What are UX design principles?

UX stands for User Experience. This term originated a couple of years ago, even though something that seems basic and completely necessary, the tech industry has been talking about it somewhat loosely and often misunderstood. Being that, we want to highlight what user experience actually is.

What is the User Experience?

UX is understood as the work that is done to improve a product / service and that is functional, which will provide the user with a good experience when using it.

To go to the real root of what UX is we need to go back to the Industrial Revolution and the technological advances of the nineteenth and twentieth century, when businessmen saw ways to improve their work processes to optimize production time. Having that clear, let’s move on with the items below.

Top User Experience Principles

Make it ‘Digestible’

UX design has to be easy to digest in plain sight and prevent the user from having to spend hundreds of neurons in understanding what it is that they are looking at. When making decisions and executing actions, we need elements that guide us. Organize the information with a certain hierarchy using size, color and icons to highlight what is a priority and guide the user to find what they are looking for more easily.

In certain cases, it may be useful to include a site map in the footer that clarifies how the sections of the site are built for easy navigation.

Clarity Above All

Good UX design is honest. That is, it is decipherable for those who visualize it. Explain things to your visitors as they want you to explain them. Do not use complex terminology, speak your language and in the more sensitive sections such as prices and rates, get to the point.

A user will not click on a ‘buy now’ button if you do not tell them how much they are going to pay and what they will receive for it. Avoid the ‘free trials’ or deceptive demos that are going to take the user to go through a payment gateway, ‘wasn’t it free? ‘ -they will think.

Design Trust

Before asking a user to complete an action, we must gain it. In a website, the way to do it is by offering concrete explanations step by step, directing it towards an agile and simple conversion within our pages.

Let’s think about how Uber has done it, which has completely revolutionized an entire industry through a user-friendly app that stores the user’s billing information (data that the user would not feel comfortable sharing with a stranger) and facilitates the payment and transactions in the friendliest way possible.

A Familiar Appearance

It is normal that for designers to like to innovate by presenting elements and combining patterns. Still, web usability requires some consistency in the form so that the user recognizes what he is seeing.

The aesthetic layouts and the appearance of platforms such as that of Google provide clues on how to design styles and icons to get to avoid friction and generating confusion during an interaction.

First of all, you should know that UX and UI go together but each one has its meaning, they complement each other but they also work independently.

Before we go deeper, here is a basic concept:

• UX or User Experience is the internal experience that a user has when interacting with the products and services of a company.
• UI or User Interface is a series of displays, pages and visual elements (such as buttons and icons) that are used to interact with a device.

Introducing their history:

A Little History of UI

To understand what UI consists of it is necessary to go back to the first computers. It was created in the 70s using command lines as an interface (screens full of letters and numbers), so to understand it, it was necessary to know the programming language. The computers did not have graphics, buttons, or even a mouse, until 1984 when Apple successfully commercialized a computer that had an interface with several windows and a mouse.

Thanks to these advances, UI Designers are working nowadays in applications, web pages, etc.

UX from the 90s to the Present Day

In the early 90’s Don Norman, vice president at the advanced technology group at Apple, invented the term UX because “he wanted to cover all aspects of the experience between the person and the system, including the industrial design, the graphics, the interface, physical and manual interaction.” Since then the term has been expanded and has taken on other meanings.

Nowadays, the UX is not limited to the visual interface of the product but is a concept that covers several dimensions and it is responsible for the company delivering a product and service that meets the needs of the customer.

Why does a Website Need both UI and UX

UX is the result not only of what the user does on our website, but also of what he feels and thinks when browsing through it. For user experience you also need to consider whether the visit comes from a computer, smartphone or other mobile device. UX is also something you must not forget about in apps.

It was the researcher Donald Norman who coined the term User Experience. Donald said that if we started only from the Usability of the Interface, it would not make sense for a user to choose one app over another application if they all have the same functionality. It is at this moment when Norman sees the need to create a new concept called User Experience.

If you want to learn why do users choose an application among others that have the same functionality read about mobile app development and how UX/UI affects it.

User Experience takes into account a user’s thoughts and emotions, it does not only consider their behavior during navigation, but also what they think or feel before and after the interaction.