Flashback to Y2K: Style & Modern Interface Design

Color is one of the most powerful tools in the hands of a UX/UI designer. The right color choices not only attract attention but also evoke emotions, build trust, and influence purchasing decisions. Color psychology isn’t magic – it’s a well-established science that should be an essential part of every interface design process.

Why Do Colors Matter?

Each color carries specific cultural and emotional associations. While interpretations may vary based on context and geography, there are universal patterns that designers can rely on.

Colors can:

• Set the mood (e.g., blue calms, red excites)
• Guide the eye (e.g., accent colors draw user attention)
• Strengthen brand identity (e.g., green in logos suggests nature or sustainability)
• Increase conversions (e.g., a well-chosen CTA button color can boost clicks)

What Emotions Do Colors Evoke?

🔴 Red

• Emotions: Energy, passion, urgency
• Best for: Sales, alerts, calls-to-action
• Caution: Can be stressful if overused

🔵 Blue

• Emotions: Trust, calm, professionalism
• Best for: Banking, tech, healthcare
• Caution: Cool tones may feel distant

🟢 Green

• Emotions: Nature, freshness, balance
• Best for: Eco-friendly products, finance, wellness
• Tip: Often used to indicate success or confirmation

🟡 Yellow

• Emotions: Optimism, happiness, energy
• Best for: Promotions, children's products, creative brands
• Caution: Overuse can be visually overwhelming

🟣 Purple

• Emotions: Luxury, creativity, spirituality
• Best for: Beauty, art, premium products
• Tip: Use with care — not everyone connects with it

⚫ Black

• Emotions: Elegance, power, modernity
• Best for: Luxury, high-end design
• Tip: Works best with strong contrast

⚪ White

• Emotions: Simplicity, clarity, purity
• Best for: Minimalist interfaces, clean layouts
• Tip: Pair with accent colors for visual interest

Contrast and Accessibility

Color psychology is not just about emotions — it's also about functionality. Good color choices should be accessible to all users, including those with vision impairments (like color blindness). In UX/UI, make sure to focus on:

• High contrast between text and background
• Clear indication of states (hover, focus, disabled)
• Following WCAG guidelines (e.g., minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1)

Practical Uses of Color in UX/UI

1. Call to Action (CTA): Buttons should stand out using high-contrast, bold colors like red, green, or orange.
2. Onboarding & Microinteractions: Colors help guide users (e.g., green = “success”, red = “error”).
3. Dark mode vs. light mode: Many apps offer both — colors must be adapted to maintain clarity and emotional consistency.

Final Thoughts

Color psychology isn’t about personal taste — it’s about communication. By using color deliberately, you can shape how users feel, behave, and interact with your product. Designing interfaces isn’t just about aesthetics — it’s about creating meaningful, emotional connections.

Imagine this: a UX team is developing a digital product, but all members share similar life experiences — similar age, background, and gender. As a result, the prototype of an app for people with mobility limitations turns out to be barely accessible, because no one in the team noticed the need for interface adaptation. When a UX team is diverse, with women in leadership roles, the chances of catching and fixing such issues early rise significantly.

Why diversity matters in UX

Diverse design teams — not only in terms of gender but also culture, experience, age, or way of thinking — bring different perspectives that help avoid cognitive biases and create more inclusive solutions. A study called Inclusion unlocks the creative potential of gender diversity in teams found that diversity alone is not enough — women and other underrepresented groups need to be actively involved in core decision-making stages, such as research and design, for diversity to translate into real creativity gains.

Companies with more women in leadership roles also tend to perform better financially. Research shows higher innovation levels, stronger product decisions, and greater empathy toward users. Forbes highlights that women leaders often introduce more collaborative, user-centered approaches that enhance the overall experience.

What women-led leadership brings to UX

• Empathy and user awareness — Women leaders often put strong emphasis on user research and sensitivity, uncovering “invisible” barriers (cultural, situational, accessibility-related) that others might miss.
• Collaboration-focused leadership — They tend to create safe environments where team members can share ideas freely, fostering innovation and exploration.
• Inclusive mindset — Women-led approaches often prioritize designing products that are useful and accessible to broad, diverse groups of users.
• Balanced decision-making — A focus not only on speed but also on long-term product impact and quality.

UX and better products

Products designed by diverse, women-led teams are often:

• better aligned with the real needs of underrepresented user groups,
• less prone to “design blindness” (ignoring accessibility, cultural differences, or varied technical skills),
• more satisfying for users, resulting in higher loyalty and fewer costly fixes,
• more adaptive to market shifts, since multiple perspectives strengthen resilience.

Does this make business sense?

The numbers say yes:

• McKinsey & Company has consistently found that companies with greater diversity in executive teams are more likely to outperform peers financially.
• A report from NGCP highlights that firms with more women in leadership positions often achieve higher profitability, stronger market positions, and greater operational stability.
• On the other hand, a study in Chicago Booth Review shows that diversity doesn’t automatically equal performance gains. Diversity must be paired with inclusive culture and organizational commitment to unlock its benefits.

The role of a women-led UX studio like UX GIRL

As a women-led studio, UX GIRL brings unique value:

• Amplifying perspectives often overlooked in mainstream design, helping spot user needs earlier.
• Building research and decision-making processes that prevent exclusion and bias.
• Cultivating inclusive team culture, leading to higher engagement, less burnout, and stronger talent retention.
• Showing clients that investing in diversity is not just ethical, but a real competitive advantage — when products fit real users better, they deliver higher business value.

Challenges to overcome

While the benefits are clear, building diverse, women-led UX teams comes with challenges:

• Structural barriers — stereotypes, lack of representation, and slower career progression for women in tech.
• Tokenism — women included symbolically without real decision-making power.
• The need for genuine inclusion — hiring diverse talent is not enough; organizations must empower and listen to them.
• Proper processes — such as diverse user testing, iterative research, and continuous feedback loops.

Conclusions and recommendations

To maximize the impact of diversity in UX, organizations should:

1. Run a diversity audit — assess who’s in the team and who’s missing.
2. Foster inclusive culture — create safe environments where all voices matter.
3. Engage diverse users early — test prototypes across different groups.
4. Develop women leaders — provide mentoring, growth, and leadership opportunities.
5. Measure impact — track both qualitative (satisfaction, inclusivity) and quantitative (conversion, retention, error rates, business KPIs) outcomes.

Final takeaway

Diversity in UX — especially in women-led studios — is not just a moral imperative, it’s a business advantage. It ensures products reflect real users, reduces design blind spots, and increases long-term value. For leaders, agency owners, or product managers, the message is clear: investing in women, inclusion, and diversity is not a cost — it’s a strategic asset.

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As AI projects gain traction and SaaS ventures become less popular to start, I’ve noticed a new mindset emerging—the belief that you can build an entire AI project on your own. The idea is that you don’t need a designer or even analysts to help shape your groundbreaking AI product because there’s now an abundance of AI tools, like Midjourney and DALL·E, that can assist with the process. But let me tell you—you couldn’t be more wrong, and I’m about to prove it.

So, why do you need a designer in the first place in this new era of AI tools for your AI project? I’m going to break it down and cover the most important aspects—focusing on the key principles behind creating truly great AI products.

AI Products Have More Functionalities Than Just Chat

Most AI products come with additional features that determine whether they are truly usable or not. Take image generation tools, for example—they offer a wide range of options like vary subtle, vary strong, or even a seed ID. But let’s be honest—does anyone even know what that is, anyway? ChatGPT is fairly simple since it’s just text-based, but when you move into text-to-image or text-to-video interfaces, it quickly becomes clear that a basic text field isn’t enough. Sure, you can use it by just typing in prompts, but without proper use of functionalities, you won’t be able to tap into its full potential.

Another example—take the Share feature in ChatGPT. Let’s face it, it just doesn’t work! Whether you’re trying to share a conversation with someone else or even a teammate, it’s always a hassle. More often than not, you’ll end up copying and pasting the answer instead because OpenAI clearly didn’t test or design this feature with usability in mind or is it just strategy? (evil laugh, not mine of course). To sum up, AI products are usually based on Writing functionalities, but not fully. You will still need to design a proper user flow and user interface with a UX designer, before starting the development of a feature.

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Pricing segmentation and upsell

If you’re building a groundbreaking AI product, you’ll definitely want to monetize it somehow (those API credits can be a real hassle to pay for, right?). This means you’ll need a solid market strategy, a well-designed pricing structure, and upsell functionalities that encourage users to move up tiers—not down.

This is where a skilled UX designer becomes invaluable. Figuring out the best places to introduce upsells and designing a smooth, effective funnel isn’t just an afterthought—it’s a crucial part of your product’s success. Because let’s be real, aside from great AI functionality, your second biggest priority is making sure users actually want to pay for it.

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Great UI doesn’t automatically translate to great UX (even with AI generated graphics)

There are countless tools available for creating stunning assets—take Midjourney, for example, which we even shared tips and tricks for in one of our articles. Yes, you can use AI tools like this to generate benchmarks or even the visual assets you need for your project with ease.

But remember—UI is not UX. A visually impressive interface won’t save a poorly designed experience. If the entire user journey isn’t thoughtfully crafted, with all edge cases considered, you’ll likely run into serious user retention issues down the line. A beautiful UI means nothing if users get frustrated and leave.
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Introducing AI features for Fintech and Health care

Some industries require extreme precision in user input and output, meaning they might not benefit from AI-driven features as much as others. Imagine you're planning a detailed travel itinerary for clients in a city you know nothing about. You could spend hours researching, or you could use an AI writing tool to generate ideas you might never have thought of on your own. In this case, AI is a helpful assistant.

Now, imagine using the same AI-generated interface to initiate a bank transaction or transfer money to another person or institution. The potential for errors is enormous—and the consequences could be serious. That’s why industries that rely on precision, like healthcare and fintech, will integrate AI carefully and sparingly. Many of the interfaces we use today in these fields will likely remain unchanged, even after the AI revolution.

If you're building an AI product in fintech or healthcare, it’s critical to carefully plan functionalities with a dedicated UX designer—ideally, one who specializes in the industry. At UX GIRL, fintech is one of our core specialties. We’ve honed our skills through years of experience and have mastered the craft of creating highly usable fintech interfaces.

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Focus on Your User—Who Is Still Human

The tools might be evolving, but remember—you’re still designing for human beings, and not everyone effortlessly navigates the ever-changing world of new tech. Sometimes, it’s better to stick with familiar interaction patterns rather than reinvent the wheel.

Take Windows ME, for example. Microsoft tried to revolutionize the operating system world, but instead of being embraced, it became one of the most infamous failures in tech history. Users found it confusing, buggy, and unintuitive, leading many to downgrade to older versions or simply wait for a completely new release rather than adapt to it. The lesson? No matter how advanced your AI product is, if the user experience isn’t intuitive and user-friendly, people won’t hesitate to abandon it.

So maybe it’s best to hire another human to design for a human—not a machine.

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Afterword: The AI Revolution Needs Great UX—And So Do You

AI is changing the way we build products, but one thing remains the same—your users are still human. No matter how advanced your AI tool is, if people can’t navigate it easily, trust it, or see its full potential, they won’t use it.

That’s why great UX design isn’t optional—it’s essential. From crafting seamless user journeys to designing intuitive interactions, a skilled UX designer ensures that your AI product isn’t just powerful but also usable and profitable.

At UX GIRL, we specialize in creating AI-friendly, user-first designs, particularly in high-stakes industries like fintech and healthcare. Whether you're building a cutting-edge AI tool or enhancing an existing product, we can help you design experiences that delight users and drive business success.

Need a UX designer for your AI product? Let’s talk. Get in touch with UX GIRL today and let’s build something great together!