User experience is a broad and ever-evolving discipline. People in this field possess various skill sets across multiple industries. In this article, we will highlight the three essential UX rules regardless of industry that every UX designer should be familiar with.
1. Know Your User and Their Needs to boost UX
User research is a natural and vital first step in the design process. Even before you embark on your journey to designing the most beautiful and elegant website, it is critical to carry out some preliminary user research.
In other words, by understanding your primary user’s pain points and goals, you will better be able to brainstorm design solutions that directly addresses those issues.
2. Keep Your Interface Consistent
Once you have gathered all your user requirements and have started designing, it is crucial to keep your navigation consistent and the overall look and feel of your website should be similar across every page.
This ties into one of Nielsen’s Normans widely known Usability Heuristic Principles – Consistency And Standards and Recognition Rather Than Recall. To read more about these heuristics in depth, visit Nielsen’s group 10 Usability Heuristics.
In addition, by utilizing layouts consistently, visitors will better understand what type of information they could expect to find on a given page.
3. Exercise Progressive Disclosure to improve UX
It is best not to overwhelm your users with too much information at a time on the website.
According to a recent study conducted by Microsoft, it found that the average human attention span has declined from 12 seconds to 8 seconds (a bout a second less than a goldfish’s attention span). As web designers, we need to learn how to cope with this short attention span by providing only relevant content at the time the users need.
A great way to do this is through progressive disclosure. Progressive disclosure is the act of exposing content and features to users in a progressive and step-by-step way – in turn achieving simplicity and conciseness. This will enrich the user experience of your website and ensure simplicity in your designs.
An example of this is through content previews.
A snippet is utilized to provide the user with just enough information to help them decide if they want to dive deeper into the content. As an example, this is extremely common in news websites and blogs.
Conclusion
Design That Puts Users First! It goes without saying that web design is largely subjective and your website’s look and experience will not satisfy every user.
However, these three above mentioned principles are some of the tried-and-true UX principles and when carefully considered and incorporated will help the users feel at home.
Also, when people interact with websites, they expect excellent, relevant and timely content. If the website fails to satisfy their needs, they’ll simply move on to an alternative a click away.
It is vital that every design that we push out as designers is well researched, well tested and most importantly, improves the user experience.
