Having a concrete plan and idea before making an app or a website is important. Before making any website or app, ask yourself what are you trying to accomplish? What’s the main purpose of the website? It’s important to understand the overall goal of the website when building one. It gives you a vision of how you want your website/app to look and function like.

What is UI/UX design?

Before we get any further into the topic, let me tell you what UI/UX is.

UI stands for “user interface design”, while UX design refers to the term “user experience design”. Both elements are crucial to a website/app and work closely together.

By their terms itself, you kind of get an idea of what it is, right?

So User Interface (UI) design is nothing but the design or a pattern that appears on the website, software or on the application. This is a basic architecture of the website and falls into the category of visual communication that interacts with the user of the website.

User Experience (UX) part refers to the interaction between the user and a product or service. Design means the UX applies to anything that can be experienced—be it a website, a coffee machine, or a visit to the supermarket. It is supposed to make the working of a website interactions seamless and flawless.

By going through the plan of UI/UX design before you begin building it gives you an option to review the functionality and easily make changes or updates to the design before it is built. It helps to ensure everything in the project works as expected, is easy to use, and reduces the risk of complications down the road.

Planning your UI/UX before making your app or website gives you a drafted look of your website.

To give you a better understanding, let us say you are planning to build a house. Now you don’t just build a house to simply build a house. You want to make sure you’re planning your “dream house”, so you plan the exterior and interior designs, make sure the interiors are going along, the floor is in contrast with the ceiling, the paint on the walls are matching with the house interior etc. Similarly, planning a website means making sure that your theme matches the website, the site’s color should match your brand and present consistency throughout the site, the right fonts and simplicity.

A survey showed that an estimated 50% of engineering time is spent redoing work to fix mistakes that could have been avoided, like incorrect assumptions about how users will behave, confusing navigation that causes users to get stuck or lost in app/website, a new feature that nobody wants to use, or a design choice that isn’t accessible. Making sure the design is done right – and done well – the first time around will prevent future headaches.

With technology changing rapidly, it’s more important than ever for companies to embrace UI/UX design – not as a one-time event, but as a fluid continuous part of a long-term business strategy.

So, next time you’re building an application or adding in additional functionality, get the UI/UX Design first!