Designing User-Friendly Interfaces: Essential UX Principles

User-friendly interfaces and User-friendly experiences are key to user retention in modern UI/UX designing. A user-friendly interface is no longer an option but is rather a “must-have” for today’s digital businesses. UX principles can be really helpful in order to create user-friendly interfaces since they provide you with a structured path toward a good user-friendly design.

In this article, we will discuss the UX design principles that are essential for a good UX design.

User-Friendly Interface

Most Important UX Principles

Here is a list of UX principles that are essential for creating a user-friendly experience and user-friendly design.

1. Accessibility

   Accessibility is designing products services (in our case, it’s designing UI/UX), and environments in an all-inclusive manner. In simpler terms, it means designing for everybody, keeping in mind the people who might have some special needs and taking care of those needs in the product experience and interface.

   For example, you can create a new feature of listening to news in your social media app and improve its accessibility by also providing the transcript in some commonly used languages so that the feature becomes accessible to people with hearing issues.
2. Heuristics

   Heuristics is the study and use of heuristic techniques about helping humans discover and learn things for themselves. In UX design, we do heuristic evaluations as rules of thumb or a better user experience.

   There are 10 main usability heuristics, These were created by Jakob Nielsen. Here is the list of 10 Heuristic evaluations:

   • Visibility of system status
   • Match between system and the real world
   • User control and freedom
   • Consistency and standards
   • Error prevention
   • Recognition rather than recall
   • Flexibility and efficiency of use
   • Aesthetic and minimalist design
   • Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
   • Help and documentation
3. A/B testing or split testing

   A/ B testing or split testing is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or an app with each other to find out which performs better. A/B testing is done after the product is launched, therefore we make smaller changes to the product. These are mostly testing copy changes, choosing between colors and positioning of elements just to see which one drives usually higher conversion rates or higher click-through rates. We judge the small changes for example by putting a button at the bottom or at the middle and just see which ones the users interact with better and which one would most likely drive more revenue.
4. Usability Test

   Usability test basically is evaluating a product/service (in this case UX of the product or service) by testing it with some users and implementing the feedback provided by them. In the Usability test, participants have to complete some tasks created by professionals and these professionals watch the users and take notes.

   Usability test can be remote or in-person. Through usability tests we give users access to the product or platform so that they can play around with it. We can give them a specific task to do and then while they are figuring it out, you can observe and see what problems that they were facing. This helps us understand things that we might have missed during designing the product. Usability test is mostly done before you launch a new product or feature so that you can possibly make up for any mistakes before it actually gets into the market.

5. Information Architecture

   Information Architecture is essentially a document or chart that outlines everything in a particular product or service and how everything inside it interacts with each other. It’s a blueprint that really outlines hierarchy behavior and interaction of content on a particular product.

   Usually Information Architecture is not shared publicly, but it is a very important document when interacting with stakeholders such as some business people or the product managers in order to show the goal or vision of how everything should ideally link together in a way that people can interact with it properly and the company or startup can achieve it’s goals.

6. Persona

   A Persona is a fictional character that we create in order to represent a type of user that will use our product or service. Personas are usually grouped according to certain behavior patterns goals or even demographics.

   Personas are a great way to build empathy with our users and it helps to ensure that we are developing and designing and doing everything keeping in mind the needs of our users. Personas really helps to connect more with the users.

7. Gamification

   Gamification means taking specific “game-like” elements or elements that you would most likely see in a game and putting them into your product or a service that is not the game in order to drive user engagement. Please don’t gamification as turning everything into a game.

   The science behind gamification is called motivation science. so typically how it works is including things like progress circles and leaderboards into your product or platform so that when people see these things they’re a bit more excited and a bit more willing to use your platform and complete that one task that brings them closer to complete that goal.

8. User Centered Design

   User Centered design is a series of processes or steps taken by the designers team in order to put the user at the center of the development of the product. With user centered design every decision is made keeping the user and the goals of the user in mind.

   User centered design usually includes 4 steps:

   • Identifying the needs of the users
   • Specifying the exact number of requirements
   • Designing a solution
   • Evaluating the solution keeping in mind the needs that we initially identified

   User Centered design is a great way to ensure that whatever we are designing actually fits in with the goal of the average user and that way we are not going to spend resources designing things that the users actually don’t need.

9. Mental Models

   Mental models are basically a framework or worldview that a person has which helps him/her to interpret and understand the things in the world and how those things are related. Mental models are deeply held beliefs that each one of us has on how the world works.

   In terms of UI/UX design, it’s really important for us to understand what our mental model is, especially when it comes to the products and how they work and what our user’s mental model is/are. And the task of a good UX designer is to bridge this gap between his/her mental model and the users mental model.

10. Design Thinking

    Design thinking is basically a creative way to solve problems. It is the sum of all the processes that results in designing of a prototype, The most important skills for design thinking are – having empathy for the users and prototyping.

    Design thinking involves five main steps:

    • Understand the challenge
    • Defining the problem
    • Coming up with solutions
    • Creating a prototype
    • Test the prototype and iterate

Conclusion

In this article we discussed the most important UX design principles that will help you create user-friendly design. Following these principles becomes important because it provides you a framework and a structure towards a user-friendly design. Even though one can achieve a great design without knowledge of any of these principle, but when you work in industry you need a set path that will guide you towards a good design and following these principles provides you that path.