15 rules that every UX designer should know

The user interface is part of the user experience. Confusing user experience design with UI, as if they were the same thing, is a common mistake. It's important to understand the difference between the two disciplines. In short, the user interface is the space in which digital interactions between people and products take place, while user experience is an emotional outcome during or after interactions with a product.

User research is the first step in the design process. It should come as no surprise that one of the most important factors you should consider when designing a product's user experience is the audience. If you plan on developing a product that your users will love, you need to have an idea of what your target audience actually wants and needs.

This means that user research and the creation of user stories should be an essential part of the UX design process. It's crucial to focus on your users before you start designing! This way you can create added value for people using your product and focus on benefits and usability rather than features.

User experience designers should be able to recognize when to stop adding new features and instead keep constant what users love and appreciate about an experience.

Testing with real users is an essential part of the design process. We often assume that people who use our interfaces behave in exactly the same way as we do. As a result, we project our behaviors and reactions onto the users. But thinking that we are the user is a fallacy. This effect is known in psychology as the false consensus - a tendency to assume that others share our beliefs and behave similarly in a given context.

Most likely, the customers who will use your product have different backgrounds, different mindsets, different mental models and different goals. In other words, they are not you.

There is a simple technique that helps developers overcome the "False Consensus Effect": Usability testing. If you want to create products that users love, you need to focus on testing. Testing with real users (not your teammates, friends or family) allows designers to learn to create products that are suitable for those who use them. This can be time-consuming, but it's the only way to be sure you're moving in the right direction.

Do not overwhelm users with too much information. An attention span is defined as the time in which someone concentrates on a task without being distracted. A study conducted by Microsoft in 2015 found that the average attention span of people has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. This means that we now have a shorter attention span than goldfish. Interaction designers need to adapt to deal with this behavior. With the aim of giving people the information they need as quickly as possible.

Developers should simplify interfaces by removing unnecessary elements or content that does not support user tasks. One technique designers can use to achieve this is functional minimalism. However, this does not mean that experiences should be limited. All information can be valuable and relevant.

Customize your design process for the product you are designing. The UX process is a make-it-or-break-it aspect of user experience design. Without a solid UX process, a designer will be completely in the dark. A clear and concise process, on the other hand, allows you to create amazing experiences for users.

Many UX designers believe that there is a universal process that can be applied to all projects. Unfortunately, there is no universal experience design. While it is possible to define individual steps for each project, a precise UX design process should always be selected based on the project requirements. This is because every project is unique and has its own requirements.

This means that a designer should be prepared to customize their design process based on project specifications to create the best possible user experience. For example, if you are developing a new product, you may need to spend more time on user research and clarifying requirements. However, if you are further developing an existing product, you may need to spend more time on design validation (running usability and A/B tests or working with analytics reports).

The design phase for digital products should include a prototyping phase. Skipping prototyping and putting a lot of effort into developing a product is another common (and dangerous) mistake among many design teams. When we put a lot of effort into creating something we think is great, it can be very stressful to realize that our solution doesn't work as expected when we release it into the wild.

Prototyping creates a model of a product so that it can be tested. Prototyping allows you to test your hypothesis before spending time with a development team building the finished product. Interaction designers can use different design techniques for prototyping. One useful prototyping technique is called rapid prototyping. It is a popular method to quickly create and validate the future state of a product, be it a website, application or app, with a group of users.

Our aim is to get as close as possible to the real customer experience. Therefore, we should not abstract the design process too much from the real world. Avoid lorem ipsum and dummy placeholders. Almost every product is based on real content, be it text, images or videos. The design improves the consumability of the contentlts. However, many visual designers do not consider the content during the design phase. They use dummy text instead of real text and placeholders instead of real images. While such a layout may still look good on the desktop, it could be completely different when the same design is suddenly filled with real data.

The main characteristics of a good user interface are simplicity and consistency. In the context of digital products, simplicity means that it is easy to understand and interact with a product. Your users shouldn't have to read instructions to understand how to use an app or use a map to navigate through it. Part of your job as an interface designer is to make things clear and subtly guide them to where they need to go.

Interfaces also need to be kept consistent throughout a design. In an attempt to make designs appear more creative and memorable, many intentionally add stylistic inconsistencies. For example, different color schemes are used on different pages of a website. Such decisions often cause confusion and frustration for users. Therefore, it is always important to keep the design element consistent and reinforce the most important facets. Remember to apply the principle of least confusion to your digital product design.

Using elements that you recognize improves the user experience for the user more than having to learn new elements from scratch every time.

Due to the limitations of human memory, developers should ensure that users can automatically recognize how to use certain features of their product instead of having to remember them. Strive to minimize the cognitive load by making content and interface functions visible and easily accessible.

Design for as many different users as possible who interact with your products. When it comes to visual concerns, designers are often more concerned with appearance and attractiveness than functionality and accessibility. Most of us try to make things look nice. This often leads to aesthetics becoming more important than usability. Of course, aesthetics are important and we should definitely try to make our designs appealing. But only after we have usable products. The most important task of digital products and services is to perform a function.

Accessible and good responsive design enables users to successfully navigate, understand and use digital products. A well-designed product is accessible to users of varying abilities, including people with low vision, blindness, hearing impairments, cognitive impairments or motor impairments. It's true that accessibility includes a number of limitations that you need to consider when creating your design. But improving the accessibility of your product will improve the user experience for all users. Here you will find many helpful tips on accessibility of your interfaces in WCAG 2.0 and the Material Design Guidelines.

Design is a team sport - don't work in isolation. Lyndon Johnson once said: "There are no problems we can't solve together, and few we can solve by ourselves." Great user experience is the result of collaboration between designers, developers, stakeholders and users. There is no such thing as a "solo genius". So when designing, you should collaborate with as many people as possible to gather new ideas and get new insights and thoughts on your work.

It is important to understand that UX design is not a linear process, but an iterative one. The phases of the UX process (ideation, prototyping, testing) often have significant overlap, and there is usually a lot of back and forth. As you learn more about the problem, the users and the project details (especially constraints), it may be necessary to repeat some of the testing that has been done or try out new design ideas.

Don't think it's possible to make your design perfect after just one iteration. Instead, refine ideas, run design thinking workshops and usability testing with real users and gather valuable feedback across the entire customer journey to iterate on.

Whenever possible, develop products that reduce possible errors to a minimum. To err is human. Errors occur frequently when users interact with user interfaces. Sometimes they happen because users make mistakes, and sometimes they happen because an app fails. Whatever the reason, these errors and how they are handled have a huge impact on the user experience. Users hate bugs and hate the feeling that they have triggered such behavior themselves. Therefore, you should try to either eliminate error-prone features completely or look for them and notify users before they decide to take the action.

An app or website should always keep users up to date with what is happening. As one of the original 10 of Jakob Nielsen's heuristics for usability, visibility of system state is one of the most important principles in user interface design. Users want to know their current context in a system at any given time. You should tell the user what is happening through appropriate visual feedback. Providing immediate visual feedback, such as an animated indicator when a user initiates an operation, is a good way to inform users that an interface is working.

Research shows that users don't like a massive change to their existing products, even if those changes benefit them. If you implement a significant redesign, there is a good chance that users will not be happy with it. This phenomenon even has a scientific name: Weber's Law of Barely Noticeable Differences. It states that the slightest change in design will not make a noticeable difference.

eBay is one of those companies that has learned the hard way that users don't like dramatic changes. Overnight, they decided to change the bright yellow background of many pages to a white background. Immediately, they received complaints from customers who objected to the change. The significant number forced eBay to change the design back. The team then pursued a different strategy. Over a period of several months, they changed the background color by one shade of yellow at a time, until finally all the yellow was gone and only white remained. Predictably, almost no one noticed the change this time.

So the best way to approach a redesign is to do it slowly, changing a little here and a little there. That way, most users won't even realize you're doing a redesign until you've completely overhauled the design.

Everyone makes mistakes. It's the only way to learn something. You only really learn when you make mistakes. If you are afraid to make mistakes and want to do everything perfectly, you will fall short of learning. Follow the rules above, but above all, always try to use new UX design techniques and approaches in software development to find the result that works best for you and your customers.