UX Design: Fundamental Principles And Best Practices
Nisa Benli
Table of Contents
UX design is the process of generating products and services to provide a positive user experience by resolving certain user problems. User experience (UX) is important at every stage of the customer journey, from the webpage click to the order confirmation.
This article will teach you fundamental UX principles that you may use for whatever kind of digital product you’re making.
Creating a solid user experience (UX) by adhering to tried-and-true UX best practices is a key component of developing an e-commerce website or app for marketing.
What is UX Design?
UX Design optimizes the user experience in the best possible way. It guarantees that users of your website or app will have a smooth, effective, and enjoyable experience.
UX designers strive to make sure consumers get what they want from the website and that it adds value to their experience. Iterative stages of the UX design process typically involve user research, user testing, and implementation.
The procedure takes into account all facets of the user experience, such as accessibility, usability, and aesthetics. Another aspect of the user experience is when a website or app makes you happy or excited.
UX Principles and Best Practices
UX principles and best practices are usability and design criteria that enhance the user experience of your project. If you want to give your consumers fantastic experiences, you must take into account UX principles.
A clear hierarchy, customer-centered design, prioritizing the user, doing usability and accessibility testing, and many more practices are examples of UX principles.
These fundamental UX principles can assist you in creating the greatest experience possible for your website or app, regardless of its subject matter.
User-centric
User-centric, the first UX design concept, calls for the development of goods and services that address user needs. Therefore, the user-centricity concept should permeate everything a UX designer does.
When you prioritize the demands of the user and make choices on their preferences for the product, you are being user-centric. The UX process is designed to be user-centric; it begins with user research to determine the problem to be solved and the demographics of your target users.
Lastly, user testing is used to determine how well the product satisfies the demands of the user base.
Consistency
Being consistent with everything you do, from the interface design to the content structure, is crucial to making things easy for visitors. In UX design, consistency takes many forms.
On the one hand, you want to maintain consistency in the way your designs appear and work across all pages/screens and items that belong to the same brand or family. Meanwhile, being consistent also means that the product you’re building should live up to consumer expectations.
For example, if you are creating an app for booking flights, customers will come to you with preconceived notions about how the app should work based on their usage of other applications that are similar to yours.
You may assist users in achieving cognitive fluency by being constant.
Hierarchy
Another crucial UX aspect is hierarchy, which makes it easier for visitors to comprehend and navigate your website.
Visual Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is concerned with a page’s layout and the relationships between its many components. The font size of the header text, for instance, ought to be bigger than that of the body text.
This straightforward graphic hierarchy indicates that headers should be given more weight than body content and aids in readers’ information digestion. Colors, spacing, and other elements can also be used to establish a visual hierarchy.
information hierarchy
The arrangement of the content on your website across many pages is known as the information hierarchy. Organizing high-level content into groups and dividing less significant stuff into smaller themes are two examples.
Typography
Typography may be quite important to the user experience because it will be present in a lot of the content that your users will engage with.
Regarding typography as a best practice and concept of UX design, there are a few rules.
- It is crucial to select legible typography that complements the design of your website, since it can significantly impact readers’ ability to comprehend and engage with your information.
- Typography has an impact on the formation of a visual hierarchy. To illustrate the hierarchical link between the two sections, you may, for instance, use a different font for headers than for the body content.
- Some intangible elements of the user experience can be influenced by the aesthetic or impression that typography conveys.
User Control
A crucial component of UX design principles is providing users with appropriate control over their interactions with products.
Users make mistakes when doing actions. To quit the undesirable activity without having to go through a drawn-out procedure, they want an indicated “emergency exit.”
The goal of the user control concept is to enable users to fix or undo mistakes without completely disrupting their experience.
You can integrate user control and flexibility into your product by including “Undo” and “Redo” functions, offering “Cancel” buttons, and clearly labelling other actions and routes the user may take if they wish to rescind a certain activity.
Accessibility
Accessibility is the making sure your product or service is useable and accessible to as many people as feasible. It entails meeting the requirements of those with disabilities and being aware of how various settings or contextual elements may affect the user experience.
All UX designers must comprehend accessibility and take it into account during the design process.
Using a strong color contrast to make text readable for persons with vision problems is one example of designing for accessibility. Check out these websites that have nailed the accessible design concept for real-world examples of accessible design in action.
Usability
Usability, the last UX design concept, is, to put it simply, a gauge of how user-friendly a product is. Usability is a fundamental UX design principle as without it, you cannot build a good user experience.
There are five aspects of usability to take into account:
- Capability to Learn: How simple is it for customers to learn how to utilize your product on their first try? Consistency and informational hierarchy are two factors that might improve a product’s learnability.
- Efficiency: Can the user do the intended tasks with the product’s design in a timely and effective manner?
- Memorability: Is it simple for customers to reacquaint themselves with the product’s functionality when they utilize it again after a period of inactivity?
- Errors: How frequently and to what extent do consumers usually make mistakes when using the product? Is it simple for users to fix mistakes? This has to do with the idea of user control.
- User satisfaction: Is using the product pleasurable and entertaining for users? Does it offer a difficult or gratifying user experience?
UX Designers incorporate usability testing into the design process to ensure a user-friendly, identify (and fix) usability issues, and efficient user experience overall.
Conclusion
To design excellent user experiences for your digital goods, adhere to following best practices. You can consistently produce useful designs that please your consumers if you include these ideas into your UX design philosophy.
