User Experience (UX) is a field dedicated to enhancing the experience of people when interacting with a product, service, or digital environment. As the name suggests, its purpose is to design smooth, pleasant, and comfortable interactions, ensuring users feel as satisfied as possible with a product.
This is a key approach if you want to offer a product, service, or environment tailored to the expectations and needs of the user. Let’s explore the fundamental elements that UX provides in the creation process:
Simplicity
In terms of user experience, the most important aspect is to offer a simple process for the user, as this positively impacts the usability and coherence of the product. Overworking the creative aspect of the space can unintentionally ruin the interface and even the entire digital product.
This is a “less is more” approach where excessive decoration of the interface is not desirable. Instead, the goal is to create spaces with only the necessary elements for interaction.
To make the product simple, it must be intuitive. Users should be able to use it naturally and without prior instructions. Moreover, they should be able to achieve what they need quickly and without much thought.
Visual hierarchy
This refers to the organization of elements within a screen. Designers use this to indicate which elements are more important at a particular moment or place, so users know exactly where to focus their attention.
From the user’s perspective, a good visual hierarchy helps them navigate the screen and move through elements in a specific order, from the most crucial to the least important.
Usability
Usability refers to how we use things, the ease with which we do so (or not), and whether those things allow us to do what we need or want to do. It’s a key aspect every time we interact with a physical object, but with the boom of digitalization, it also applies to our relationship with digital environments.
In UX design, web usability is one of the most important factors, as it heavily influences whether the product or service will truly address the user’s problems or concerns. No matter how visually appealing a service is, if it’s unusable or has too many friction points, its value will diminish.
Usefulness
A product is useful when it meets a need or solves a user’s problem. UX design aims to create products based on an identified concern, deficiency, or situation in the target audience.
The difference between usability and usefulness is that while usability defines the product’s ability to function well, usefulness refers to its ability to directly address the user’s issue or deficiency.
Consistency
When a person’s experience with an application, platform, service, or product is the same regardless of the access point, we say that the design is consistent. These access points include the devices the user uses to enter the environment, ranging from tablets to computers to phones.
If a product is not consistent across its different presentations, some platforms will have significantly lower conversion rates than others, and abandonment rates will increase dangerously. Therefore, ensuring a consistent experience across different spaces is one of the main priorities in UX.
Pleasantness
If a product is pleasant, it means that the user is happy with the design, as it should reflect their thoughts and feelings, forming a positive relationship with it.
In a way, it’s not mandatory for a product or service design to be pleasant. However, it complements the usefulness it can offer, enhancing the perception of the user experience.
To achieve this, focus on the pain points, preferences, and opinions of users so you can understand what they need and deliver it to them.
User control
This is another critical principle in user experience, referring to the users’ ability to act within your application, product, or system’s environment. In other words, how much control they have over their own experience.
For example, imagine a person selects an option by mistake and needs an exit to avoid taking the unwanted action. Does your application offer this option? How accessible is it for the user?
Generally, user interface controls that allow people to reverse actions they’ve made by mistake include the following:
-
- Undo and redo options.
- Cancel links to exit a multi-step task or process.
- Close link.
- Back link to return to a previous page or screen.
Accessibility
Last but not least, accessibility refers to the possibility for people of all ages and groups to comfortably use the service or product. It’s important to ensure that everyone, regardless of their condition, can interact with the environment in the best possible way and have a quality experience.
In UX, the accessibility focus considers people with disabilities to develop tailored environments and experiences, striving for equity with the rest of the population. The importance of this is such that companies and brands can face fines and sanctions for not complying with accessibility laws in their respective countries.
The purpose of UX design is to support and foster the creation of more useful, usable, understandable, and accessible products and services for everyone. This allows for faster, more agile, and intuitive interactions, ultimately making them memorable and positively impacting brand impressions.
At Coderslab, UX is one of our top priorities. When designing services, websites, and platforms, we consider the needs of users and clients so they can interact comfortably and seamlessly with these spaces. We create accessible experiences for everyone, without friction points, and completely intuitive for all.
