Follow these UX design principles and you will improve your website’s effectiveness
When designing a website, there are some practical UX design principles to follow. It might seem obvious and simple. However, under taking these principles is not. Simply put, keeping the user at the centre of your decisions will ensure what you design will work. Of course, when it works for them, it benefits the business side of things too. Follow these principles and you will have a website that provides real value for your users.
Understand your user
The most important of the UX design principles is understanding your user. After all, UX stands for “user experience”. How can you design an experience if you don’t know about your user? If you don’t know their needs, you are only guessing. Much like how you research the person you are buying a present for. You wouldn’t take a guess, they might be allergic to the Fun Size Peanut Tin you’ve bought them! What are your user’s needs? By answering this question, you uncover the purpose of your design.
- Why are they coming to your website?
- What need are they fulfilling?
- What is motivating them?
For example, they might be coming to you for a car insurance quote. The need is obvious, they want car insurance! However, what isn’t clear are their motivations. By speaking to your target users, you learn things that will inform your design decisions. What is the force driving them and what beneficial outcome are they seeking? Understanding this will directly inform the content you write. Subsequently, how you write it and where and when you position it.
Content first
The second UX design principle, is consider the content first. What content will answer their needs? For the previous example, you might’ve identified motivations such as getting insurance quickly. When you are aware of the user’s situation and what they need, it becomes easy to write content that will help them.
Prioritising this content is what leads to the formation of a wireframe. With this in mind, by working mobile first, you are forced to consider what content matters most. It forces you to keep it brief, which in turn means your content is well written and to the point.
When you have the content written for your users needs, the rest follows easily. Everything else should be supporting the legibility and hierarchy of your content.
Test, test, test
The third UX design principle is testing. Anything you design that hasn’t been tested, is an assumption. When you assume something, you are accepting it as the truth without evidence. If you don’t have evidence, there is a high chance you are wasting time and money. By testing your assumptions you start to uncover the facts. Testing your designs early and often will iron out these assumptions fast. You can do this by “guerilla testing”. For example, testing your prototypes in coffee shops, or where you know your audience will be.
Split testing is a highly effective way of testing assumptions. It can give you data that proves or disproves your assumptions. By having a hypothesis, it can help you formulate what and why you want to test. An example of a hypothesis, in the example of the car insurance website:
Because we saw people abandoning the car insurance form at the first page.
We believe that breaking the form into chunks will make it less daunting to fill out.
We will know this is true when we see less users abandoning and more completions of the form.
In conclusion
The core UX design principles are to understand your user, put the content at the heart of your design and test, test, test! Read about how to run a design sprint to see how you can use these principles in practice.
