When one uses a website to perform an action, for instance, to buy an item, make a payment and so on, one is basically making a decision. Various elements influence those decisions. These elements that aim at enhancing user experience form the basis of the 5E model. The principles of the 5E model play a key role in enriching the UI/UX design.
What is UI/UX Design?
UX design or User Experience Design involves designs to enhance the wholesome experience for the user. UX involves processes that identify and tackle user problems. The steps in UX Design are researching, building prototypes, testing the usability features and constant communication between the designers.
UI design or User Interaction Design, on the other hand, involves choosing the appropriate interfaces needed for the user to interact with the website or the app.
UI design includes features right from drop-down lists, check boxes, text boxes, and so on to the entire layout or structure of a web site or an app.
UI/UX design aims to enable smooth and stress-free user interaction. The design must be simple, effective and must take minimum interaction time.
5E’s in UI/UX Usability
Before we go into the 5E model of UI and UX design adopted by Domaincer, let us first understand the terms ‘usability’ and ‘user-friendly’. The actual goal of providing usability is to design a product based on research and recommendations that communicates seamlessly with the consumer. Once the product satisfies the Usability criteria, it becomes user-friendly.
The five dimensions of Usability are the 5 E’s, which are:
Effectiveness:
How effectively the user interface responds to the user’s requests and answers his queries.
Efficiency:
How quickly the user is provided with the required response accurately.
Engagement:
How the interface can engage the user and make his experience enjoyable and satisfactory.
Error Free:
How error-free is the interface? And if errors do occur, the application must be able to recover from them quickly and continue to function.
Easy to Use:
How the application provides training to users initially and also support throughout the learning and usage period.
The above five dimensions must be balanced, and sometimes, in some situations, one dimension may be more important than the other.
5E Model in UI/UX Design
The 5E model in UI/UX design is adopted by Domaincer to include coherence, aesthetics and interest to the experiences of you, our customers.
We intend to not restrict our design creation process only to our designers but aim to include the holistic engagement and experiences of our users as well.
Excitement
We at Domaincer begin the design process with the idea of High Concept.
This is the first E in UI/UX Design process that creates excitement about the product or the process. In order to achieve this, we pitch our ideas to many users and people and form a story about their experience based on their inputs. Based on this user experience data, creativity in design is unleashed.
Entry
Once the relationship with the user has been established, the user experience design begins. All the entry points are designed via which the user can interact with the interface. This way they begin the journey of their experience switching over from one feature to another.
Engagement
This is the most challenging yet rewarding phase of UI/UX design. It is challenging because it is easy to capture the user’s attention but difficult to sustain it. Activities to immerse and engage with the user through continued interaction forms the third E of the 5E model.
Exit
This E represents the end of the user experience. The user must exit the application after he has learned, gained or achieved his goal through this interactive experience.
Extension
The last E of the 5E model in UI/UX design is the “reward” or the physical entity the user can get from the experience he had using the website or the app interface. This could be a printout, a picture, an image or anything else.
The other aspects our designers at Domaincer dwell upon is the questions phase at each step of the 5E model. They analyze queries such as, what were the users thinking? What are the challenges in each phase? What questions might the user have and so on?
Our UI/UX design is based on a simple philosophy- how will people react to using our product? This helps in attaining a design that fulfils our users’ needs, achieving seamless user experience and delivering beyond their expectations.