Design_Statistics
https://uxcam.com/blog/ux-statistics
https://www.impactplus.com/blog/mobile-marketing-statistics
https://www.goodfirms.co/resources/web-design-research-small-business
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