UI Audit Edition - A UI Audit for an AI Tool

Hello! My name is Jesiah Camara and I am a UI Designer from Nektic. I’ve been a UI Designer for over a year working on landing pages, website UIs, branding, etc. and I have been enjoying and learning the field so much that I decided to create a UI Audit series for the whole 3rd quarter of 2023. With this, I’ll be able to practice my UI Designing skills, learn a lot more about refactoring UI, and share what I have learned and observed with you all.

So with that said, let me introduce you to our first UI of the week: Outboundly’s landing page.

What is Outboundly?

Outboundly is an AI tool that meets your AI needs regarding email assistance, sales, research, and AI chatbots. It’s a browser extension that simplifies cold outreach by leveraging AI to generate personalized prospecting messages.

You can check their landing page here: https://outboundly.app/

The UI design on their landing page is fairly interesting. Because of its simplicity, it’s easy on the eyes of the user while being comprehensive enough, not overwhelming them with the amount of information.

However, I think there are sections and designs that we can further improve to help out Outboundly. Here are some of my observations.

UI Observations

Enhance Page Balance: The usage of the page margins here is a bit inconsistent, with some elements overlapping or falling short of the margin. But we can fine-tune this to give the page a more balanced and visually appealing layout.

Achieve Spacing Consistency: Some spacings around the page, as well as the sections, are somewhat inconsistent with each other as well. Some being too long, and some being too short. Let's achieve consistent spacing throughout the content and sections, ensuring a smooth flow for users.

Optimize White Space: While white space is essential for clarity, we can optimize its usage to maintain a clean and modern look without overwhelming users. Too much of this can make the page feel a bit empty and disconnected from its sections and content.

Promote Component Consistency: By ensuring a consistent design approach for all components, we can create a cohesive and harmonious user experience. Achieving balance is one of the keys to creating a good design, and unifying the page’s components is a good direction to go with.

What I think the UI needs

After compiling all those observations, I think the main needs that Outboundly’s landing page should have is balance and consistency. Having different-looking components on a landing page sometimes looks jarring while the different-sized spacings in each section can feel off and disconnected from the contents they contain and are trying to say to the user.

Sometimes I also personally overlook these things whenever I try to design landing pages and UI. I tend to go finish up the UI and not look back unless someone points it out to me. To prevent this, I try to follow a system that has the styles and points I need for the whole design to stay balanced and consistent. And I believe that with this kind of observation we made today, we can learn and redo what we can improve, adjust, and fix.

Refactored UI

Now after those observations, here is what I came up with to help improve how Outboundly’s landing page can look like.

Here are the improvements I implemented:

• Followed a properly spaced margin to be used throughout the whole page. This will make the elements aligned with each other giving it a more balanced look for the user to see.

• Tweaked the components’ styling to match them with each other and make them feel more consistent. Styles adjusted are corner radius, paddings, and font-weight and sizes.

• Some of the sections have also been either refactored or have had their layouts adjusted to achieve consistency and make them cleaner as well, with consideration to the user and where their eyes may land first.

What I learned

In this UI Audit, I learned 2 main things: (1) too much of one thing is a bad thing (e.g. spacings and negative space) and (2) consistency is very important to good design.

It’s true IRL that too much of a good thing (or anything in this matter) is a bad thing, which also applies to design. Too much negative space can greatly affect how your UI looks and with an unwise use of this, can make your UI look barren and empty. If we try to master the balance of usage of these things in our designs, then we’re getting forward in a good direction of learning and understanding design.

Consistency is also one thing that we should continually practice and observe. We can’t have minimal negative space in one section and too much in the next. It is what makes our designs feel balanced and even to our eyes and the eyes of the user, reducing the possibility of cognitive overload.

Continually practicing these topics will surely help me in achieving my goal of becoming a good UI Designer and can honestly also apply to being a better human as well. And I hope you, the reader, have learned from this as well.

Thanks for reading the first of my many UI Audits for the whole 3rd quarter of this year! I hope you liked it!

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