Finding the balance between familiarity and distinctiveness in UX design
How do you create a website that feels intuitive and easy to use without looking like everyone else? We explore how strong UX foundations can create more room for distinctive design.
The web has become very good at following the rules. Websites are getting faster, more accessible and easier to use, which is exactly what we should want. But as more organisations follow the same patterns, conventions and best practices, something else can start to happen: everything begins to feel a little more alike.
That creates an interesting challenge. How do you build a website that is intuitive, usable and easy to find, without losing the personality and distinction that makes your brand memorable?
Strong foundations make distinctive design possible
Good user experience (UX) starts with navigation and journeys that feel intuitive to users, content that is easy to find, clear calls to action and, importantly, an experience that is accessible to everyone. But as more websites converge around the same templates, structures and familiar patterns, distinction matters too. The challenge is to create a web experience that stands out without making it harder to use.
Good UX may follow many of the same principles, but the way those principles are brought to life through typography, colour, imagery, motion, tone and brand personality can be completely different. And a lot of that distinction should be shaped before the design work even begins, through the thinking, research and analysis that helps uncover what makes the organisation different, what its users need and where there is room to challenge convention.
The power of challenging convention
You only need to look at some of the biggest challenger brands to see how powerful this can be. Brands like Monzo, Tony’s Chocolonely and Who Gives A Crap have all built recognition by refusing to simply look and feel like everyone else in their category.
Monzo replaced much of the visual and verbal stiffness associated with traditional banking with bold colour, warmth and direct language, without losing the functionality people need from a bank. Tony’s Chocolonely goes further than bright packaging, with its deliberately unequal chocolate pieces reflecting its message about inequality in the cocoa industry. Who Gives A Crap took an anonymous, functional household product and built a colourful, humorous and mission-led brand around it, carrying that personality through its packaging, website and wider customer experience.
Their distinction came from challenging what people expected those categories to look and feel like. The same principle applies online. As websites converge around familiar layouts, components and visual patterns, there is a real opportunity for design to create something that feels both intuitive and unmistakably yours.
Cundall: the power of distinction in practice
We saw this in our work with global engineering consultancy Cundall. With teams across 21 international offices and more than 20 service divisions, there was plenty of complexity to accommodate, but we did not want that complexity to dictate the personality of the website.
Instead of defaulting to the familiar engineering formula of services, sectors and polished architectural imagery, we looked at what made Cundall feel like Cundall. People and ideas were given much more prominence, with profile pages reserved for people producing or co-authoring content, regardless of seniority. Newness also became an important organising principle, helping the site surface what was current and interesting from across the organisation, and reflecting its meritocratic principles that help talent and ideas rise to the top.
That thinking carried through into the wider experience too. Imagery was developed to better reflect the diversity of Cundall’s global workforce, while technical language was kept clear and accessible. The result was a site that felt more energetic, human and representative of the organisation behind it, while still making a large and complex business easy to navigate.
And importantly, that distinction did not come at the expense of usability. Following launch, sessions per user increased by more than 20%, pages per session rose by more than 62%, session duration increased by 106% and bounce rate fell by 30%.
For us, that is the interesting bit. The website did not perform better simply because it looked different. The design, content and structure worked together to make Cundall feel more recognisably itself.
Design for distinction
If you’re planning a new website, one of the biggest opportunities is to understand what should make the experience feel uniquely yours from the outset. That means understanding what your users need, what makes your organisation different and where there is room to challenge the conventions of your sector.
Get those things right and you do not have to choose between usability and personality. The strongest digital experiences do both.
If you’re planning a new website and want to explore a design direction grounded in user insight, speak to the Ten4 team.
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