Universal Principles of UX: 100 Timeless Strategies to Create Positive Interactions between People and Technology (Rockport Universal)

If it’s bigger, it’s automatically easier to use.

At the same time, the brief can’t be too limiting—there still has to be enough space to allow for surprising solutions. When I was doing my master’s in communications design at Pratt, a professor once said to me that if the brief is “design a better toothbrush,” you will always end up with something that looks like a toothbrush. But if you open up

Since visual language and typography fall in the domain of the UI designer and play a tremendous role in influencing how people feel about an interface, it’s incredibly important that the UX designer works closely with the UI designer for all type decisions every step of the way. Because if they don’t and the typography is bad, the entire user expe

When, where, why, and how we access content needs to be considered well before we actually start designing anything, because when it comes to designing for multiple devices, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. When a system is designed for context of use rather than screen size, there is a higher chance that the interface will be more appropria

Once the entire flow has been mapped out, it’s time to review each action or decision point and identify unnecessary moments of friction. Are there ways you can get to the end of the flow in a faster or simpler way? If the answer is yes, and you’ve discovered some steps that could be optimized or removed, it’s time to update the user flow with the

Kickoff meeting Once we have digested that, we set up a four-hour meeting (ideally in person) with their core project team to go through our questions, clarify requirements, review existing design documentation,

Afterwards, we put together a document with everything we have learned with one clear problem statement that this project will need to address. This is our North Star. Every decision will have to map to that. If we don’t agree on this up front, or we don’t figure out early on where there could potentially be pushback or delay, that negative domino

At times, not showing features can hold just as much value as showing them. By suppressing features people don’t need, we help highlight the ones they do. We just need to make sure that whenever we do decide to hide less-used features, there are easy-to-understand trigger indicators, and we don’t inadvertently make the interface harder to use.

Great design doesn’t come from following the numbers; it comes from following our intuition.