If you are one of the designers that think that UX design is not essential, you are doing it wrong.
User Experience (UX) is one of the critical aspects of an app. It defines how the user interacts with the app functionality. No matter how proper the app functionality is — if the UX is bad, the user will abandon sooner or later.
It doesn’t matter if you are starting out your career or you are already an established professional, you can take advantage of the UX principles while building a website or a product. In this article, we will be sharing a few of the excellent UX principles that will help you redefine your app. Let’s get started.
1. Meeting the User’s Needs
User’s need is at the core of the UX principles. Throughout the design process, you need to focus on users. To get started, try to look at the app through the user’s perspective. You can do user testing or use other methods to understand user needs. Getting close to the user needs can help you improve your user design immensely.
Most of the time, developers do not give much importance to users, which leads to a design that user’s don’t need.
2. User’s Mental Model
To ensure that you develop the UX design according to the user, you need to use a mental model. The interface shouldn’t be just based on your instinct or simply through your gut feeling. Each button placement should be purposeful and should meet the needs of the user. Bad design is the one that makes the user clicks on a button in anticipation of completing a task, but does a different thing. As a UX designer, you should avoid it at complete cost.
3. Digestibility
Another important UX principle is digestibility. A good design is always easy to understand and digestible to the brain. When a user wants to use an app, he is not ready to discover the product. All-in-all, it should be intuitive and should be easy-to-read and understand. A digestible design starts with a proper navigation menu. Also, the navigation menu should include a good number of elements. Putting a long list of features on the menus will only confuse the user.
The idea is to present the content in the most digestible way without stressing out the user. Another way to handle digestibility is to provide user guide throughout the different steps of the app or service. This will ensure smooth user transition at all steps, and will not decrease the bounce rate of your service or app. However, that doesn’t mean that you should include unnecessary instructions. That can easily confuse users.
4. Learn Your Position in a Design Process
As a UX designer, you may feel overwhelmed with all the decisions you are making. The design process can become complex, pretty fast. To avoid being overwhelmed, it is recommended, you understand your position in the whole design process.
Using the right tool for the right phase in the design process can help you elevate most of the problems.
Source
As you can see in the image shared above, we have different tools for different phases.
5. Trust
Trust is another critical part of a design. It is mostly used to convince a user to perform an action within your app. It is common for users to quit if they are asked to do something unusual. The internet is full of hackers, malicious actors, and scripts, and that’s why you will find most of the user very cautious in their approach when dealing with “any” kind of app.
As a UX designer, you aim to be clear and honest as you can. You can communicate the results of an action to the user, and tell them its benefits. Apps such as Uber are thriving because they have made it safe for people to book taxis. They are revolutionizing the taxi industry through an “app” and “service.”
6. Clarity
Be clear in your approach. A good design ensures that it is clear in all possible way. For example, the pricing page should have a clear understanding of what the app or service has to offer. No user would click on the “buy” button before they know what they are getting. It is also essential for you as a designer to make it clear for the user. A buying decision is one of the most important ones, and hence, clarity should be maintained throughout the funnel process.
Try to be as simple as possible to be precise. Being straightforward will give you the ability to provide value to your users.
7. Consistency
A consistent design is more appealing to the user. It is also one of the fundamental pillars on which a functional design stands. A cohesive design not only looks and feels good, but it also makes it easy for the end user to learn about the product quickly. The consistency should be in the operation, performance, and the overall feel. An excellent, consistent design will further improve user learning and help them spend less cognitive abilities to understand the design in and out.
8. A Clear Hierarchy
A clear hierarchy can make a product easy to navigate. For example, If you start blogging, you will also find yourself building a blog that makes it easy to navigate. The same is true in the case of product design. The smooth navigation through the different functionalities will help you to organize the information correctly. As a designer, you should understand the important parts and provide that navigation to the end user.
In some products, it may become hard to find customer support. This can lead to dissatisfaction to the user as they surely do not want to google how to find support on product X.
Conclusion
This leads us to the end of the eight UX principles to improve product design. We covered quite a lot of principles — which are essential in building the best possible product design. If you find the article useful, do not forget to comment below and let us know. Also, share it with your audience.
