Simplified UI (SUI)
The art and science of marketing software
Role: Creative Lead/Designer
Credits: James Porter as Visual Designer
Show us the software! Over and over again, this is what the analytics have told us about how to market software today. This is especially true for B2B companies with a user base that might not be particularly interested in the lifestyle promise of the product. What they want to know is, how does this product work? What functionality does this product have that my existing product doesn’t? Will this software make my job easier? What does the platform look like and and how does it integrate with the other software tools that I rely upon?
As an artist at heart, realizing that users didn’t JUST want to see illustrations, or photographs of good looking people, was a slice of humble pie that I had to eat a few times before the lesson sunk in. On the other hand, the data was impossible to ignore and this presented me with a new challenge that needed to be solved. Screenshots of the software were often too cluttered and hard to communicate an action or feature, but metaphor was not appreciated by an audience that values functionality.
With the help of our Visual Designer at Deel, James Porter, we went about the work of building and defining what is becoming a new category of graphic. Something between marketing and UX that could answer the call of “show me the software” without sacrificing the simplicity of well designed creative. This goes by many names outside of my team, but within our team we call it SUI or Simplified UI. Our system started with an audit of frequently used UI components and a process that simplified them for maximum digestibility. We then went through a number of iterations that built upon these components to create an extensive and modular library of SUI for our product that, combined with the more humanizing brand elements of illustration and photography, tell a fuller picture of our product without sacrificing brand personality.
