UX Design Principles for Everyday Living
What guides you when sculpting great ideas into even greater product experiences?
Crafting user experiences for software and hardware can be highly complex and extremely rewarding. The challenge comes when trying to achieve an alignment between the two. As a UX practitioner, having a set of guidelines that uphold the necessary foundations of product design can prove to be one of your greatest assets — from conceptualization to decision making to the execution of your ideas.
At times, it’s hard to know where to begin, so I put together a set of fundamentals (in no particular order) that I embrace when designing smart home technology and the software that drives it. Perhaps, these principles can provide some initial baseline considerations when plotting out the course of your own experiences.
Keep Things Human
Design is created by humans for humans. Involve the human perspective in the problems you are trying to solve. Always be empathetic and put people first. Respect the user, and understand their needs, emotions, and circumstances. Design should enhance human abilities without replacing humans. Keep design as agnostic as possible.
Keep Things Simple
Designs should be open, clear, unobtrusive, and obvious — reducing cognitive load for users, and providing a better time understanding and adopting the experience. Designs should be easy to use, and ultimately become invisible and unconscious. Designs should provide sufficient context for the experience and strive to reduce complexity. Less is more.
Keep Things Consistent
Design should look and behave equally across devices whenever possible. Uniformity increases usability. Don’t force the user to learn new behaviors unnecessarily. Consistency allows for the transfer of knowledge to new contexts so users can learn things quickly without pain. Strive for seamless experiences.
Design with Everyone in Mind
Design should always be inclusive and accessible. Good design works for everyone. Make things usable for as many people as possible. Design should be responsible and supportive, and empower users. Empathy alone isn’t effective without action.
Always Have Purpose
Provide natural steps and build logical paths for your users. Instill confidence with your design, while anticipating user needs. Present few choices, but solve significant problems with the ones you offer. Your experiences should guide and satisfy. Always strive to innovate, and never stop ideating.
Embrace the Data
Always gather feedback and listen to the data to guide your designs. Make decisions based on reality and not opinion. Constantly iterate to improve your products with facts. Squash assumptions, avoid conjecture and guess less. Prove hypotheses and theories around your product, and be OK when you fail. The data never lies.
Be Honest & Establish Trust
Always be transparent, and avoid dark patterns and experiences. Instill calm, and don’t create anxiety with your design. Good design is credible and reliable while inspiring confidence and imbuing control. Never trick or surprise users. Do no harm. Craft experiences that are helpful, conscientious, and informative.
Be Creative, Be Compelling
Find a balance in your design for the user. Establish visual hierarchies that embrace order, space, and proportion. Encourage and enable discovery. Good design accelerates new ideas. Take calculated risks to solve greater problems. Don’t avoid the details. Prioritize quality and aesthetic integrity. Embrace modern, best practices. Design for tomorrow, not today.
Innovate
Good design embraces the power of existing patterns. Always be open to alternatives ideas for better, broader solutions and experiences. Never stop refining and improving designs — the iterative process is essential to smart ideas. Technology is design’s greatest ally and provides opportunities that elicit the imagination.
Communicate & Collaborate
Provide constant feedback. Good design never stops communicating, but make sure it’s actionable and avoids jargon. When crafting experiences, don’t silo yourself — partner with like and unlike minds equally. Listen, share ideas, and learn to compromise. Brainstorm together on a level playing field. Be open to possibilities, and inject that model into your design.
These principles are not all-encompassing for all designers in all situations, but are meant as a starting point for pragmatic product design. I encourage all UX practitioners to formulate their own list that has guided and worked for them, and share it with our community. The more we know, the better we can craft.
Sidenote: For additional inspiration, check out principles.design and their open-source collection of design principles from all corners of the world.