Professional designers build mind-blowing, bright, and spectacular web projects that get billions of likes on Dribbble and Behance. They create the unique UX, conduct tests, and design amazing interfaces to breathe life into a website. But when it finally goes live, it turns out that the majority of users do not understand the design concept. It is not because something’s wrong with a website or its the audience lacks creativity, it is just people got used to a bit different reality and web experiences. This means the UX should be reconsidered and redesigned. In order to avoid this scenario, we have decided to focus on some of the universal principles of User Experience design. Read also: A Comprehensive Website Planning
Universal Principles Of User Experience Design
Pillars of UX Design
The main goal of any UX designer is to ease user’s web experience. In one of our previous articles, we’ve already discussed it in detail. Now, we’d want to shed some light on the process of creating a perfect User Experience design that should be not only of commercial interest, but also technically feasible, user-friendly, easy-to-use, and useful. This means it should correspond to people’s everyday web experiences. So below we’ve gathered some of important things you should know about the perfect UX:
- First of all, we recommend making your website a bit more human. Try to avoid complex wording and keep the website’s structure simple and close to user’s thoughts
- Try opening your design project on an ordinary monitor to see how it looks on a standard screen. Most people use standard monitors, while web designers prefer using high-resolution monitors. This could make a huge difference as their colors and resolutions may vary greatly
- Pay special attention to how your visual hierarchy is structured. Make important elements look bigger and place them higher
- Place the most valuable blocks to the upper left-hand side. People usually start reading from there
- More Calls-to-Action bring better conversion. Don’t forget that
- Same blocks must look similar on your website
- Be careful when playing with fonts, always make the links look differently by outlining them
- Make your site’s structure as clear as possible for visitors. If it is too complex, it is your task to guide their navigation
- Always keep your audience in mind. Get to know what they need
Read also: Things You Should Know About Material Design
How to build User Experience Design
- Ensure system feedback.
The communication between machines and your users is actually the process of data transmission. This forms a mutual understanding and effective interaction. That is why the explanations and timely effective feedback are of the highest priority. When a person performs certain action, your website must respond immediately in the form of light emission, vibration, shape change, disculoration, etc. Your visitors should always know that their action is known by the system.
- Allow people to make mistakes when operating the interface.
Most likely they occur due to some kind of problem in your design. But do not forget to guide your users to the correct operation path.
- Ensure intuitiveness.
Right operating parts should be obvious, conveying the right information to visitors. An average user should operate the website with no extra learning, but based on his or her instinct.
- Do not make people think a lot.
A good UX product presupposes that users can achieve their web goals within seconds, with almost no thinking. In order to build one, fullow the customer’s mental model.
- Functionality always matters.
The functionality of the UX design is more important than its aesthetic look. Often, it is not easy to put ” true art” and “web design” together. So when it comes to the User Experience design, you must be ready to do the right choice. In addition, all functions should be optimized for middle-class users.
- Less is More.
In the modern web industry, the essence of “less” means doing your best to reduce the user’s operational and cognitive costs. This concept is one of the hottest trends in web design.
- Consistency.
The purpose of this principle is to reduce the visitor’s probability of misuse and learning efforts. This requires using the consistent performance within familiar or the same scenes and functions
- The most important principle of the UX design is to meet the customer’s needs. So do some homework and build user scenarios, analyze data, and observe their behavior.
Read also: Anti-Principles of Successful Web Design
Key Takeaways
Generally speaking, a successful design means user-focused design. It is impossible to create a great UX design without following the above principles. In addition, don’t forget to test it on your coworking neighbor or someone from your target auditory. Also, don’t forget to click this link if you have any questions. Together we will make the world a little better place.