Web App Design: Examples of Modern UI Design for Inspiration, Principles & How to Design

Web applications have become a thing of the present.

Various companies worldwide have shifted their websites to web apps because they offer better benefits.

Moreover, people worldwide have accepted web applications with open arms.

Hence, if you have also found one of the excellent web app ideas and are planning to launch your business, one of the crucial things you should focus upon is web application design.

Moreover, delivering the best experience through design has become essential to be successful online.

Now, if you are wondering about web application design and things encircling around it, then you have reached the correct place.

We have been working in the web application design & development field for a long time; hence, we know what is required to design a web application.

Here, we will first walk you through the basics of web application design. After this, we will look at the examples, principles, and process of web application design.

What is Web Application Design?

Web application design is one of the crucial stages for developing a web application. It mainly refers to the overall appearance of the web application.

Web application design consists of two essential components: User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). While working on this you must ensure that you follow the fundamental principles of designing. Let us look at them in detail.

What is UI in Web Application Design?

It is the part with which users interact when using a web application. The primary purpose of the designers is to create a user-friendly & attractive interface. For the same, they look after the fonts, buttons, colors, navigation, etc.

What is UX in Web Application Design?

User experience is how a user feels when interacting with the web application. It requires a combination of critical analysis and logic to know how a user interacts with different services or products in a web application.

To provide an effective user experience, a designer needs to look after several aspects like usability, UI design, creativity, content, navigation, and impression.

You need to give proper importance to web app design because it speeds up your work in the stages ahead.

To help you understand better, we will walk you through some of the best web app design examples created using these aspects.

So, let’s get started.

Best Web Application UI Design Examples for Inspiration

Here we have curated the list of the most popular web app design examples. You can take web app design inspiration from these examples to create your own app.

Gumroad

Gumroad is a simple tool for online selling that helps you create and manage sales by directly connecting to Facebook, Twitter, or Email. It also helps you sell without taking any cuts from your income.

When you visit the web app, you will see that they have utilized beautiful pictures and colorful fonts. All these details explain things well.

Gumroad was designed to make selling as easy as sharing, so sellers can focus on their craft and not worry about collections, orders, or payments.

Buffer

If you are familiar with Buffer, you know that they have a super clean web app. Its playful brand colors add a vivid splash to the UI and make it an attractive web application to visit.

As soon as you visit the homepage, Buffer indicates it offers some great social media management tools. With Buffer, you can schedule and share posts throughout the day on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Netlify

Netlify makes the experience as smooth as the interaction itself. Everything is beautifully structured and clearly explained, and navigation between screens is a breeze. The web app is also intuitive. No guesswork is required.

Netlify offers a lot of features that make it stand out from the rest. Each feature of the web app is explained beautifully in an easy-to-follow manner. It is also very apparent that a lot of research has gone into making the UI/UX so pleasant for users.

Notion

Notion is a well-known web application that offers various components to improve productivity, such as notes, databases, kanban boards, wikis, calendars, and reminders.

As soon as you visit the web app, you can see different features of Notion. Moreover, they have explained all the things through emotions, icons, and a clear user interface.

Grooveshark

Grooveshark has the same interface like most other streaming music sites; however, with a few neat twists: you can search music by popularity or availability, browse by genre, and listen to full tracks before you decide to buy.

Those looking for album art can enjoy one of the best visual experiences in streaming audio.

Zendesk

When you are designing an interface that will be useful every day, you need to be restrained. If your colors and fonts are too bold, they will quickly become tiresome to look after. Zendesk does a great job maintaining a great design while keeping it focused on the content.

Zendesk also keeps its typography straightforward. It has simple fonts and is not using too many fonts, which affects the readability.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp does a great job at creating a consistent design language across all of its platforms. They embrace a consistent color palette and use structural elements to establish an overall design style. This leaves Mailchimp designers room to be expressive with each email.

Mailchimp has a great design team. They make sure they only communicate to the user through typography, forms, color, and a defined voice in their copy.

Squarespace

The design of Squarespace emphasizes more on white space. The space on the page is used effectively which many designers might not have focused upon. The homepage consists of a simple heading with two lines and a get started button.

They have removed every last bit of extraneous design. Hence, it feels like you’re actually building a web app instead of playing with drag-and-drop elements.

Web App Design Principles

Here are some of the essential web app design principles. By following these principles, you can create a user-friendly and attractive UI design for web apps.

So, let’s discuss them in detail:

User Interface Facilitates Interaction

User Interface includes all the things that you watch on the screen. It consists of the smallest of elements like icons to big images used in a web application.

Based on the requirement of the web application, you need to include various UI elements. Here we will walk you through some of the primary components of the UI design.

Keep it Simple: Whether you have a simple or a highly complex idea, you should represent it most straightforwardly in your web application.

All of your users should be able to understand things effectively. It is one of the most well-known UI design principles to consider for all types of web applications.

Offer Clarity for Each Element: Your user interface should be easily understandable by the target audience.

The audience shouldn’t have to make any effort to know about the buttons, language, flow, etc., of your web app. An effective way to handle all the things is to have a new page for every action.

Familiarity: Familiarity means when someone has knowledge of a particular thing. If someone is visiting your web application for the first time, they should be able to relate its elements with their previous experiences.

For example, an “<-” icon should indicate going back to the last step. By keeping familiar elements for users, you reduce their learning curve, increase user retention, enhance usage speed, and get other advantages.

Simple Navigation: Navigation is yet another crucial thing in the user interface of a web application. All the users should easily be able to navigate from one part to another without any hindrance.

To provide effective navigation in your web app, you can integrate a top menu, sidebar, sub-navigation, and footer. Moreover, by delivering flawless navigation, you offer an effective UX.

Responsive: A web app should be completely responsive on various devices such as smartphones, tablets, desktops, etc. In simple words, it should adapt to the screen sizes of the devices along with delivering better usability and experience to the users.

Consistency: Web application design principles should remain consistent right from the first page to the last page.

A consistent design helps users to identify all the patterns in the web app. Hence, they can get all assumptions about the UI correct and use the web app smoothly.

Aesthetics: An aesthetic user interface leaves a good impression of your brand among the audience. Also, the users would connect well with your business and spend more time on the web application.

To create an aesthetic UI, one should pay attention to the fonts, icons, colors, buttons, menus, etc.

Efficiency Affects Performance: Efficiency denotes a level of performance that utilizes fewer inputs and provides the highest output.

A web application should integrate better shortcuts, proper flow from one screen to another, and effective transitions. These things enhance the productivity of the users and help them achieve more with minimal time and effort.

Offers Better Compatibility Across Different Browsers: A web application should look and perform similarly on different screen sizes, operating systems, and browsers.

Offer Instant Feedback for User’s Actions: Most users don’t like to stay long on a web application if it doesn’t provide feedback.

Provide users feedback whenever they perform any action on your web application. For example, you can show users a specific icon for every action they perform.

Besides this, you should forgive users for several mistakes. For instance, if a user deletes a file, you should offer an option to undo the action and get the file back.

Typography Impacts Readability

Typography is a way of organizing letters and text to make the complete copy attractive and clear to the user.

Well-executed typography helps to increase readability and sales. Also, it shows professionalism in your business. Other than this, it benefits an online business in various ways.

To inculcate better typography in your web application, you should focus on several essential elements like text size, fonts, text alignment, hierarchy, letter spacing, line spacing, color & contrast, and whitespace.

Use Color Scheme to Improve Aesthetics

A color scheme is an essential element in a web app UI design. It is an arrangement or combination of colors in any online website, web app, mobile app, etc.

A properly executed color scheme helps to grab the attention of the users. Moreover, it is helpful to communicate the message on a visual and physiological level.

Use WhiteSpace to Provide Better UX

WhiteSpace is also known as the negative space, and it is the space between the text, graphics, images, and blocks.

By utilizing whitespace properly, you can maintain a balance between various elements of your web application, such as copy, sidebar, margins, etc.

When you maintain whitespace on the web application, users can easily find the desired information and navigate flawlessly.

Moreover, whitespace offers various benefits such as increased readability, better interaction, highlighted CTA, etc.

Usability Aims for User Centric Design

Usability is a measure of how a user utilizes a product/ service to achieve a specific goal. In simple words, usability is the process by which a user can access a web application.

Usability depends on the five most important components. Let’s have a brief about all of them.

Learnability: It is the primary component that leaves the first impression about any web application. Here, learnability means the ability of a user to learn and access the web application easily and instantly.

Memorability: A user visiting the web application after a certain interval of time should be able to recall all the things easily.

Efficiency: How well a user can execute a task after which they have understood the design. If users cannot complete a task without any hindrance, what is the reason behind it?

Error Tolerance: How instantly can users revert from a mistake after committing it? In short, the response of an interface towards human errors. Here, you can monitor mistakes committed by users and how they are tackling them to find out the issues in your design.

Satisfaction: Determining how pleasant a user feels while working on a web application. A user should be able to achieve this goal and feel like coming back to the particular web application again.

SEO-Friendly Design Helps to Rank Higher

You should definitely create the web application for your target audience; however, you should not forget search engine optimization (SEO).

It would be best if you also looked after essential elements that are not visible to your eye for SEO. It includes meta tags, title tags, headings, HTML coding, etc.

By making all of these things appropriate, you create an SEO-friendly design that helps you rank well in the search engines.

Divide Content into Small Chunks

Content is the most crucial principle of web application design. More than anything else, users engage with your web application based on the content. Therefore you should give utmost importance to this principle.

The content of your web application should answer all of the users’ queries straightforwardly. It should bring value to the life of users. Hence, it would help if you kept it informative, engaging, and entertaining.

Here, you should invest time in creating the best content for your web application. Moreover, you should divide your content into small chunks as people access the web app from devices and follow a specific pattern for scanning.

When you create content that resonates well with the visuals of the web app and divide it into specific parts, you can attract more users and keep them engaged for a long time.

It is not the end. There are various other elements to create an attractive UI for web applications. Next, we will look after the common challenges of designing and developing a web application.

Focus on Solving User Problems

Web apps are not meant to provide information to the users but also assist them in completing various tasks. Hence, the main purpose of a web app is to ensure that users’ tasks get completed. You need to make sure that users’ needs are fulfilled in every stage from validation to finalizing design concepts to creating a design considering UI & UX.

What is the best way to make this a practice?

Communicate with users frequently. Schedule interviews, send them surveys, and discover what type of problems users face expect your web app to solve.

You can create user personas and customer journey maps and update them regularly to create a web app based on users’ needs.

Test Performance & Refine UX

One of the essential principles of web app design is testing. You should test your web app during different stages to ensure all the users’ needs are met and make improvements accordingly.

Monitor your web app regularly to ensure that it is functioning at an optimum speed. Set alerts whenever anything is about to expire for the smooth running of the web app.

Implement modern concepts on web apps and get feedback from the users to ensure that you are on the right track.

Testing your web app is essential during the MVP and when your final app is done. You can also create two different designs and run A/B testing to determine which design users like and later modify your web app accordingly.

How to Design a Web Application?

Here we will go through some basic steps to design a web application efficiently.

1. Project Discovery

The foremost step in designing web applications is project discovery. It is mainly required to fill the gap between the idea and the result. In this step, the business analysis, business owners, UI/UX designers, and technical lead define the fundamental things about any web app project.

The product manager looks after three main things, market research, competitor analysis, and consumer analysis. Let us go through all of them.

Market Research
Market research helps you to determine product capabilities, look for market niches and potential users. It is beneficial to compare the product with competitors. Moreover, market research helps you to obtain information related to the customer’s needs & preferences.

Do Competitor Analysis
It is necessary to know your competitors to stay in the market. You should define your competitors and then their strengths & weaknesses. You can also know the issues users face from these web apps and try to provide an upgraded version.

Conduct User Research
The user is a central part of any web application. You should schedule interviews with the users to know their intentions, needs, and behaviors. You will also know their issues and resolve them through your web app.

2. Create Information Architecture & Prototype

After researching and knowing your user’s needs, you can move ahead with the ideation and the prototype stage. The design team comes up with various ideas and possible solutions to create the prototype of the web app.

The design team discovers various ideas, and to organize these ideas, they create an information architecture. Let’s quickly understand what it is.

Information Architecture
The designers first organize the information in a logical manner. Then, the designers sort the entire content and build a sitemap and navigation of the web app from start to finish.

Wireframes
Designers structure various elements like buttons, images, and texts in the web app. It looks like a black & white version of the web app.

Prototype
Here, designers convert the wireframe into a highly interactive version. After the prototype starts working properly, designers switch to the next step.

3. Create UI Design

In this stage, the designers start working on the look & style of a web application. They schedule some meetings with the app owner and then define the style, color, typography, and form in the web app.

Besides this, the designers also keep an eye on the blueprint of the entire web application. They also make various icons, illustrations, and animations in the web application.

4. Test & Evaluate

UI/UX designers conduct a series of tests to check how the users interact with the web application. The primary purpose of this testing is to obtain feedback and modify the web app accordingly so that users get what they want.

Here, the QA also carries out a series of tests to detect any errors and provide the best-in-class web application design.

Bottom Line

We conclude that design is one of the most important aspects of a web application. The Web application design principles and examples help you gain better insights into how to design UI for web applications.

Also, we looked at the streamlined process to design web applications. By following the process, you can make a modern web app design efficiently.

If you have a unique web app idea and want to create an attractive and scalable web application design, you can contact us.

Guru TechnoLabs offers the best web app design and development services for all kinds of businesses across the globe. Hence, we can understand your business in-depth and provide you with the most suitable solution for your future web application.