What is Look & Feel and why is it important?

Imagine that you're about to create a product, so you decide to give it a great design. How do you start? Well, sometimes this question might not be so easy to answer. The thing is, the design process has its methods, and among them is the phase of appearance, in which the product will gain its style.

Quite often our clients don't know how to verbally express what they need, and that's where the Look & Feel comes into play, with which they can say: "Yes, that's what I wanted".

During the creation of a design appearance, we show a visual representation of the mood of the interface before working on the details. This is just a part of the whole design process, based on exploration and discovery, but it's after which you'll fall in love with your product.

Sounds pretty good, right? In this article, we will explain the steps to create it.

What is the Look & Feel and What is it For?

Many people may imagine that a brand's Look & Feel only consists of a brand's logo or the colors you choose, but this concept actually refers to something more global that goes beyond the digital.

For example, if we offer a service in a store, everything, from the bags to the colors of the premises, must be coherent with other aspects of the brand, like the digital strategy.

In its most basic terms, the "Look & Feel" of a website is the appearance of the site to the user and what they feel when they are interacting with it.

The "Look" is defined by the following components of your website:

• Color palette

• Images

• Design

• Font types

• General style

The "Feel" is determined by the following features:

• The movement and response of dynamic components like drop-down menus, buttons, shapes, and galleries

• Sound effects

• The speed at which pages and images load

  

Why is the appearance of a Website important?

The look and overall feel of your website are important because they instantly present an attitude to your customers before they start reading the content on the site.

Although there is some freedom of action within general industry categories, users may be confused by websites that look or feel too far from their expectations for a company or industry. Before beginning a website redesign, check your objectives against industry standards by examining your competitors' websites.

The look and feel of a website can also be described as "the personality". The personality of your website should match the attitude of your business and its objectives while still fitting into your customers' expectations.

How to use the "Look & Feel" to improve your web design?

By using precise adjectives, you can help your company's web design team choose their design and composition options before they present their work to you.

Here are some examples of the types of adjectives you could use to describe your website:

• Friendly

• Accessible

• Professional

• Experienced

• Exclusive

• Innovative

• Elegant

• Technological

• Cutting-edge

• Powerful

On the other hand, websites with poorly executed general design schemes and ease of use can inadvertently fall into less flattering categories, such as:

• Boring

• Tense

• Heavy

• Outdated

• Tacky

• Messy

• Confusing

• Childish

Rather than focusing on only positive adjectives, you can help your web design team triangulate your expectations by providing them with a descriptive scale like: "The website should look fun and exciting, but not childish" or "Our website should be professional, but never heavy or outdated”.

When working with a web design company, take some time to clearly define business objectives and key adjectives in relation to the appearance of the website to ensure that everyone is on the same page before they start the work.

How to create the Look & Feel of your brand?

1- Preparation

To start the appearance process, we must first talk. Yes, this very visual design work starts by talking. A lot of it. Creating the best design mood requires this, so we can clarify what we want to achieve.

The easiest and most effective way to do this is to organize a few-hour workshop, during which we can discuss the design in great detail. It is crucial that each and every business leader is present, as they have the deepest knowledge about the product and the target group.

Things that should be addressed in the workshop:

• Values and Style

Discussion about the target values (for example, reliability, freshness, transparency) and the style (for example, modern, youthful, colorful) of the product. Having a clear idea about these things can give us a certain path that we can follow throughout our entire process.

• Available Resources

We have to ask our clients if there are existing design pieces and screens, so we can also take these elements into account. The existing parts and the new ones should be compatible with each other.

• Analyze our rivals

Here we need to discuss what we see as pleasant and what we see as avoidable in them. We like to ask our clients to show us the interfaces they like, so we can clearly see what the desired mood or style is. It's always better to actually see them with our own eyes than trying to figure it out based on words; they might be the right words, but there is still too much room for misunderstandings.

2- Get inspiration

The next task of the designers is to do some research. It's necessary to find material that fits with what was discussed earlier and that can be a source of inspiration for the design of the interfaces. Rival websites, other software interfaces, design trends, for example, can serve as resources for the appearance.

It is useful to go around with eyes wide open collecting layouts of our interface, user interface elements (buttons, form elements, menus, etc.), fonts, icons, and photos.

All this can be presented in an image, the Moodboard. By using moodboards, one can immediately see the imagined mood and appearance.

3- The Real Look Design

After finishing with the research, we choose a typical screen that can serve as the homepage of our website or as one of the most important screens of our software. We create a bunch of colorful sketches for this screen, all with a slightly different atmosphere.

In the period of getting inspiration, we most likely got closer to the desired character, so now we are just looking at slightly different faces of this character in a particular product.

Each version of the appearance designs can differ in color, shapes, font types, or toolbar icons. Additionally, we often create at least one dark design and one light one, so our clients can more easily decide what kind of look they want to have for their products.

Examples of Look & Feel

For the BuzzDrive project, during the initial discussions, a futuristic, clear, shaded, dark, and flat design was established.

After designing the software prototype of Hibridlevel, designs were created for one of its typical screens.

The colors and style (trendy, modern, youthful) were given, so clearer and darker versions were created within this framework.

PartyLocator contains quite similar icons and shapes, but the same cannot be said about its colors. They are quite different in the mood they express.

What kind of feedback does the designer need in the Look & Feel process?

Design is not a "lone wolf" type of job, there is a constant need for feedback after the different phases, that is, after getting inspiration and also the Look & Feel design phase. First, we need to discuss whether the values established during the initial discussions are sufficiently present in the plans.

Next, we have to choose between the different versions, knowing exactly why we chose that particular one. We can always combine different versions, if we like something in one and something else in another.

Indeed, that is the goal of feedback: to be able to shape the appearance as much as possible to the client's wishes.

Secondly, we can also discuss the details to some extent, but there's no point in getting into lengthy discussions about them. This is a detail elaboration phase, so there will be plenty of time for discussion when the appearance is already in place.

In the process of creating the Look & Feel, it is easier to communicate through images and examples than through words, as mentioned earlier. Therefore, it is much more meaningful for the client to send us a website or an image rather than trying to verbalize the feedback.

EASIER THAN YOU THINK

After reading this article we can see how the process of creating a Look & Feel is not that difficult. There are methods that help us in developing the mood and character of the application long before working on the design in detail.

It is necessary to create Look & Feel designs, and follow these few steps, so that the preparation, inspiration, creation of the actual appearance and feedback, can be easily done. It will definitely be worth it.