8 Rules of UX Design

Nowadays, brands need to create ideal experiences for their users and appointing a team of User Experience (UX) designers is more and more popular amongst businesses looking to improve interest from their community. The Prototype team, a UX design agency, has created a whitepaper to help guide you with your user-experience design and this blog summarizes some of the main points. Give us your feedback in the comments below - got any extra tips to share?

As a brand, you need to focus on each leg of the journey that your users take when they interact with you. If you are a bank, you need to consider in-store experiences, experiences with the ATM machine and online banking experiences. The online user experience needs to be perfect to compete with the ever-competitive online world. Here are our top 8 UX design rules:

1. Familiarity: The experience that your user has should be so familiar and seamless that it shouldn't be even something they have to stop and think about. The login process should be easy, navigation should be easy and tasks should be easy. When they have to think, they are gone.
2. Performance: Your website or app should perform perfectly with no glitches. Pages that take too long to load, or tools that don't work correctly will frustrate the user and you will lose their interest.
3. Intuitive and Efficient: Nobody likes to jump through too many hoops to get to a goal and this goes for online too. Your user should get right to where they want to go with no more additional steps that necessary.
4. Relevant and valuable: If you can offer your users valuable and relevant content then they will stay. YouTube keeps users watching video after video because they suggest other videos that may interest the user. This keeps users on their site for hours.
5. Consistency: Your user will trust your brand if it is consistent across all platforms. This goes down to the tiniest details. Think about National Geographic. Their brand brings certain colours to mind, a certain tone of voice and breath-taking images. These elements are consistent and the same wherever National Geographic is.
6. Trust: Trust isn't a tool or element that you can include in your plans for great UX. It is a feeling that is created when you develop all the above points.  Once you are consistent, transparent, confident in yourself and responsive to your users, you will design trust for your users.
7. Goals: Most of the time your user has visited you to achieve a goal. On Instagram, the user's goal is to view pictures and post pictures. On a self-help website, a user will be seeking advice and help on a certain matter or issue. Helping your user reach that goal as fast as possible and perhaps educate them beyond what they were looking for.
8. Feedback: Feedback is and always will be your best guide to how your user feels on your website or app. Basically, you must ask for feedback to move forward in the best way with your brand's online UX. You should never consider your UX design process complete - it is a constant journey through new needs, devices and goals.

This is a brief intro into some of the research and ideas you will find in our whitepaper. Download the whitepaper here and leave your feedback below.