Our Understanding of Interface Design

Many confuse design as how something looks. But in our understanding, design is about how something works to achieve the objective it is intended to realize.

The interface of a product, the very layer that directly touches the audience, is derived from order, hierarchy and logic. Take Apple’s iOS7 , a lot of people hated the flattened icons and proposed how it should look better, but many of them missed a more profound fact that the whole system works together better and makes users’ lives easier is way more important than pretty icons. With iOS7, Ive wanted to bring a sense of order, hierarchy and logic to the system, not just the absence of ornamentation.

Here in Logicdesign, like our name suggests, we value logic and order in our design. For interface design specifically, a sense of logical coherence is crucial to realize a natural user interface. Every part has to make sense, feel natural to use and work together seamlessly. That requires a view of the users, but at the same time, maintaining an elevated standpoint to extract the logical order of the purpose the interface designed to achieve.

Successful interfaces should share the following traits:

• Clear in structure and hierarchy so users can easily pick it up.
• Inspire actions or discovery from users by establishing clear visual leads.
• Uncluttered layout with identifiable visual style, careful-chosen colour scheme and restrained use of ornamentation.
• Motion and animation play an important part to smooth transition between views and inject liveliness.

So designing an interface is not just about how it looks, but how every element on the interface works together. Interface design, for us, is more of an “experience design”.