A personal challenge on visual UI design for an existing app.
The objective of this personal project was to challenge myself on visual design making it appealing yet easy to read important information base on visual hierarchy. As a complex SaaS product that displays both analytics and monitoring capabilities, it was a good starting point for me to put myself up for the challenge on how I would design without introducing an overwhelming number of colours whilst maintaining simplicity of the product.
Also see Notify - Production Monitoring System.
Project date: Nov 2021
It started with working closely with product managers that uses Microsoft BI charts where you as the user can customise what you want to display on your home display. I took some of the inspiration from there and introduced possible features to an existing Production Monitoring App (Notify by Netzsch) and pushed the UI design to be more modern and clean. I also understand that eye strain often occur when users stare too much on a lighter background due to the blue light emission that lighter backgrounds emit. To ease that pain point, I introduced a dark mode that makes looking at the screen easier whilst setting the saturation and the vibrancy of the chart values to be more contrasting and noticeable. Since the app needs to be available on mobile to allow remote monitoring on-the-go, I ensured that the UI that I build needs to be responsive but also scalable for future expansion.
Another approach I took was to maintain a strict UI colour palette that is distinguishable from all other elements. As a complex information heavy SaaS tool and to allow ease of use, The UI is kept simple and consistent throughout. This helps users identify what to interact with making it intuitive. Base on the order of importance to the user, information display ranks higher than all other UI elements, hence these elements needs to be much more eye catching and contrasting than the user interface. User interface in this circumstance would be ranked second after the information display and will be less vibrant and saturated in comparison. The only times users will need to interact with the UI would be in these scenarios:
Majority of the time would likely be spent on monitoring the production’s progress to ensure it runs smoothly.
While this was a simple challenge, it was one where I wanted to push myself and my understanding of visual design and it’s hierarchy. It’s especially challenging for a SaaS tool that is predominantly for monitoring and analytics. Hence, it pushes me to prioritise which information in the app is important while keeping the design minialistic and visually appealing.
Also see Notify - Production Monitoring System.