The principle of user experience (UX) design governs tour everyday interaction with websites and apps. When you are on Tiktok and press your back key, it doesn’t automatically go back to your phone’s home screen. Instead, a prompt that says “Tap again to exit” appears.
So you end up just scrolling again for a good few minutes. This is not accidental at all. The developers designed the app to keep you from leaving and keep you scrolling for hours on end. It doesn’t matter whether you are a regular consumer or a business owner; it will help you big time if you know what UX design is and how you can do it right.
What Is UX Design?
In the design world, UX design is a term used to improve the interaction between a human user and a product. These products can include everyday things, services, websites, and even machines. So in short, UX design is quite a broad discipline.
When a user interacts with a product, the experience already exists. And the goal of a UX designer is to make that experience better. The experience itself is that a design must be foolproof for the user, which is a common misconception people have about UX designing.
What designers look at is the exact interaction between the user and the product. They study people’s behaviors and habits and use their findings to improve the experience. They use the following elements as standards for food user experience design.
The Three Main Elements of a Good UX Design
Although there’s no perfect UX design, a great one typically follows these three elements:
- Usefulness: Does it accomplish something that a user needs accomplishing? It goes without saying that a product must fulfill a purpose in a user’s life.
- Usability: After you determine that a product has utility, this element pertains to how well the product addresses the user’s need. Does the product provide exactly what the user needs to complete the experience?
- Desirability: Finally, the product should appeal to the user to take action using the product. For example, when you see two products on a shelf, the desirability factor influences which you pick, given that they are both useful and usable.
There are more elements that you should consider when talking about good UX design. However, these three are the core elements you need to look into. You can judge any product, whether it be a mug for coffee or a website, based on its usefulness, usability, and desirability. If a product checks all three, it has a good UX design.
Examples of Good UX Design
But what are examples of good UX design? It can be as simple as when you need to enter a verification code on an app or a website and the code appears right on the screen. With this design, you won’t have to exit the app to retrieve it. Or a much better one is when the code gets auto-filled once you receive it.
Another example is a calorie counter app that just requires you to input your current weight, height, and age, then your target weight. And then, it automatically shows you how much your calorie intake should be per day to reach the weight.
As most customers check reviews first when visiting a website, a good UX design is a website that shows you user reviews as your scroll down. If you own a commercial space that needs cleaning, one of the most important things you look for in a commercial cleaning service is efficiency. Can they do it in no time so that you can continue your business as usual? If the information you are looking for in customer reviews is immediately there when you click on a website, that’s good UX design.
Examples of Dark UX Design
In a nutshell, bad UX design is the opposite of the above or the absence of the three elements. However, something worth discussing is dark UX design. Simply put, a UX design is considered dark when it pushes a user to perform a particular action and the action serves the interest of a company and not the interest of the user—like pushing for sales, for example.
According to UX researchers, when you go to a shop’s website and a pop-up tells you how many people have bought that product in the past hour, that is considered dark UX design. It plays on social pressure to get you to buy. For marketing strategists, it might just be another tactic.
Or when you are canceling a subscription or any action, the usual buttons for “continue” and “cancel” are swapped in positions. Or sometimes, the developers swap the colors. It’s also applicable to subscription pop-ups whose “x” button is designed in gray and is barely visible.
UX design is an interesting disciplined to be familiar with. You will realize that everything around you is designed to be used or interacted within a specific way.
