Does Your Startup's UI/UX Need a Unique Point of View?
Designing UI/UX with a distinct character may be the demand of the day
Should you, as the founder, follow the design aesthetics trend ?
As founder, I noticed and found that people were “influenced” by leading companies whose websites are trending. While we were building our first iteration of the product, we found that websites and products had started being “influenced” heavily by Notion. Notion was a website with 2 colors - white and black. Again, we observed the same thing when Google rebranded their logo to multiple colors. Suddenly everyone was aping their vibrant color palettes. I see this as an disadvantage, while companies bringing in the trend; have a point of view. The companies aping the trend have no point of view on their customers. When a design or color palette becomes in trend and leaders who brought the pattern in, get all the attention and praise, the rest of us following the trend, subconsciously remind our users of the “leading” trend setter. For multi colored logos aped by companies, for users like me, we are reminded of Google.
For small founder-led teams the advantage of getting influenced by a certain design aesthetic is that we minimize our “brain cycles” and time spent on the topic. Many times, small teams don’t have an experienced designer on board. In those cases, it does make all the sense to save time and money by being influenced by existing designs. A founder friend once told me that they bought design and code templates from the website and used it for as long as 4-5 years, till their design teams started to complain about the fact that their design choices were getting seriously impacted by the design template bought during the initial stages of the startup.
Design as a function of point of view
It is my opinion that designs should have a point of view on users. Take stock broking apps for instance, they all feel “clinical”. By clinical, their apps don't have a character of their own and don’t extrude warmth and safety. When I set out to design a chatbot for a fintech women's only app, I wanted the app to have warmth and a sense of connection with the audience. I wanted it to have a strong point of view on the customers. For me it meant that app should have character and should keep in mind that it’s designed to engage the audience, while evoking the strongest positive emotions for the product.
Should the dashboard be plain and bereft of colors ?
Another example on building with a point of view was when I started building the startup. I wanted to build a product that was beautiful, functional and useful. But well!! beautiful, functional and useful meant different things to different user cohorts. For me, beautiful meant being joyously colorful and functional/useful meant that client should be able to reach the aha moment quickly. In line with our thought process that dashboards and apps in general should have a point of view. We decided to make dashboard which had pastel colors for different tasks on the Kanban board and project timelines. For us, it’s was the matter of making the color palette and design, a reflection of our point of view - “dashboards shouldn’t be dry/”clinical” interfaces, they should evoke positive emotion in the person”. What do you think of our approach ? Let me know in the comments below.
Reach out to the author - Priyanka at pn@vevesta.com or LinkedIn