Every digital interface has one goal – to keep users engaged.
To achieve these, you must apply user experience (UX) principles before, during, and after designing your interface.
It has been proven that applying UX design principles to digital platforms like websites and landing pages can raise customer sales by 74%, increase customer satisfaction by 72%, and customer loyalty by 44%.
In this blog post, you’ll discover what these UX principles are and how you can apply them to create digital web platforms users love.
What UX principles are and how to apply them when designing user interfaces
Interfaces that users love are built and maintained by applying UX principles throughout the design process. They are:
- UX research: understanding your users
- Accessibility, inclusivity, and user control: your users are your boss
- Screen navigation: keep it simple!
- Prioritize content hierarchy: information, visual design, and aesthetics
- Consistency, familiarity, and personality: maintain the same design pattern
- Testing, feedback, and responsiveness: give and receive feedback from users
Let’s discuss each UX principle in detail and discover how you can apply them to create digital platforms that keep users engaged.
1. UX research: understanding your users’ needs
Understanding user needs, pain points, and behavioral patterns is at the foundation of UX principles for designing intuitive and engaging user interfaces.
To achieve this, user research is critical. Tools like Hubble are helpful UX research tools, especially if you desire to conduct research and test your product without using third-party agencies at a low cost and shorter time while achieving quality results.
According to Chris Mears at UXr – “User research is how you will know your product or service will work in the real world, with real people. It’s where you will uncover or validate the user needs which should form the basis of what you are designing.”
To conduct UX research, there’s a five-step process.
- Objectives: What knowledge areas are you missing and which questions must be answered? Your objectives should cover who, what, when, how, why, and where about your users.
- Hypotheses: What do you think you understand about our users?
- Methods: What methods should you select (based on your resources – time, manpower, and tech)?
- Conduct: Execute the research by gathering data through your selected methods.
- Synthesize: Provide answers to your research question, prove or disprove your hypothesis, and discover changes you can make to your current design efforts.
With UX research methods, you’re trying to observe your users while they use your product, trying to understand how your user expects your product to work, and analyzing the patterns behind their thought processes. They include:
- User groups or focused group discussions: You ask questions and discuss your product with users
- Usability testing: Users get to run specific tasks on the product while you observe and take notes
- User interviews: You have one-on-one interviews with users and gain more individualized feedback
- Online surveys: Keep your surveys simple and short so users can answer quickly
- User personas: Identify your ideal customers and their current behaviors, needs, goals, pain points, and desires
2. Accessibility, inclusivity, and user control: your users are your boss
Making your digital platform accessible to everyone, especially sensory handicapped users, increases the level of user engagement. The potential for revenue growth for your brand by increasing your user base and market reach is very high.
Transcribing your text into audio formats in multiple languages is an easy way to increase the range of useability levels. For example, by using a Spanish-to-English audio translator, you can access audiences within two huge language populations.
Someone who doesn’t want to listen to your full audio content or read your entire article text can either read the transcripts or listen to your audio translation which extends benefits to multiple users in different scenarios who desire to explore your product.
Also, it’s important to give users control over their interactions with your product to enhance their overall experience. Jakob Nielson, (co-founded the Nielson Norman Group), explained that users often perform actions by mistake. A clear “emergency exit” button like “undo”, “redo”, or “cancel” to leave the unwanted activity without going through an extended process is needed.
3. Screen navigation–keep it simple!
The easiest way to keep users engaged on your website, landing page, or website is to keep content simple for your users to find. When your interface is complex, you increase your user’s cognitive load and decision-making process.
Keeping your screen navigation easy for users involves breaking down complex instructions and options into simpler tasks. This includes using simple language, giving your users limited choices that satisfy their needs, and simplifying the sign-up, login, and checkout pages.
Maintaining consistency with content options and layout is important to anticipate users’ expectations leading to continuity and predictability for users while they engage with your interface.
4. Prioritize content hierarchy: information, visual design, and aesthetics
Before your users read through the content on your digital platform, they will first scan through it.
Organizing your content to immediately tell users which information is essential at first glance is critical while designing.
To achieve information and visual hierarchy, you have to use descriptive and succinct headings that convey optimal meaning in little words, use bulleted lists or infographics to show data-heavy content, and mobile responsiveness for readability (font type, font sizes, and line spacing).
Hierarchy in UX design also involves visual arrangement–how elements like buttons, text, animations, and icons are influenced by typography, color, layout, and size
Your visual designs are essential for designing intuitive interfaces because they greatly influence first impressions, capture users’ attention, and drive engagement while also leading to increased brand loyalty and identity.
To create visually compelling interfaces, designers must understand and apply the principles of:
- Visual hierarchy: Use size, color, contrast, and placement to guide users’ attention and convey the importance of different content sections.
- Typography: Choose fonts that fit your interface’s tone and purpose while ensuring your users can read and access content across multiple devices and screen sizes. Don’t forget your font size, spacing, and alignment while designing.
- Color theory: Use the power of color to evoke emotions in your users’ minds, create visual harmony and hierarchy, ensure that colors are complementary, and increase your interface’s aesthetic appeal.
It’s important to balance aesthetics with functionality.
Visual elements should not only look good; they should enhance usability and create intuitive interactions. Maintain consistency through the interface to create a unified user experience, familiarity, and ease of navigation. And always ask for users’ feedback to identify areas for improvement.
By prioritizing information and visual content, you reduce your user’s cognitive load leading to an engaging user experience. Applying information hierarchy in your UX design interfaces helps your user:
- Focus on the most important content they need at every point in time
- Lead them to make the right decision to meet their needs
- Increase comprehension while going through complex content on your interface
To keep your users engaged, your content must be scannable, digestible, easy to understand, and show your users the next right thing to do as fast as possible.
5. Consistency, familiarity, and personality-maintain the same design pattern
Creating and maintaining consistency through your digital platform breeds trust and familiarity with your users.
It leads to user confidence through reduced friction, and ease of use which reduces your users’ learning curve, and reinforces your brand’s identity and messaging.
To design consistent patterns that create familiarity in your design, you’ll need to:
- Research common design patterns,
- Adapt them to suit the needs and personality of your interface, and
- Consistently apply them throughout the interface to create an engaging experience for your users.
Your interface consistency doesn’t happen by accident – it requires deliberate planning and execution. You will need to:
- Create comprehensively developed style guides,
- Create design systems, and
- Regularly conduct user testing to identify usability issues and irregularities that must be improved on.
Adding personality to your interface elements can create an emotional connection with your users. This includes the use of visual branding (colors, imagery, and iconography), micro-interactions (animations, transitions, sound effects), and the use of an engaging and empathetic copy that speaks to the user in a relatable language that’s solution-focused.
6. Testing, feedback, and responsiveness: give and receive feedback from users
To keep your interfaces engaging, you must test, consistently give feedback to users, and ensure responsiveness amongst multiple devices.
Feedback to users helps your users understand the outcome of their actions, letting them know if they’re doing the right thing. It could come through confirmation messages or checkmark icons, error messages or warning alerts, sound when a button is clicked, or a progress bar to measure the progress of users’ actions.
Because most users use mobile devices, achieving responsiveness involves careful consideration of flexible layouts, touch-friendly interactions, and performance.
Also, testing your interface provides you with user validation, identifies usability issues, and continuous improvement. You can achieve this with usability and A/B testing of multiple variations of your interface to gain qualitative and quantitative feedback on your users’ experience.
By testing, you’re able to consistently learn from your users’ experience and make quick adaptions to your users’ changing needs, preferences, and pain points. You’re also able to optimize your interface performance, usability, and overall user satisfaction.
UX principles and engaging interfaces for users
Mastering and applying UX principles for designing intuitive and engaging interfaces leads to emotional connections with users has been deeply explored in this article.
These UX principles drive learning and show you how to adapt your interface to evolving user needs, technologies, and experiences that exceed users’ expectations.
About the author: Isaac Adewumi is a dedicated storyteller with a relentless passion for crafting perfect words. His days are immersed in creating engaging, easy-to-understand copy to drive leads, user onboarding, and customer retention for B2B, B2C, and SaaS brands.
Under surveillance, you’d catch him deeply researching client briefs, pondering creative blog intros, and writing compelling articles and email copy.
Inspired by marketing legends like Chase Dimond, he immerses himself in endless marketing copy, poetry writing, solo chess sessions, and Fantasy Premier League videos—all accompanied by the soothing tones of slow classical music on Spotify. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.