No matter which app you’re developing, users are the most important asset of it. Therefore, the UI UX design price is a significant investment when you’re planning your app development, so your customers will understand and accept your offer and mission. Here, we’ll discuss how a good user experience reward companies and why all large and successful businesses and applications pay foremost attention to it. Then, we’ll overview what constitutes the UI UX design price and how to evaluate it.
Table of Contents
The Importance of UI UX Design
A good tool should be usable. If a customer cannot take it and solve their problems without being tired and confused, it’ll fail, no matter how well it’s developed. Bad user experience includes interface overloading and ignoring genuine user preferences, as shown in the scheme below.
User experience design requires customer and usability research to understand how various user groups use the application, what they want and expect, and how you can meet these expectations. The user interface requires good color combinations and interactive elements to switch between screens and perform necessary actions, such as choosing the item in the online store, messaging, or learning new words in the language learning tool. They complement each other, as UX provides material for UI development, while the latter builds a basis for new UX research, polishing the app further. While these tests, research, and development require investments, the usable app will pay off much more.
Successful tech companies use them everywhere in their workflow, ensuring that their customers will be happy. Let’s review three very different examples: the tech giant Apple, Telegram messenger, and the learning app Duolingo.
- Apple is famous for being extremely attentive to details. Its iPhones and iPads are often presented as the product design standard. Its website is an example of a high level of usability, so explore it and inspire yourself!
- Telegram, a messenger tool, is famous for its security and usability. It goes further than most other messaging services, providing an exceptional level of personalization and instruments such as folders for chats and channels to organize communications. You can explore it to see how a good messenger interface should look.
- Duolingo, an app for language learning, provides an incredible level of gamification and interactivity while maintaining its app simple. There is a reward system with famous streaks and ratings, diamonds that you obtain for completing various quests, and the ability to see foreign words’ meanings by hovering or tapping on them. These features make Duolingo the top language learning app, as its users are happy and excited. They recently changed their UI, creating a journey-like path and making language learning more interactive.
Components of UI UX Design: Interface vs Experience
Let’s see a short table to summarize and compare the main UI UX design components. Both of them complement each other in the purpose of developing a usable and convenient tool: while UI is about development, UX is mostly about research.
| UI | UX |
| Creating the app prototype and working with it to develop a working version of the end product. | Conducting user research to obtain information about user behavior and preferences and create user personas. |
| Develop wireframes and sketches to understand how the app’s interface will look like. | Develop empathy maps and user flow/journey maps to understand how and why users use the application. |
| Ideation to create the informational architecture of the app/website and choose colors, fonts, and interactive elements. | Ideation to develop user-centered solutions which the app may offer to its potential customers. |
| Test the app’s usability to see whether all interface components work properly and indicate possible bugs. | Test the app’s usability to see how users will interact with it and indicate experience flaws. |
UI UX Design Realization
User experience design requires user research, which one may summarize in 5 steps on the scheme below. First, UX designers and researchers formulate objectives and hypotheses based on what they want the app to do. After that, they communicate with customers, using surveys and interviews to gather data. Based on them, they create user personas, showing features, preferences, and desires of typical target audience representatives, user flows, showing how customers use the app, and user journeys, showing what they want to achieve using the app.
User interface development starts based on the data obtained after the first user research. Below, one can see an informational architecture of the application: the scheme that shows its screens and the connections between them. UI designers then develop each screen based on its purposes, including elements such as buttons, lists, shopping carts, users profiles elements, and others. They use color schemes based on the app’s brand and UX research results.
Therefore, both these processes complement each other in creating a usable and attractive service. Good UI UX design always pays off. You noticed that all large companies and popular apps pay a lot of attention to it.
Examples of Unsuccessful UI UX Design
So, while it may be tempting to ignore it, the app’s functionality is no less important than all its features taken together. To strengthen our position, let’s see two famous examples of unsuccessful UI UX design from large companies.
- WhatsApp: “This message was deleted” is what you’ll see when you’ll try to delete the message. It’s annoying, as the message’s trace actually remains. Such small flaws of the world’s largest messaging tool annoy its users every day. No wonder that while WhatsApp is still the largest, Telegram gradually increases its share due to its successful UX decisions.
- Apple appears in this list, too, because despite having such a good website and product development, its storage management system is known for its inconvenience. If you try to make photos while having your storage overloaded, you’ll see that you just cannot do this, without offering the next steps such as choosing and deleting something. It leads that people often prefer Google Photos as a more user-friendly tool.
How Much Does It Cost?
UI UX design price depends on the scale of research you need to conduct and the number of user stories you need to convert into the interface. In addition, the app features’ number and complexity also influence it directly, as more features will lead to larger information architecture schemes and UX maps. So, to estimate the price, write down the next factors:
- Designers’ hourly rates (typically $20 – $50).
- The amount of research necessary for your app.
- The number of features necessary for it.
- User epics (steps of the user journey)
- App screens (elements of the informational architecture)
- Timeframes for your project.
The typical range of UI UX design development time is 1 – 2 months, and the typical cost is from $5 to $20 thousand dollars. It’s not a large number, especially taking that the return on investment may reach $100 for each invested dollar!
Conclusion
User interface design works to create a working and usable application, while user experience investigation collects data necessary for this process. Together, they ensure that your project will actually deliver its value to customers. While paying close attention to it may increase the overall app development price, it’s one of the most rewarding elements of the development, making your app attractive and highly beneficial compared to your competitors.