Top 6 UX Design Principles You Must Know
As a UX designer, you should aim to have a great looking design that offers satisfaction to the end-users. To attain this goal, you need to apply the top UX design principles that give guarantee your design will be accepted by the users. The top question to ask yourself is how the principles you apply fit all your UX design users. You should think of principles that hold everything together. Apply principles founded on research, experimentation, and experience over several years. The principles should focus on both aesthetics of the design and user experience. Here are some of the top UX design principles and how to apply them for your design.
Top UX Design Principles
1. Focus on end-users
As you create your UX design, the most critical thing is to focus on your end-users. You are creating a mobile or web design for them, to ensure they enjoy a great user experience. Create a design that combines function and form. You should integrate user experience into your design at the initial stages of the project. By doing this, you end up with a UX design that is user-centric. As you do the designing, think of how the end-users will interact with it and the tasks they use the UX design. If you are doing the designing with other team members, make sure everyone has the end-user in mind regardless of the role they play in the design process.
2. Consistency is critical
Consistency is among the UX design principles and best practices every designer must observe. Consistency in UX designing involves ensuring that the functionality and designs stay the same across all products and web or app pages. You need to keep in mind that most of the successful websites or apps apply similar templates for user interfaces. This happens in button placements and the flow of the menu systems. If you create a UX design with consistency, it means that users always come to your site or app with a pre-existing idea on how things should work. Consider creating a design mimicking the most successful web or app designs online. The more familiar your UX design looks, the easier it will be for your targets to use and have a seamless user experience. To attain consistency in your UX design, think of ways users interact with your app or website and apply the same design across all systems.
3. Context is critical
Context determines how your intended end-users interact with your UX designs. Before you start creating your design, think of the devices your targets use to access your app or webpage. Take note that mobile browsing is the top form of online traffic. To bring a contextual approach to your UX design process, perform a user survey to understand your end-users better. You can also carry out ethnographic research in which you use the same web or app pages with similar context as your end-users. If you do not have a good experience with the design, it means that your users are also not satisfied with it, so you need to redesign it.
4. Give users more control
Giving your design users more control is one of the UX principles you should not ignore. In the past, UX designers did not focus on giving the users much control over the apps and webpages. However, this has changed since the latest UX research shows that giving end-users more control of the app or web pages offers a better experience to them.
5. Easy accessibility
Accessibility is among the most critical lean UX principles that allow everyone is able to use your app or webpage design including the ones with a disability. Focusing on accessibility as you create the UX design allows users to have a positive experience. Besides, there are regulations that require you to give equal access to all. Create applications or webpages with simple visual design to make it easy for everyone to use.
6. Hierarchy
Hierarchy is among the basic UX principles, you should never forget as you create your app or web page design. It involves ensuring that the information your website has and its functionality is perfect. Ensure that your pages flow naturally from each other. Applying hierarchy in the design makes it easy for users to navigate through your site or app easily and get what they are searching for fast. It also makes it easy for users to see how your site or app works. Apply this principle by first developing an information hierarchy, used to create a site map. The map should have everything that your design will contain. From this map, you can now develop a design hierarchy interlinking your pages in a logical and consistent manner.
The Best Tool for UX Design
As you create UX design, you have tons of prototyping tools you can use. However, for a fully interactive UX design, Wondershare Mockitt is the best tool to use. The tool has the functionality needed to help UX designers create fully and rich interactive designs. Mockitt is cloud-hosted, meaning you do not have to download or install it on your device to use for your project.
This tool runs on all web browsers on all devices. With the tool, you can create UX design fast. Even if you are a beginner, you find it easy to use since no coding is required in the designing process. When working as a team, you enjoy a smooth process since the tool allows for easy collaboration and communication from the start to the end of the project. The platform has a simple layout that allows you to access the platform with a single click.
As you create your UX design, you can build customized libraries to share with your team members. In addition, you can easily customize the drag and drop elements depending on your design requirements. It features libraries rich in assets and templates. The tool has rich templates, components, icons in "Resources". You just need to simply drag and drop the components from the tab of "Built-in" that makes it easy to use even for novices in UX designing.
You can visualize your final design by the use of interactive gestures and transitions. You can also create and reuse libraries. The tool allows for real-time collaboration making it easy to create UX design with your team. This feature allows you to work on a similar page with your team members and see any changes they are making instantly. This makes you have a seamless UX design process. When using Mockitt, you can easily share your design with other stakeholders using a QR code or URL link. This allows the other team members to preview it online on their devices and give feedback for improvements.