Think. Design. Make.
Alex James is a UK-based user-experience and interface designer, solving problems with beautiful, user-centric web and mobile products.
Let’s work together.
Focus on the user
“Focus on the user” is the most important principle in UX design, and underpins all of the other principles in great UX design. This principle sits at the core of UX design, Why? because it helps to combat a very common issue found in website and app designs: as designers become more adept at working with complex web design frameworks, they can end up designing sites that are more concerned with impressing fellow designers than providing real-life users with a great experience and their clients.
It’s all about consistency
Consistency is a core principle of UX design, it’s one that is extremely important when it comes to building a successful website, app or web-app. At the broadest level, consistency means that designs and functionality stay the same across all of your pages, products. It’s also important to recognise that many of the most popular and successful apps and websites use similar templates for user interfaces, whether this is in the placement of buttons or the way in which menu systems “flow.” We do this to create a sense of ‘familiar’ experiences between different products for users.
Establish a hierarchy
Hierarchy is another core principle of UX design, but one that is often forgotten. At the simplest level, a hierarchical approach to design means thinking through all of the functionality and information that your website or app will contain, and then mapping this into a tree-like structure in which every aspect of your website or app flows “naturally” from the last page to the next. When implemented effectively the pages of your website or app will flow so naturally from each other that your hierarchy will be all but invisible, creating a seamless navigation experience for the user.
Context is the key
This is one of the key insights provided by a great UX design approach, embedding ‘context’ into the frame work of the design. It is an extremely important part of how users interact with your designs. Context, in this sense, means paying attention to which devices will be used to access your webpage or app and paying particular attention to the fact that mobile browsing has become in recent years the most prevalent form of web traffic on mobile devices.
Put the user in the driving seat
Putting the user in control is a really key part of the UX design process. Years ago, there was a widespread reticence to give users a high level of control over the web pages and apps they use, because there was a similarly widespread fear that people would break them and not know how to use them. One of the key findings of two decades of UX research, however, has been that we now know that giving the user more control results in a better experience, which in turn means people will keep using the product because they enjoy the experience which it gives them.