Learning Session 02: UX Design Principles in details

Sep 3rd, 2022

Topic

In today’s session I mostly focused on deep diving on each UX design principle and learning their role in UX Design. Followed by that I tried to gain an understanding of different common roles of Designers.

So let me start and show you my progress for today.

What I learned

As I mentioned on my last article, UX Design has 7 main principles:

• Usefulness
• Usability
• Desirability
• Find-ability
• Accessibility
• Credibility
• Value-impact.

Today I digged the internet to learn more for each one of them

Usefulness can be easily described as ‘An app doing its own job and serving its own purpose’. So let’s take Weather app as an example. Users obviously go in that app to check weather, that should be the main focus of the app, giving users information about weather forecast, and anything other than that counts as an extra feature.

So basically, if we fail to maintain the main action in focus, we are not doing the best job in creating a great User Experience.

Right after that I focused on learning about the next rule — Usability, getting to know why it plays such an important role to create the proper UX.

The product should be easy to use and understandable for all users, and creating confusion and wasting user’s time on performing a certain action should be our primary thing to avoid.

Steve Krug, the author of the famous ‘Don’t make me think’ book elaborates this topic really well, on how we need to make actions easy, obvious so the users won’t have to put their brain into work to perform an easy task.

Here is a great quote from him:

As a user, I should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable-or not.

Then I proceeded to learn Desirability which has such a big role when designing a product, and it’s proven that clean, neat and organized interfaces are more desirable to users.

Zurb has defined Desirability as follows:

“Desirability should be how we can drive a user to take action through design.”

In dictionary desire can be explained as a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen.

So by creating great products, that feels good, looks good and serves its own purpose without being annoying and without having to go through 15 screens to perform a simple action, we increase the desirability of users to use our product and we avoid them from deleting our app.

Find-ability — In my experience of using different apps, I know how this rule impacts on a product, users should be able to find what they are looking for without wasting their time to think how this app works, and the best thing you can do is to put design elements like CTAs, navigational bars, search bars right in front of their face and not hide them behind bushes.

Accessibility — The rule that a lot of designers do not care about.

I learned how accessibility lets every user, irrespective of their disabilities enjoy a good user experience in a product.

By applying this rule, you make sure that every user, without excluding anyone can enjoy the benefits that your app gives to the world.

There is a lot to learn on how to make the design accessible to all users, so I need to write a separate article just for that.

Credibility

We should aim for that fair trade, we serve a great application, and in return we receive the trust from our beloved users. For the lover of stats:

According to Baymard Institute, 18% of users abandon their cart because they don’t want to share their credit card information with a website they don’t trust

Wait, but how we can make users trust us?

Okay, that takes some time, and cannot be done during a day or a week, but we for sure can take some steps.

According to Uxcel, here are the best steps to take:

• Reassuring users that you have a safe place to place their data.
• Including social proof in the form of testimonials and reviews in a clear and prominent way on your website or app,
• Highlighting your expertise in the field,
• Introducing your team like the real humans that they are,
• Including details such as your company’s address and contact information.

And, last but not least, I learned about several roles of Designers and how responsibilities change in every role of being a Designer, even if it’s tied to UX or not.

Here are 10 main design roles:

• UX Designer
• UI Designer
• Visual Designer
• Product Designer
• Information Architect
• Motion Designer
• Interaction Designer
• UX Researcher
• UX Engineer
• Illustrator

What challenged me today?

Well, I can say that learning about Accessibility challenged me the most, and that’s because it’s not that common to find talks and real life examples of accessibility usage. There are too many topics that can be learnt on accessibility field like: Dyslexia, Anxiety, Epilepsy, Autism spectrum disorder and it’s kind of wonderful to know that through a great design piece, we can make people with these kind of disorders enjoy apps and not feel different from others.

I really appreciate you comming this far and following my learning journey, any piece of feedback, praise or crtique would be a huge boost and help for me. ❤