The 10 Key UX Design Principles That Every Designer Must Know

The world of app/web designing is concerning to create a lasting impact on users by integrating creative ideas and design elements. Even though, designers hold a good command over the design practices but deep down there is a need to put down some extra effort that corners their business in the market. The major concern in the design aspect will include factors required to create a new experience, and robust strategies that separate good products from terrible ones.

Therefore, to showcase how design principles help designers to play a heroic role, we are listing down the top principles here.
Read on!

The 10 Most Important UX Design Principles That Every Designer Must Follow:

1. Create User Centric Design

It is one of the crucial principles in UX design to create a design flow that satisfies user needs and offer them the elements they are looking for. User needs are focused closely because the user experience is what actually matters in the success of any web design.

Designers have their own understanding and standards of delivering the best design, however, when their decisions are based on user information and other specific requirements, they are always the smart ones.

For instance, a creative design with a complex user journey can cost you a lot as you may immediately lose your user. Therefore, it is advisable to include intuitive elements that help your user to complete their purchase journey. Try out multivariate web designs to collect feedback and create one that matches your user preferences.

2. Maintain Consistency

Consistency in the UX design stands for creating a product design that is easy to use i.e. where the user can follow a low learning curve. Try to include intuitive fundamentals similar to other products in the market as it will accelerate user adaptability and enhance user experience.

The major aim of using this principle is to observe user behavior and offer them the convenience of using the product in a limited timeframe.

In other words, consistency can be maintained by focusing on the basic components like the right selection of the icon’s color, size, location, and arrangement that eliminates the user’s struggle of understanding and operating the product.

For example, while creating a design for a food ordering app, follow the design process similar to other apps in the market. However, ensure that you need not copy your competitor and conversely, you can save yourself by reinventing the whole wheel.

3. Keep A Clear Hierarchy

The design hierarchy explains how the designer has shaped the product in terms of easy user navigation. There are basically two types of hierarchy focused on the design part i.e. content hierarchy and visual hierarchy.

Managing content hierarchy means a consistent alignment of the different web pages and their content. Whereas, the visual hierarchy represents the presentation and arrangements of the design elements on the web page.

A website hierarchy principle is also used for these reasons like:

• It ensures easy navigation for the site visitors
• It allows search engine bots to easily crawl the webpage for indexing
• It simplifies the designer’s task of precisely understanding the website’s functioning

Thus, keeping a clear hierarchy is important as it helps in drawing user attention to the most important sections or pages of the website and provides useful insights to the users as per their requirements.

4. Use Accessibility Testing

The user accessibility principle has gained greater popularity in recent years. The principle is used to ensure designers that their design must be accessible to all people including the ones who are physically challenged.

And to match the accessibility level of the UX design, it is crucial to remove the design obstacles and create a trouble-free layout where users can easily understand and get clear outcomes.

The design components that need to be focused on by users are text readability, color visibility, and a sufficient level of color contrast.

For example, a designer can make use of different contrasting colors in the fonts and background as well. This will increase the readability of multiple users including those who are having dim light or the ones who are visually Impaired.

5. The Selection of Typography Matters

Typography holds the power to change the way how any user interprets the message. It is essential to pay attention to the typography choices by designers as it helps them to either enhance or deteriorate the meaning of the content displayed on the webpage.

On contrary, the right selection of typography fonts can help designers in improving text readability, accessibility, usability, and user-friendliness.

6. Be Heedful of Usability

Usability is the structure of the website that explains how easily the user can interact with the design. The major areas that need to be focused on while ensuring the high usability of a UX design include efficiency, learnability, user satisfaction, error prevention, and memorability of the design. It is very important to make your design safe and easy to use.

For example, if you are designing a website then you need to ensure that the design should not be challenging or cluttered in order to retain your users. This can be easily managed by ensuring the purposeful placement and design of the text, buttons, snippets, and other elements.

On the contrary, there is no specific design guide as it may vary with different products and brands. Therefore, it is recommended to take the usability test with multiple design elements like font, text, style, clarity, etc.

7. Simplicity Wins Always

Every designer aims at creating a unique design by integrating multiple unique features that help them stand out in the market which is obviously good from the design aspect. But it is important to note that user satisfaction matter more than the design decoration and attractions. This goal is easily achievable by making clear bifurcation of the design elements.

For example, if you are designing a PDF website then the primary elements like upload, convert, edit, etc. should be highlighted first. Then the other features like adding comments and page numbers, crop options, etc. must be placed as secondary options.

Thus, clear bifurcation makes the design looks simple and clean and ensures better site conversions.

8. Get a Clear Understanding of The Design Context

Context is directly related to the situation or circumstances where the design will be used and the number of factors that will affect the user experience. To manage the design context, the designer can focus on the devices used to use the product, the user’s location, their expected emotional state, their tasks and goals, technological limitations and capabilities, and many other environmental factors.

Once the context is clear, the designer can easily envision user behaviour and create an intuitive design strategy that boosts user experience to the next level.

9. Add Animations to Make More Appealing UX Design

The moving effects are eye-catchy and create a deep visual understanding of any design. Designers can not only grab the user’s attention but they can clearly communicate the purpose and idea behind the website functionality in a quick and sharp manner.

Furthermore, by using animations, designers can successfully help the target audience to remember even the minute details of the design, help eliminate unnecessary visuals and act as a more engaging and cost-saving strategy. So, this design principle suits better to the business that is looking to express its ideas, thoughts, and concepts in a more enhanced way.

10. Use the Art of Storytelling

Isn’t it amazing and easy to remember a conversation rather than reading the whole uninteresting text?

The storytelling principle plays a similar role to the UX design principle. It helps designers to effectively communicate product essentials by using appealing videos, texts, images, and animations.

So, try to create a narrative design and leave a lasting impact on the user’s mind. You can also enjoy other appealing benefits of the storytelling principle like broadcasting a new campaign, and creating better brand recognition and even users can enhance their learnability level along with better user onboarding.

Summing Up!

UX designing is already a huge term that includes swift, strategic, and exciting actions to uplift the desired outcomes. The ultimate goal of a designer center around enhancing user experience which can be easily achieved using UX design principles.

So, if you are looking to develop the web or app design of your business, make sure to instill required updates in your design strategies. You can consider above-mentioned cluster of the top UX design principles to make your product a great hit in the market.

If you have other specific choices regarding your product then, don’t forget to consider other essential principles too.