Inconsistent Design: A Business Risk

How many times have you heard, ‘Oh, but we just need to make everything look colourful to improve our website’? I can bet more than enough times. I can also bet that you haven’t heard even 5% of those people saying, ‘Our business has doubled because we made our website look bright and colourful’.

Often, people (wrongly) believe that superficial visual changes to their website are enough to drastically alter business outcomes or that visual design is nothing more than a dash of red here and a dash of yellow there and can play no significant part in boosting conversions.

By definition, visual design is the process of strategically creating visuals for digital media to enhance their aesthetic appeal and more importantly, to create media that are functional and easy to navigate.

There is often confusion between visual design and graphic design and how they are related to UX design.

While graphic design was primarily meant for designing for the print medium and has evolved over the last two decades to cater to digital media as well, visual design exclusively works for digital platforms not just to beautify the website, app or any other digital platform but to also enhance the usability of the platform. Designers from both disciplines need a thorough understanding of design principles and elements. However, ‘graphic design’ can be used to create visuals for print, advertising, information, branding and sometimes web design, but ‘visual design’ is exclusively used for digital platforms only.

Visual design and user experience (UX) are fundamentally interconnected. Visualize UX as an iceberg divided into 5 parts (bottom to top): strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface where the ‘surface’ or tip of the iceberg represents Visual Design. UX design is focused on optimizing the overall user experience including factors like usability, accessibility and user satisfaction. However, Visual Design works to improve the aesthetic quality of the interface for better communication.

A well-thought-out and well-executed visual design contributes significantly to the success of UX by creating an interface that is visually appealing, intuitive and easy to navigate. By utilizing visual design elements viz. line, shape, colour, grid and space and visual design principles that affect UX such as scale, visual hierarchy, balance, contrast and Gestalt principles, visual designers can come up with effective, clear and unique user experiences.

A good visual design strategy is critical for a robust UX design. At the same time, inconsistent designs or superficially created visual design poses a huge business risk. Imagine navigating an app where the back button sometimes appears on the left and at others on the right. This inconsistency causes frustration and makes users struggle to perform the most basic functions. Similarly, a website that gives no thought to balance, contrast, or visual hierarchy and throws its users a mix of coloured buttons, different fonts for headings, body text, and images of varying styles confuses the users in what to expect.

As an entrepreneur, if you are struggling with high drop-offs, maybe its time to step back and relook at your design strategy. Does your website have mismatched colours, fonts and imagery across platforms? Check how the information on your website is organized. Check for variations in navigation menus such as categories named differently on different platforms. For instance, a fashion retailer could have labelled bottomwear as ‘bottoms’ on desktop and ‘bottomwear’ on mobile. Even the slightest of variations can cause inconsistency and make your brand look unprofessional. Finally, test how users interact with your product. Do they struggle or face confusion assessing product details due to poor image quality? Are they facing issues finding desired products because of inconsistent navigation?

Maya Studios can help you not only identify gaps in your visual strategy but also implement effective design solutions to reduce bounce rates, exit rates and drive conversion and growth for your business. We conduct design audits where our team will analyze your current design and identify areas that lack consistency. We build design systems where we create a style guide for your website defining all design elements for a cohesive and unified look across platforms. We will help in the implementation of the design system so that designers creating content for your brand can use the guidelines for standardization. Through the identification of these differences, Maya Studios can optimize the user journey, making it intuitive for your audience and profitable for your business.