Your creativity rules the field of design. You are allowed to twist and turn the anything that you create as per your creativity and your ideas. And the best part is the fact that you never even have to explain anything to anyone verbally, your ideas do the job for you. Similar is the case with the UX Designs as well. You can play by your own rules and ensure that it’s appealing to your audience.
Still, there are certain things that as a UX Designer, you cannot afford to miss out on or break. These are some general principles that will improve the way your audience interacts with your website or your design. These are the ones that have been tried, tested and approved over the years in bettering the audience’s interaction with your design. These make your life easier as a UX designer as it would help you understand your design and further help your audience navigate through your design.
Check out the principles to live by below!
Visibility Of System Status
This means that your system should always be able to tell your users what is going on. It should be able to give feedback to the audience within a reasonable period of time (not too long). Your users must always be appropriately informed about the things that they are doing and what will happen after a specific type of action. It will help the user feel more in control of what they are doing and will know what they’d do next.
Should your design be able to answer questions like did the edit get saved? Or What is the status of my order? Or How long will the process take? The idea is to ensure that your user isn’t sitting in front of your design with a blank mind and confused about what to do next.
Design Vs The Real World
If your design is very different from the real world, the user will have no idea what’s going on. Your website should be able to speak the user’s language, be it in words, phrases or concepts. Things must be familiar to the user rather than using things that would require a specific type of knowledge or expertise to understand. The information provided on the website or via your design should be easy to understand, logical and natural.
You can do this by using familiar words and language. Don’t use massive vocabulary. The meaning of the words or the icons should be straightforward and understandable to your target audience. In most cases, visual symbols are the easiest to understand than text.
Uniformity
As a designer, your website must follow a specific type of standard or consistency. Your audience should never have to wonder if different actions or commands or words mean different things. There are types of consistency: Internal and External.
Internal consistency is related to the patterns within your website or the mobile application. It is as simple as keeping the colour of the links same or using the same image or concept for a particular action at all pages.
External consistency means how it works on the outside. For example, if you own a clothing store website, then most of the audience that comes to your website are familiar with how it all works. They know that when they click on the add to cart option, the product will show in the bag and further procedures. In this, you don’t have to reinvent anything. Because if you do, it will confuse the audience with what they are already familiar with.
Being consistent, both internally and externally, will save the user’s time.
Balance Between Control And Freedom
Your website or your design is a controlled environment. You do restrict specific actions in your website, but it should also enable the user to make a choice. And give them an “emergency exit”. It would often happen that your user made an action that they didn’t want to or they want out of it now, it is essential that your design guides them for a way out without an extended dialogue. Your system should never force the user to do something that they don’t want to.
Minimalism And Aesthetic
When you are creating a design or a website, you must remember that it shouldn’t look too loud. If there are a lot of things going on at one screen, it will get very confusing for the user. The information to be provided on the website make sure that there is not too much of it. Your points should be concise and minimum, so the user doesn’t take too long to read them.
The idea is to minimise the distraction and enable your user to be more focused on the task at hand.
Conclusion
The aim of each and every principal for the UX Designers is to make sure that the user has the easiest and the most enjoyable experience with your website. The user is most likely to be back if your content is easy to comprehend and access. This is what we at Imaginxp follow too. You can buy the guide to UX here!
