UX design principles: When we hear the word design, our eyes quest for a little hint of creativity, innovation, and something beyond beautiful.
And UX design is a creative and ever-growing field that embraces fresh ideas from new practitioners.
But there are some foundational UX design principles that every designer should know. When a design is combined with the right principles and rules, then an enhanced user experience and brand trust will be the end result.
Let’s walk you through these UX design principles that every designer should be familiar with.
1. Meet the user needs
When you run a startup or are thinking of starting one, then the first thing that strikes your mind is to assure that the user’s needs are met. One of the essential principles of UX design strategy is to focus more on their end-users through every step of the web or mobile app design process.
The user experience gives you a clear picture if your design needs an improvement or not. Therefore, one needs to figure out what their users are looking for and create content accordingly. There is also a possibility that a design that looks appealing to the firm might not reach the users’ expectations.
2. Know your status in the design process
If you’re a newbie in the field of UX design, then the process can seem a little intimidating. Though you must know what role you play in the whole design process.
And after every phase makes sure that the designers use various tools and have a clear picture of the design process. This helps you to understand things better and lets the creative you surface out.
3. Have a clear hierarchy – UX design principles
It is easy to take hierarchy for granted, but it is an important principle as it ensures smooth navigation throughout the design procedure. And there are two hierarchies you need to make a note of.
First is your primary hierarchy, which is associated with how content is organized and you might notice a few sub-categories that usually come under the secondary hierarchy.
4. Consistency is the key
The users are likely to expect products that will come in use regularly. This makes it easy for them to become familiar with the new product without any extra learning costs. Thus, for startups or businesses of any size, consistency is the key which makes the UX design process simple for designers.
5. Understand the accessibility – UX design principles
One of the important rules of UI UX designs is that you need to make design and accessibility your first priority. It’s the designer’s responsibility to ensure that the maximum number of people are able to use the application. And to make this work, as a designer, one needs to ensure that users can navigate through the application with ease.
6. Allow content to regain supreme
The designer needs to develop the content before getting started with the designing process. They’ll be able to implement the mobile UX design principle in less time if they design with real content relevant to the company.
7. Adapt designs for short attention spans
An attention span is defined as the amount of time someone concentrates on a task without getting distracted by other things. Designers need to understand this and work with the aim of delivering information to the users as quickly as possible.
8. Prototype before you build a real product
Skipping prototyping and investing a lot of effort into creating an actual product is another mistake that designers commit. Prototyping is creating a model of a product so that it can be examined. It allows you to test your analysis before hiring a team to build the actual product.
9. Recognition over recall
Users should easily recognize how the features in an application work without them trying to recall everything. Designers should strive to minimize the cognitive load by making information and interface functions visible and easily accessible.
10. Use simple language
Simple language is to be used, which is easy to understand, it also enhances your designer’s user-friendliness. In this fast-paced world, nobody has time to go through a whole lot of complex words. So, designers should always opt for simple language.
11. Less is more – UX design principles
The less the design, the more eyeballs it grabs. For the UX, the underlying aim is simple: reduces the operational and cognitive costs of the users. Several celebrated designs have surfaced as a result of this UX design principle, including major products like the iPhone and iPod.
12. Be playful with animation
Animations can get hold of users’ attention quickly. It has been noticed that interactive web experiences and animations are likely to add more life to your site and reach your target audience. Hence, playful features work wonders, so the animation cannot be skipped.
13. Establish trust and credibility
The importance of trust and credibility is not to be taken lightly. No matter which project you’re working on, designers have to follow the web or mobile UI UX design principles. A designer must strengthen the legitimacy of the brand apart from its website. Once the user finds your brand to be trustworthy and credible, they are more likely to bring your business loyalty.
14. Preventing errors is better than fixing them
One should design products while keeping the potential errors minimal. Users tend to hate silly errors and it could ruin your brand’s name in less time. Thus, one should strive to either eliminate error-prone situations altogether or check for them and notify users beforehand.
15. Narrative design – UX design principles
This is one of the most important user experience design principles is narrative design, or voicing out your story in the form of a design. Time and Rhythm are the two critical storytelling elements.
Time depicts how slowly or quickly your narrative is unveiled. And rhythm is the pattern of unfolding that your narrative adopts. Like the pattern of the series of screens through which the entire design opens up.
The site should neither be too slow nor too fast, as it can either bore the user to no end or inundate the user with excess information. Therefore you need to maintain the right balance. For instance, the Big Apple Hot Dogs website shows how well the designer uses this narrative storytelling principle.
Conclusion:
As you step further into the field of UX design, you’ll want to get yourself familiar with the common UX terms and conditions that every designer should follow. Hope this article helps you learn more about UX design principles and their importance.
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