Basic UX Design Principals

Most of us have, at some point, spent some time pulling at the handle of a door marked 'Push' purely because it has a handle - frustrating and embarassing isn't it? This is just one example of bad user experience. You may know your way around your site/application because you commissioned it, designed it, built it or have live with it for so long that the processes required are second nature to you. Do your users know it as well as you do? How long will they spend learning their way around before they give up and leave? What will their experience do to your company or brand reputation?

There are so many things to know about user experience design that we won't be listing them all here. Here are our favourite ten pointers to get you looking in the right places.

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Accessibility

Accessibility shouldn't be a concession.

As you design your next site you should be trying to make sure that all content is available to all ranges of abilities without resorting to secondary content streams - you shouldn't need alternate content for people with different abilities; the original content should be able to support all abilities.

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Consistency

A very important aspect of user experience design is simply making things work in the same way throughout your site - If you start by putting 'submit' buttons in the bottom right-hand corner of your forms, then you need to make sure that's where they always are.

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Flexibility-usability tradeoff

This is fairly obvious; the simpler you make something the easier is will be to use. If you think about a car remote locking control, it only has one button - to turn on and turn off the locking system. Simple = easy to use.

Now picture one of those programmable TV/Hi-Fi/DVD/etc. remote controls - take the best one you can find, the one that controls the most equipment. Now to explain to someone else how to set it up. Flexible = difficult to use.

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Forgiveness

You should be doing your best to help users avoid triggering errors on your site and, when they do eventually trigger an error, making sure that the result doesn't leave them trapped or abandoned. Make sure that any data the user has added is easily recoverable, their 'shopping basket' isn't deleted, they're not left stranded without proper navigation, etc.

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Form follows function

Always remember that beauty in design is a direct result of simplified function.

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Garbage in - garbage out

Be careful what you ask from your users - if you're not specific enough then you could easily end up with the wrong result. Try using two fields for 'First name' and 'Surname' instead of just one for 'Name' - the results you'd get from the second option would vary too wildly to be of any real use.

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Hick's Law

Hick's Law states that the time is take to make a decision increases as the number of choices increases. If you give your user too many options then you site or application may become to time-consuming to be of use.

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Interference effects

Mental processing in your user is similar to processing in a computer - the more processor you devote to different processes the slower and less responsive it will become. Try not to distract your user too much with flashing images and animations unless that's exactly what they've come to see.

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Ockam's Razor

If you have more than one option and the choices are functionally the same then choose the simpler option.

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Signal To Noise Ratio

Similar to 'Interference Effects', this is a measure of how much relevant to irrelevant content you have on a page. More 'signal' and less 'noise' is better.

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More...

If you want to know more about usability and its impact on your particular site then please contact us.

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