I think there's a misconception that digital is completely separate from print when in reality there're a lot of principles from print that can be applied to digital design, such as layout thinking and typographic thinking.

I've worked on so many projects over the years, but the one that I enjoyed the most was developing a pet-wellness app for a UK company. The app was called Pezo and the project was amazing for a number of reasons.

From my perspective, user interface design is just the design of any digital interface. While it has various applications, such as a marketing or a brochure website or a mobile app, it is essentially taking the foundation, be it the UX design or the wireframes, and using best practice to style it so that it can be coded in a way that allows a user to engage with it in an online space.

With an increase in digital prevalence across a lot of industries you are competing for attention, hence it's really important to make sure that your digital products are memorable and useful. UI design and a good user experience give you a competitive edge over the next person.

From an abstract perspective, a key tenet or principle of UI design is consistency. It's important to make sure that throughout your interface you remain consistent with styling, spacing and text hierarchy. It creates familiarity and a good UI experience, as well as a credible brand presence.

UX design entails setting up the infrastructure, the thinking and the logic. UI design adds a different layer of principles to give a face, or visual usability, to all of that. It's the styling of the digital product.

From a UI perspective, inconsistency is usually the biggest problem. I believe consistency creates familiarity and learned behaviour that allows people to engage with your interface more easily. Inconsistency or unfamiliar patterns immediately create discomfort with your user and can confuse them. Examples are different colours for your primary buttons that leave your users not knowing which is the right one to click on, an inconsistent UX language style or ambiguous calls to action.

My advice to entrepreneurs is to remain solution orientated. It can obviously be quite tricky to have a positive mindset when you have a lot of concerns about either an existing app or a future app. But I advise you to come to the conversation with an open mind and to trust that the person you're working with has done this before and that they're there to guide you.

When it comes to the UX side of things, we use FlowMapp for all of our site maps. FlowMapp focuses specifically on building out the site maps for your website and can also do user journey flows. 

I try to make sure that everything I do is based on solid research. I don't like to play a guessing game. For me that means benchmarking yourself against the industry you're working in. Make sure you've looked at your competitors. Make sure you have done due diligence, that you've really tried to understand who the target audience is within that industry.