Make Your App Look Boring
Save your creativity flex for solving user problems. Not for re-inventing interaction design and UI.
We've reached a stage in software development where we have patternized pretty much everything. This is good news for two reasons:
1. It makes building fast and efficient
2. It reduces the cognitive load for users. They are already familiar with the common user flows and UI components.
The downside is that most user interfaces look the same. Trends like flat design, make things even worse. A sentiment in some web dev circles is that nowadays all web apps look "boostrappy" - a result of many web devs using the Bootstrap library for building user interfaces.
So, if you don't want your product to look too "bootstrappy", and you want to stand out in some way, what do you do?
Be creative with the right things
Here's where creativity and innovation will pay off in spades:
1. How you solve your users' problem. People use a product because it helps them get a job done. Finding a better way to do this will keep winning you customers daily. Your unique solution to a painful problem (or a critical job to be done) is an integral part of your product strategy. It's long-term, and it can be a moat (i.e. defensible advantage).
2. How easy and intuitive your UX is. Data-informed interaction design is your secret weapon. Along with UI, interaction design should always be grounded in the established industry standards, and deviate only with the data-informed intent of making things more intuitive and easier for the user. In other words, don't innovate for the sake of being different.
3. Visuals bound by usability. Experiment with colours, animations, and shapes, but always keep in mind that what you build has to be usable. Try different design ideas, but always test them for usability. It's common sense, you'll say, but it's not a common practice.
How Hey Email does it
Hey Email is an email service from the team behind Basecamp. Going head-to-head with behemoths like Gmail and Outlook is scary. Besides, innovating on something as standardized and commonly accepted as email, could be the shovel to dig your own grave. A logical question: if email is broken, how come Google and Microsoft haven't fixed it?
Hey's team, however, didn't waste time with such navel-gazing. Instead they dove deep into understanding how people use email and the key challenges they face. This research formed the foundation of their solution: a system for triaging each email into one of three buckets: Imbox (important stuff), Feed (newsletters), and Paper Trail (invoices, bills, etc.).
Once you get a new email, it goes into your screener box. From there, you have to decide whether you want to receive emails from the sender, or relegate them to a filtered-out folder. If you want the email in, then you have to decide in which box you want it go: Imbox, Feed, Paper Trail.
These are about the only decisions you have to make with Hey. Compare this to the Outlook experience: everything goes into your inbox, and the system decides what to place into a sub-category Other. You open your email in the morning and you see a long list of stuff you don't care about and you have to classify and sort out every time.
Notice that Hey's innovation, and main point of differentiation is in how they solve the problem of email. Sure, their UI is bold and unique but that wouldn't have mattered if they just remixed the same old Gmail experience.