UX best practices for people who love their apps

The best UX sets a precedent. It can be culture-defining, inspiring years of updates to come. Just as significantly, it can transform the fortunes of almost any product.

Getting the fundamentals perfect is essential for any UX professional or product manager hoping to produce that culture-defining design. That starts with understanding and embracing UX best practices.

Nine UX principles to live by

The field of UX design is constantly evolving. New concepts emerge, and old ones fall out of fashion within months. But as time passes, a few ideas stick around — because they work. Applying these design principles to your work is certain to have a positive effect on the outcome:

1. Establish a UX design process

User experience design is a complex dance with many moving parts. This is why the best UX examples come from businesses with an established process.

There are several benefits of creating a clear workflow:

• Clear pathways of communication within your team

• Each person involved in the process knows their role

• Quality assurance can be baked into the process

• Smoother hand-offs, leading to improved efficiency

It would be fair to say that building a UX design process is the most important principle on this list, but it creates a framework to guide your work.

2. Maintain consistency

Imagine reading a book where the direction of the text changes every page. It would certainly be confusing and probably hinder your ability to focus on the content.

This mental image shows why consistency is important for UX design. If you want your product to be easy to use, maintaining some level of regularity is advisable. Examples include:

• Using each icon for only one purpose

• Keeping the number of fonts to a minimum

• Choosing a color palette and sticking with it throughout your product

• Making gesture controls universal

This consistency ensures that users only have to learn how to use your product once. It should prevent unnecessary confusion and frustration, too.

3. Simplicity is better than clever

People who design things tend to have a playful streak. While the average person is delighted with a house with four walls and a sloping roof, architects love using vast amounts of glass, cantilevered overhangs, and rounded borders. It’s smart but impractical.

In designing digital products, many UX professionals fall into the same trap, crafting user experiences that are beautiful but confusing. Such designs do well on Dribbble but won’t give your customers the desired user experience.

There is a simple cure: stick with simplicity. It might seem tedious, but the truth is that no one downloads a mobile app to admire a unique menu toggle. If there is an obvious way to do something, think twice before switching it up.

4. Accessibility should be a priority

From a business perspective, design decisions that can significantly increase the total reachable market of your product are worth pursuing. Accessibility fits that description.

By making a product or service accessible, your business can reach and retain millions of underserved potential customers with disabilities and impairments. Moreover, several jurisdictions globally actually have legal requirements for digital accessibility.

Some examples of accessibility in product design include:

• Making a website navigable by keyboard for users who cannot use a mouse or trackpad

• Adding subtitles to videos to help users with hearing impairments and those watching in a noisy environment

• Creating alt-text for images for visually impaired users who rely on screen readers

Aside from the specific benefits of reaching more users, prioritizing accessibility promotes the general principle of adapting your product to the user’s needs — which is the foundation for great UX.

5. Always conduct user testing

You might think you know what users want. Perhaps you have even asked them what they wish to do and applied your findings to the design process. But do your users enjoy using your product?

The truth is, it’s impossible to know without conducting user testing.

Running live tests with users can provide invaluable insights about your product — from revealing the most popular screens to highlighting potential sticking points in the customer journey. Usability testing can also pinpoint any technical flaws that may detract from all your good work on the design side.

The 5th principle of UX design is non-negotiable. If you fail to conduct user research, you’re flying blind.

6. Design for errors

In an ideal world, users would navigate your product in the way you intended. But no matter how carefully you design your interface and onboarding tour, problems will arise. With this in mind, planning for errors is considered a best practice in UX.

Designing for errors means accepting that users will find flaws. It also requires you to consider those flaws and shape your product to mitigate the problems.

A simple example of this would be a drop in connection. Creating a clear error message will keep your users informed and help them to solve the problem themselves.

7. Pay attention to micro interactions

While it’s important to consider the big picture, UX also relies on the details.

Microinteractions are subtle design elements that accomplish a specific task and aim to enrich the overall user experience. They often go unnoticed when done right but are crucial in creating a smoother, more intuitive interaction with the user interface.

Examples include:

• A button changes color when hovered over

• A checkmark appears when a task is completed

• The “refresh” animation when you pull down from the top of the screen on a mobile device

• The “like” function on social media platforms changes color when tapped

Introducing micro interactions into your product can enhance the user experience by providing immediate feedback. This can help guide users through each process and even add fun or delight to your product.

8. Consider culture

Microinteractions are not the only minor details that affect user experience. If you plan to launch your product worldwide, it’s critical to consider each region's cultural norms.

Culture plays a significant role in how users are likely to perceive and interact with your product. Make the wrong choices, leaving the door open to confusion, misinterpretation, or offense. Each will significantly degrade the user experience.

As a real-world example, consider color symbolism. In Western cultures, white is associated with purity and innocence. But in some Asian cultures, it's linked with mourning and death. In this context, promoting wedding services with a primarily white website will likely appear inappropriate and offputting.

For this reason, it’s always worth conducting cultural research when designing international products.

9. Embrace iterative design

“Getting it right the first time” is a useful motto in many fields of work, but it doesn’t apply in UX and UI design. Iteration is essential for perfecting the user experience, even for apps and websites that start with good UX design.

The iterative design begins at the concept stage once wireframes have been converted into prototypes. This is the first opportunity to gather the opinions of users. Your UX research should point towards any changes needed in the initial design before the project moves to the next stage.

Businesses that adopt the iterative approach tend to deliver a better user experience overall because their products and services have been fine-tuned. This constant optimization tends to iron out any kinks before exposing the product to real users.