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User experience increases chances of customers recommending your product by 16.6%. UX is an art within the boundaries of science that makes business sense and drives ROI for organizations. A seamless UX is about providing meaningful and relevant experiences to users in order to increase interactions and retention. It can be created with continuous improvement in designs with regards to usability and customer’s perceived quality. There are several recipes one can use to make UX Design a success. These are our top 8 recommendations of UX Design principles to create successful experiences.
1. Focus on real users:
The main goal of any business is to make the end customers happy. The first and very essential principle of UX design is to focus on real users- their needs, expectations, motivations and frustrations. A clear understanding of these important user aspects helps designers to build personas, and focus on these personas throughout the design cycle. One can elicit real users’ needs using common user research methods such as interviews, focus groups, contextual inquiry and shadowing.
2. Focus on business:
For any product to be successful in the industry, UX design of that product MUST make business sense. Defining your business goals upfront is extremely important. A good UX design creates a great balance between business and user goals. Making the end customers happy while meeting the business goals will eventually result in ROI for your business.
3. Data informed design:
A design is great not because it is created by a designer, but when it is informed through multiple data sources. Designers use data as a source to make effective design decisions. Data can be qualitative or quantitative in nature. Examples of data sources are users, business and marketing stakeholders, competition, market buzz, and site analytics. Data informed design will help achieve long-term business as well as user goals and also give users a great experience which will eventually help in user engagement and retention.
4. Design for user’s mental model:
User’s mental model means the perception that a user has in his mind about a particular product or service. Once you understand users’ mental models, you can replicate that in your design to give desired experience, thus making it easy for users to complete their tasks and achieve their goals. Research techniques are used to capture user’s mental model.
5. Design for Learnability, Memorability, Task Efficiency and Human Memory:
One of the important UX design principles includes creating designs that are easy to learn, create memorable experiences and make users do their tasks efficiently and effectively. Learnability of the design is based on the user’s understanding of the design. Memorability means, when the user returns to it, he or she should be able to remember how to do things, as users are not using the application all the time. Here, user experience plays a crucial role as a differentiator. When the user has decided to do a task on a website or in an app, then he/she should be able to complete it efficiently which is also achieved with the help of great user experience.
6. Validate Designs:
Design validation means a detailed evaluation and analysis during or at the end of design and development. The goal of validating designs is to ensure that the design is able to achieve the set goals. Validation of design helps to improve design decisions and maintain consistency. Typical techniques used for design validation are expert review, cognitive walkthrough, formative and summative usability testing, and A/B testing.
