7 Ways Digital Illustrations Amplify User Experience Design

The visual perfection is limitless. It engages, intrigues, makes you enjoy and feel emotions. Digital illustration is one of the ways to implement it. Modern apps are plentiful and saturated with UI details and decorations, but most of them lack something authentic and original. It’s what illustrations can do for your app. 

Branded illustrations are an extraordinary way to express the brand’s personality and show the product’s character on the app store crowded with soulless digital experiences. Besides visual satisfaction, digital illustrations can add a lot in terms of app functionality. Unexpectedly? You might be surprised even more if you learn more about all benefits that come with digital illustrations in a mobile app. 

Illustrations Help Transfer The Main Idea Faster

They are an excellent means of communication besides the words. They transfer an additional meaning of the message consisting of the mood, emotions, and character that are encoded in it. You might have already heard many times a phrase that a single image is worthy of a thousand words, and it’s true. 

Sometimes, it’s enough to see a simple picture to catch its complex meaning at a glance. So, when it comes to user onboarding, visual tips, or just introducing your brand style in a mobile app, digital illustration can do great work for you, transferring the information hidden beyond the words.

They Create an Illusion of Real Communication With a User

You can create a character that guides your user throughout a full mobile app experience, like an AI-powered assistant on a website. You can enable this hero to answer some predictable questions and assist the user in a proactive live chat. Although the number of answers you can teach your “chatbot” will likely be quite limited, it will help create a feeling of real communication between the brand and the user anyway. It helps let users know that the app creator cares about them and tries to raise the comfort of their experience with its digital product to maximum.

Digital Illustrations Let People Have Fun

It’s an excellent opportunity to build more personal and “human” relationships with your audience. We all need a laugh sometimes. Your brand can give it to people expressing funny visual metaphors in in-app illustrations. Humor has a big impact and ability to skyrocket user loyalty toward a brand. 

When we have fun when interacting with a product, we may forgive UX infelicities or even not notice them. The fun helps smoothen sharp edges of the user experience design. However, it doesn’t mean they should be in an app, of course. A useful tip is to use funny illustrations in the case of the bug occurring. It will allow you to eliminate negative user experience and increase loyalty instead of losing it.

They Add Elements of Gamification into a Mobile App

Gamification of digital user experience is a technique that designers use to insert gameplay elements in non-gaming settings. It’s extremely trendy and popular today. It helps increase user engagement and grow the overall satisfaction from the interaction with a product. UI/UX designers can consider illustrations as the user’s reward for some achievement. Gamify the user experience to turn your app into a pleasant journey that surprises the user with unusual gifts and rewards. Besides gamification, you can use other digital illustrations trends that are gaining momentum this year to amaze users with a more exciting visual experience.

It’s a Perfect Way for User Onboarding

There is no secret, it’s always better once to see than many times to hear or read about anything. In-app illustrations can work as the visual accompaniment during the user onboarding. You can greet the user with an eye-catching picture. Or you can explain app features and benefits in a set of engaging illustrations that constitute a whole story inside the app. Storytelling is a powerful method of user onboarding, so don’t hesitate to use it and entertain users when educating them on how to use your app at the same time.

Illustrations Emphasize The Main Style Concept 

Along with branding visuals, you can also add digital illustrations to the UX. They can support the central concept and style of your visual design. They should feel like the continuation of the central story told in a mobile application. The only obligatory requirement is that illustrations should correspond to the main theme and branding style. All these visuals combined should look like they have come from the same source, even if different people have created them.

They Drive User Loyalty and Engagement

You might have already noticed that I’ve used the term “user engagement” and “user loyalty” pretty often when talking about in-app illustrations. The most significant power of digital illustration is that it can increase user engagement and loyalty toward the company at almost every step of a mobile app journey. Illustrations help create a positive brand image, improve a brand reputation, and even grow brand awareness if you use them as marketing visuals beyond a user interface design. 

Closing Thoughts

Digital illustration. It has a whole variety of benefits that may help you amplify UX design and tailor a more memorable digital experience. They perform amazing functions and enable you to bring even more pleasure from interaction with your product to users. There are dozens of styles, trends, and talented people who can help you create fabulous illustrations for your brand and stand out from the competition. Don’t wait to test this practice and grow your app’s popularity.