UX Design Principles to Follow in 2024
Applying the correct UX design principles will help your product teams make impactful design decisions and create user-centric digital products.
From intuitive navigational flows to modern interfaces, a proper UX design principle guides designers toward creating digital products that meet users’ needs and business goals.
In this article, our UX experts put together a list of principles in UX design to help product teams take essential aspects of UI and UX into account while developing new digital products. The list covers 10 leading principles that lead to data-driven decisions and help UX designers create customer-centric products.
What are UX design principles?
User experience (UX) design principles are guidelines and best practices that help UX designers and researchers create user-friendly digital products. The concept of user-centered design is at the core of a UX design principle. It is about putting your users at the forefront of the design process and knowing their goals, tastes, and behaviors.
When the right UI components and best UX practices are applied, it helps your company enhance its product usability, accessibility, and overall user satisfaction. Many UX designers, including us at Limeup, adhere to Steve Jobs’ famous quote as a guiding principle when designing digital products:
”Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
We recommend implementing the principles of UX design mentioned below at every step of your product design process, whether you run a UX audit to redesign your product or conduct research to create a brand-new digital product. Knowing what practices exist and what design principles to implement will help you create your user persona and understand the users’:
- Pain points,
- Mental models,
- Online behavior,
- Motivations.
For this purpose, the key design principles to follow are usability testing, UX research, user control, and accessibility. On the other hand, principles like simplicity, usability, copy clarity, and consistency can help your product team enhance the performance of an existing product.
In the following paragraphs, we will cover each design principle in detail.
10 principles of UX design
If you design a new digital product or redesign an existing solution, your product team might wonder what design regulations to implement and what impact they might have on product performance.
As a UX design company, we’ve asked our UX experts about their most used UX design principles while working on design and research projects. These include but are not limited to usability, design consistency, visual hierarchy, simplicity, accessibility, clear copy, and usability testing. Below, we explain each principle in detail to help you grasp what you can apply during the product design process to achieve your goals.
10 main principles of UX design.
1. Prioritize user needs
At Limeup, our design teams have worked with some startups and established companies that made the following mistake: they designed a digital product based on their own perception and vision. Later, we worked together to improve their products’ usability and business performance.
Why did it go wrong?
They failed to include their customers and the target audience’s needs, wants, and feedback while developing a new product for them. Prioritizing user needs is a key UX design principle every product designer should follow while working on web design. That’s why we listed this principle first.
There are many ways to get insights about user behavior, likes, and preferences to help your design teams make data-driven decisions. There are plenty of UX research methods that can help you collect insights and discover what your users prefer. If you are beginning your product design process, we recommend using the following research techniques.
User interviews help you get to know your users, their motivations, challenges, and goals through remote or onsite one-on-one sessions. By asking open-ended questions, you can learn what your target audience wants to achieve using your product, the challenges occurring while using competitors’ solutions, and what could persuade them to switch to your product. It takes cognitive effort to collect these insights. However, you will luckily create a user-friendly product if you prioritize the users’ experience needs.
Focus groups can help you understand your users’ preferences, evaluate new ideas, gather feedback on your product idea or design concept, or explore perceptions and attitudes toward specific topics. They provide valuable qualitative data by allowing participants to express their opinions, emotions, and perceptions in a group setting.
2. Never design without research
In 2019, over 66% of customers worldwide reported that brands failed to meet their experience expectations. These numbers are even higher if you check the statistics for countries like Australia, France, Germany, the UK, and the USA. An excerpt from the customer experience trends report.
An example from the customer experience trends report.
What might be the problem?
Brands fail to “hear” their customers and create digital experiences tailored to their needs and preferences. At Limeup, with an experienced design team, we are convinced that many usability challenges could have been avoided if brands had conducted initial user research.
User experience research can provide valuable insights into user needs and online behaviors essential for creating compelling and user-centered designs. Without research, UX and product designers risk creating digital solutions that fail to meet what users expect, adversely impacting business performance in the future.
By implementing the UX research process into your product development process, product and design teams can make informed decisions, mitigate risks, and create designs that resonate with their target audience.
3. Know where you are in the UX design process
The user experience drafting process is a systematic approach your UX designers should follow to create user-centered and impactful digital experiences. While the specific steps and methodologies may vary, the general UX design process typically includes the following stages:
UX design process in 4 stages.
- Product discovery to collect insights about your end users, set the goals, and kick off the design process.
- UX strategy to outline how your company will create and deliver exceptional experiences across its products, services, or digital platforms. It aligns user needs and business goals to ensure the user experience is a strategic priority and a competitive advantage.
- UX design of your product, where you already have a validated design concept for development.
- The validation phase is to test your design concept by using a professional prototyping tool. This way, you’ll ensure your users understand your solution, can navigate through your product, and perform the target actions.
Every process step requires different approaches, skills, research methods, and UX design principles. For example, you’ll only consider simplicity and typography during the UX design step. On the other hand, usability and user experience research are essential during the product discovery step.
That’s why we always recommend following the proven-to-work design and research processes while creating user-centered digital products.
4. Strive for simplicity
When users land on your website or a mobile application, they quickly evaluate the design for trustworthiness and clarity. If your web page or a mobile page is challenging to navigate or understand, your users will likely leave and find an alternative.
For example, look at the two mobile app designs below. Which one do you think is more user-friendly? We believe the one to the right. Why? Because it’s decluttered and simple. Simplicity is about removing unnecessary design elements to create clean and intuitive user interfaces. Simplicity in UX design lets users browse through your product easily and quickly find what they’re looking for.
As a UX design company, we recommend simplifying your product’s user interfaces where possible. It includes:
- Succinct copy
- Short and clear CTAs
- One CTA per screen (for mobile apps)
- Usage of white space
- Removing unnecessary design elements
- Intuitive user experience
- Focusing users’ attention on the essential aspects of product design
The difference between cluttered and simple product design.
5. Make your designs consistent
While simplicity helps improve usability and overall product perception, product design consistency is vital for multi-platform designs. Consistent and decluttered user interfaces across different devices and screen sizes make it easier for users to switch between platforms and stay aware of how the same product across various devices works. Furthermore, the UX design principle of consistency can help your business look more professional and trustworthy in your users’ eyes.
Consistency can help your brand to make the right impressions on users through visual storytelling and communication of your brand colors, logos, and message. How can you ensure your product design stays consistent? We listed a few tips every UX designer should know and follow, especially if they work on complex digital solutions:
- Consistent colors, typography, icons, and other visual elements across all interfaces.
- Standardized button styles, navigation structures, and input forms.
- Consistent user flows and design patterns.
- Aligned design with a brand’s visual identity.
We hope it is clear now that design consistency reduces cognitive load and helps users interpret and recognize visual cues. By prioritizing consistency in your product design, you’ll be able to create a more intuitive experience.
Consistency in product design.
6. Focus on usability
Forrester’s research study proves that usability plays a crucial role in online business performance. According to the study, well-designed and usable websites have up to 41% lower page abandonment rates. That’s something to consider if your website struggles with high bounce rates. Furthermore, the study also revealed that good usability correlates with an increase in the customer’s willingness to pay by almost 14.4%.
As a London UX design agency, we stress the importance of focusing on usability while developing new products. Don’t see it as a competitive advantage because people expect to grasp your product intuitively. Failure to design a product with the usability UX design principle in mind might result in your users switching to competitors.
Depending on your product, you might have different standards of “good” usability. It can be the time needed for a user to complete a particular task, the amount of frictionless contact form submissions or online purchases, or the number of challenges users face while interacting with your product.
Main criteria for usability evaluation.
One of the proven ways to measure the usability of your product and understand what users think about it is usability testing. We’ve already discussed it earlier in the article, and the 10th point is also dedicated to usability and user testing.
At this point, we want to communicate an important message: relying on your opinion when designing a product won’t help you create a user-friendly solution because you are not the end user and won’t interact with your product daily. That’s why it’s crucial to conduct usability tests to see how users interact with your product, what they think about the UI design, and whether they can understand every design element and interact with it as a part of your UX project.
You can run usability tests in-house if you have dedicated experts and the capacity to do it. Alternatively, you can hire UX designers and researchers to manage tasks.
7. Use a clear visual hierarchy
This point stands for how you organize design elements on web pages based on their importance for end users. It directly impacts how easy it will be for users to quickly find what they need, understand what a web page is about, and navigate around your website. We distinguish the following elements in the design hierarchy:
We distinguish the following elements in the design hierarchy:
1. Information architecture
Your website’s information architecture is your site map. In other words, your website’s structure shows the relationship between different pages and content clusters. We recommend using a card sorting method to improve your website’s information architecture.
Informational architecture example.
2. Visual hierarchy
Visual hierarchy, on the other hand, is about how you organize individual elements on web pages to create a unique look and feel for your product. As in the example below, the right usage of the hierarchy places the most crucial part of the design elements at the top of the web page to make them stand out. It’s worth noting that visual hierarchy and storytelling concepts are interconnected.
To give you context, good visual hierarchy is about conveying your brand’s story and the key message through a combination of images, visual elements, videos, and graphics to tell a compelling story, evoke emotions, and engage your audience.
Using various visual techniques, your designers can create a compelling user interface that aligns with your brand’s story. We’ve outlined a few aspects worth knowing:
- The size of design elements
- Usage of bright or contrasting colors
- The use of different font sizes, weights, and styles
- Usage of white space
- Elements alignment
- Usage of visual cues to guide users’ attention
By combining and applying various aspects from the list above, your UX designer can create a hierarchy that communicates the relative importance, order, and relationships of elements within a design. This helps users navigate and understand the content more easily, improving the overall user experience.
Example of a visual hierarchy on a web page.
8. Mind accessibility
Designing with an accessibility design principle in mind means you create a digital product for a wide range of users, including people with disabilities.
Depending on your product, it’s essential to create a digital experience considering visually impaired users and people with auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities and ensure they can access, understand, and interact with your product effectively. By considering accessibility in UX design, your product designers can create more inclusive digital solutions, accommodating a wide range of users, including those with visual impairments.
Why is it important?
People with disabilities should not feel incapable or different. Product companies, like no other, can help these people facilitate their experiences offline and online. Furthermore, not designing for accessibility is also a missed business opportunity! The 2020 annual report on the global economics of disability states the disability market controls over USD$13 trillion in disposable income. This market has potential!
We recommend relying on the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that gives concrete recommendations to UX experts on designing accessible products for people with disabilities. Furthermore, creating a clickable prototype and conducting a few accessibility testing will help you better understand whether your product serves users’ needs.
Accessibility guidelines for a UX designer.
9. Use clear copy
We’d like to share the results of one A/B testing experiment that shows the importance of an on-page copy.
A clear and authoritative privacy policy copy on the contact form increased the conversion rate by 19.47% compared to the control version. A freelance CRO consultant Michael Aagaard ran this experiment for 12 days, reaching 20257 visitors, resulting in 380 conversions.
How using a clear copy impacts business performance.
Why did more people sign up via the second form compared to the first one? Because the clear copy addressed their concerns about their private information. The vendor used a two-line simple but powerful copy to ensure people their data won’t be shared with third parties. This is an excellent example of the positive impact of copy on business performance.
A concise and clear copy in UX design is how effectively you communicate essential information to your target audience. Suppose you want to ensure users from different backgrounds will understand your website copy. In that case, we recommend using words, phrases, and instructions that are easily comprehended and aligned with users’ mental models that seamlessly guide them through UI.
We recommend using the following UX design principles when writing a web copy:
- Use plain language.
- Avoid jargon and technical terms that may confuse or alienate users.
- Eliminate redundant or ambiguous information.
- Prioritize important information at the beginning of copy.
- Use clear headings and subheadings.
- Break long paragraphs or blocks of text.
- Maintain consistency in terminology and language throughout the interface.
- Consider the cultural and linguistic nuances of your target audience.
- Conduct a UI UX review to gather feedback on the clarity and understandability of your copy.
10. Improve your designs through usability testing
Last but not least, the fundamental UX design principle is seeking feedback from your target audience for improvement. Your target audience’s likes, preferences, and online behavior change. If your product meets your users’ and business needs now, it does not mean it will continue performing well in the future.
Besides, your competitors work on improving their products too. That’s why it’s essential to work on your product continuously, discover your users’ challenges, implement their feedback, and ensure good usability.
7 steps of usability testing.
How can you collect user feedback?
We recommend using popular analysis methods — usability and user testing. UX designers and researchers frequently use usability testing to observe and gather user feedback as they interact with a design or prototype. By continuously testing and collecting user feedback, your product team can identify and address usability issues, validate design concepts, and refine solutions over time.
How to put a UX design principle into work
Applying a design plan at work might be a bit overwhelming if you or your product team have not done it in the past.
At Limeup, we know that putting a design regulation into work involves applying it consistently throughout the design process to create user-centered and impactful digital products. We’ve compiled a quick checklist to help you apply essential principles of design to your work effectively. The following are four steps your product team can easily replicate.
1. Gather insights about your target audience
UX design is always about creating an intuitive and easy-to-understand product your users will like. That’s why we always recommend design teams start with user experience research to understand your users’ goals and challenges.
If you develop a product from scratch, user interviews, field studies, and focus group research procedures will help you collect valuable quantitative and qualitative data into what features your product should offer and how it should function to meet users’ needs.
Suppose you want to improve the performance of an existing product. In that case, the following methods will help you collect your customers’ feedback and learn about their experience related to your product: usability and user testing, A/B testing, user control, online surveys, and diary studies, to name a few.
How to define your target audience.
2. Pick a UX principle depending on your objectives
After conducting research, you should better understand your user’s and target audience’s needs and motivations. These insights will inevitably shape your UX strategy and the design process.
We recommend selecting principles that align with your project goals. Some common principles include simplicity, consistency, accessibility, usability, and empathy. Each principle focuses on different aspects of UX, so choosing the one that best suits your project and supports your objectives is essential.
Essential UX design principles for a great user experience.
3. Incorporate design regulations into your design process
At this step, you already know the discussed principles support your goals and how they can help enhance your digital product. Now, it’s time to incorporate the handpicked principles into your design team’s work.
How to do it? Integrating the essential principles into every stage of your UX design process. You can apply the principles consistently throughout the design process, from creating wireframes and clickable prototypes to using interactive elements and designing a pixel-perfect visual design.
Besides, we recommend ensuring that your design plan supports and guides your decision-making at each step.
Clickable prototype as one of the UX design principles.
4. Continuously evaluate and refine your product design
Creating a usable product that meets your business and users’ needs is an ongoing process. Your target audience’s needs, likes, tastes, and preferences may change in the future. That’s why creating a customer-oriented design, implementing feedback, replicating familiar UX design patterns, and committing to continuous product improvement is essential.
We recommend periodically evaluating the impact of your product design on the user’s journey. You can do this via expert design review, collecting feedback from real users, analyzing metrics, and iterating your product design if necessary.
Evaluation of a design product.
How Limeup experts implement UX design principles
At Limeup, we have over 50 UX experts continuously working on various product design, development, and research projects.
Applying fundamental UX design principles is at the core of our work since we aim to create digital products that positively impact people’s lives worldwide. In this paragraph, we want to share how we approached the selection of principles of UX design for one of the client projects and what we’ve achieved.
We’ve partnered with HousePro, a property management company in the USA, to design and develop web and mobile apps. We started the project by analyzing the existing solutions on the market and conducting research. In particular, we wanted to discover why people use property management platforms, what challenges they solve, what frustrations they experience, and what would persuade them to switch.
After collecting user insights, we created several user personas that we used later during the product design.
User persona created for HousePro.
Analyzing online user behavior, tech savviness, challenges, and objectives helped us define several bases of design we’ve followed during the entire product design and development process.
In particular, we’ve designed a simple and intuitive user interface for mobile apps and removed unnecessary design elements. We followed the rule: one screen-one call to action. This way, we achieved one of our main goals — users knew where they were in the app and where they should navigate next.
We’ve also reviewed the copy with the HousePro product team to ensure it was clear and concise. Non-native English speakers were among the target audience, so plain language increased their likelihood of understanding the interface design.
We’ve also applied usability design principles at different stages of the designing method to ensure users’ feedback was implemented, and objections were addressed. It took us 22 weeks to complete the project and hand over all UX deliverables to the client.
The screenshot below is one of 140 screens and examples our UX designers created for HousePro.
HousePro user interface design.
Closing thoughts on UX design principles
We’ve written this article summarizing our in-house knowledge and experience of UX to help you better understand the importance of UX design principles in product design. Furthermore, we’ve given you an overview of some of the most used methods you can apply to create frictionless and user-friendly products that support your business goals.
UX principles remind us that a successful product is not merely about aesthetics but about solving real user problems and improving people’s lives through impactful digital products. Besides making your product visually appealing, visual principles have proven to enhance the usability of your product, provoke emotions, and strengthen your brand identity.
Last but not least, effective communication and collaboration among your product and design teams, stakeholders, and development teams are essential for effectively implementing design regulations. By embracing these principles, you can foster user loyalty, build trust, and ensure your users’ needs are met.
Contact us if you are looking for a UX design company. At Limeup, we are ready to help you with any product design or development-related challenges.