17 UX Design Principles to Follow for Creating a Great User Experience
Functionality is a must when it comes to attracting customers, but it’s user experience that helps you retain them.
Wondering how to create an outstanding user experience?
Read this article to discover 17 UX design principles to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Let’s dive right in!
What are UX design principles?
A UX design principle is a guideline that helps you create seamless, efficient, and enjoyable experiences for users.
The principles shape the UX design process and help designers make the right decisions and prioritize user needs.
Why is it important to follow UX principles?
Following UX principles offers multiple benefits.
Good UX design helps users improve their productivity and efficiency in achieving their goals. It also makes the user experience intuitive and enjoyable.
This increases their satisfaction, which is linked to higher customer loyalty and retention.
Outstanding UX can improve your brand reputation and help you attract new customers. And convert them into paying accounts through well-optimized landing pages and sign-up flows.
Finally, excellent UX reduces the load on the customer support teams. Clear and intuitive design flattens the learning curve and minimizes the risk of errors or issues, which lead to customer requests and inquiries.
17 principles of UX design all designers need to know
Without further ado, let’s delve into 17 essential UX design principles that no UX designer can afford to ignore.
1. Follow a customer-centric approach
User-centricity is about putting yourself in the shoes of your users to understand their needs and designing solutions that address them.
This starts with user research to identify the problems users try to solve and how your or other existing solutions fail to address them.
One way to do it is through in-app surveys. When run regularly, they can help you pinpoint customer pain points and identify opportunities to offer your customers a better experience.
Other research methods include user testing, interviews, focus groups, and user behavior analysis.
2. Create consistency in your products
To offer an outstanding user experience, your product needs to be consistent:
Consistent with your customer expectations. For example, if they’re looking for a fitness tracker, it needs to have the relevant functionality, like activity or weight tracking.
Consistent in how it works. For instance, all screens and navigation should be the same so that the user knows exactly what to expect.
Such predictability reduces the time needed to master the product and derive its value.
3. Consider the context in the design process
When designing the UX, take into consideration the context in which the product will be used.
Some questions that can help you include:
- Who is the user?
- What are their goals?
- Where are they going to use the product? (e.g., office, home, commute, etc.)
- What device are they likely to use?
- What’s their emotional state when they use it?
- Who is around? Possible disruptions?
4. Create a visual hierarchy in the user interface
Visual hierarchy is how you arrange and present design elements to signal importance. It helps guide users’ attention to the most critical parts of the interface first to make it easier for them to navigate and understand the content.
What variables can you manipulate to convey hierarchy?
- Size and scale: Larger elements, like headlines, attract more attention.
- Color and contrast: High-contrast elements, like CTA buttons, stand out more.
- Typography: Bolded text or using different fonts are easier to notice.
- Position and alignment: Elements at the top or in the center are seen as more important.
- Movement: Animations catch the audience’s attention better than other visuals or text.
5. Populate empty states with helpful content
An empty state is the blank page that users often see when they log into the product for the first time. This often happens because they haven’t had a chance to import their data or customize their dashboards.
Such a blank slate is a terrible waste.
You can use it to start building a relationship with your user and kickstart the onboarding process.
For example, you could greet them with a welcome screen and add guides covering the core features needed to start using the product.
6. Personalize experiences to meet user expectations
Personalization makes customers feel valued and understood. At the beginning of the user journey, it reassures them that they’ve chosen the right product.
More importantly, it helps them achieve their objectives.
Here are a few ways to personalize UX for your users:
- Customized dashboards (populated with features and shortcuts linked to their use case, like in Canva).
- Personalized onboarding (focusing on features relevant to their needs, like in Kontentino).
- Content localization.
- Contextual in-app guidance (based on user behavior and the stage in the user journey).
7. Give user control over their product experiences
In addition to anticipating user needs and making personalized recommendations, you can improve their UX by allowing them to customize their own experiences.
You can give users control over their experience by allowing them to:
- Skip in-app flows and return to them at a later date.
- Customize their theme and layout (e.g., dark mode).
- Change notification settings.
- Modify privacy settings so that they share only what they want with other users.
- Create custom workflows or dashboards.
8. Incorporate accessibility into your visual design
When designing your UI, take into account users with different needs. For example, users with impaired vision may not be able to see text in certain colors.
Make the UX more accessible by:
- Using high-contrast color patterns and avoiding color-only indicators.
- Adding alt text with image descriptions.
- Enabling adjustable font sizes and zoom functionality.
- Using descriptive anchor texts (‘View your report’ instead of ‘Read here’)
- Creating a logical tab order so users can navigate the UI with a keyboard only.
9. Enhance product usability to increase user engagement
To boost user engagement, improve your product usability by focusing on its 5 core elements:
- Satisfaction (How pleasant is the product to use?)
- Errors (How easy/difficult is it to make mistakes? How easy is it to recover?)
- Learnability (How easy is it for users to complete basic actions the first time they log in?)
- Efficiency (How quickly can they perform their tasks?)
- Memorability (How easy is it to start using the product again after a break?)
10. Keep the user interfaces simple and intuitive
Which is easier to use: a remote control with 5 or 50 buttons?
The 5-button one, as long as it includes all the necessary features.
The same applies to SaaS product UI.
The more options users have, the more time it takes them to complete tasks. That’s because a complex UI increases the cognitive load on users and makes it more difficult for users to make the right decisions.
Over time, it leads to fatigue and can even cause user churn.
11. Ensure the web page copy is clear and easy to understand
Poorly crafted website or in-app copy has the same impact on users as unintuitive UI. It makes it harder to access the necessary information, increases the time needed to complete actions, and is tiring for users in the long run.
The solution?
Work with a decent copywriter or use AI tools to make your copy concise and free of ambiguity, like Userpilot’s AI writing assistant, which allows you to create new microcopies or refine existing ones.
And once you have a few versions ready, run A/B tests to identify the best-performing copy.
12. Consistently collect user feedback
User feedback can help you measure your customer satisfaction with your product UX.
The best way to collect it?
In-app surveys have the highest response rates and help you reach the actual users, which isn’t always the case with email surveys.
In addition to regular surveys, enable a feedback widget to collect passive feedback.
In this way, you give users a chance to submit their requests, ideas, and insights when they really need to, for example, when they experience usability issues.
Pro tip: add open-ended follow-up questions to the surveys to gather qualitative data and use AI to identify patterns in customer responses.
13. Use progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming users
Presenting too much information or too many options at once can be overwhelming.
You can prevent it by breaking it down into smaller chunks and disclosing progressively.
Here’s an example of Userpilot’s survey builder.
There are quite a few things you need to set up before launching your survey, so we’ve divided them into 4 logically organized groups. Users can access them from a tab and easily find the needed settings.
14. Remove friction from the customer journey
Friction and good UX don’t go together.
It makes it more challenging and time-consuming for users to get their jobs done, which has a detrimental impact on their satisfaction.
How do you get rid of friction points from the user journey?
Use analytics to find them.
Funnels help you find the stage where users slow down or drop off. And with path, heatmap, and session recording analysis, you can pinpoint the cause.
Once you know what’s causing friction, you can address it. For example, with in-app guidance.
15. Design for speed and efficiency
In the SaaS context, speed and efficiency are critical because they allow your customers to save or earn money.
You can achieve this through:
- Task simplification, for example, by reducing the number of steps needed to complete it.
- Workflow automation.
- Batch actions.
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- Auto-fill and auto-suggest.
- Inline validation (to prevent errors).
- Fast loading times.
16. Create a responsive design on different devices
Users likely interact with your product on various devices: desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobiles. So, make sure your product performs well on each of them.
Start with a responsive design so that the website or app screen layout adapts dynamically to the screen.
And make your product UI touch-friendly, for example, by ensuring the right button size.
17. Ensure customer support is readily available
Technical or usability issues are bound to happen but they don’t necessarily ruin the user experience if you can provide reliable customer support. You just need to deal with user issues quickly and efficiently to help them carry on with their jobs with minimal disruption.
This means using a range of various support tools, both high- and low-touch:
- Live chat.
- Email support.
- Phone support.
- Resource center with video tutorials, how-to guides, and product documentation.
- Proactive in-app guidance.
- AI-powered chatbots.
It’s the self-service resources that are particularly important. They’re available 24/7, quicker to access, and most users prefer solving simple problems independently without talking to support agents.
Conclusion
Customer-centric UX design is what distinguishes excellent products from good ones. It enables users to realize their goals and makes the interaction effortless and pleasant.
This can greatly increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. All of which are essential for your product and business success.
If you’d like to learn more about Userpilot and how it can help your UX designers implement some of the principles, book the demo!
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