What makes a good experience? These UX "lenses" (or design principles) can help you design better products and critique designed experiences to find areas of opportunities.
An ever evolving collection of design goals and tenets adopted over my career.
The UX Principles
Principles curated to not only design by, but to also use in the evaluation of designed [digital] experiences.
Areas of Impact
The UX lenses can impact various areas of an experience. These areas are broken into three quadrants: Think, Feel and Use.
THink
What do users think about the product?
Is it useful and valuable? Do they find it credible?
Reference: Peter Morville's UX Honeycomb, Katerina Karagianni's Optimized Honeycomb
The UX Lenses
Experiences should be...
Purposeful
Promoting a clear, primary purpose, supporting the "Why" behind the experience. Focused on the benefit – while aligning with top tasks.
Every facet of an experience should strive to promote a single, clear purpose, to support its reason for being.
The purpose should be driven by the underlying goal(s) of the end user, supporting any associative business goals, while providing clarity of information and affordance.
A scannable experience should make the most important actions and/or information readily accessible for quick and easy information processing. Being scannable is to distill the necessary facets of an experience, while reducing the overhead cognitive load.
User behavior should be used to inform a contextual experience that is tailored to one's goals; yielding levels of hyper-personalization.
A personalized experience should surface the most relevant and contextual information and anticipatory actions for the end user. The end user should hold a refined level of awareness around the experience being tailored to them; should be implied, but not necessarily specified.
All experiences should be supported by research, and validated and verified via a combination of insights sources; qualitative and quantitative, in combination with such things as established patterns, interaction design, psychological principles, etc. – to an extent that yields confidence and mitigates risk.
Clear & Concise
Content is not filler, nor is it meant to support the design. Copy (text) is the unsung hero of the experience; however, that content should be distilled and simple.
Aesthetic integrity doesn’t only measure the visual beauty, but also reflects how well the appearance of said information integrates with the function.
Additionally, reduce the distraction by eliminating any visual elements that do not contribute any value to the information, or in support thereof.
People tend to believe that things that look better will inherently work better – not always the case; however, with a positive emotional response to the visuals, if any minor usability issues arise, the user would be more tolerant and forgiving with a more aesthetic interface.
The experience should align or surpass user expectations.
Expectations within an experience lie within learned behaviors and interactions – interaction design solutions should be done so without stepping too far away from established design patterns; otherwise you run a high risk of user confusion, frustration and excess friction within the designed product/service.
Nothing worse than a solution in search of a problem – Start with the problem, not a solution.
It is easy to get excited and distracted by new technologies; however, as solutions are explored, don't start with the technology you wish to leverage, start with the problem. As you research, analyze, and ideate, you will naturally gravitate towards solutions that are most fitting to solve the problem you originally sought out to combat.
Interaction patterns and UI elements should be consistent to support learned behavior(s) – especially when the intent is the same – to reduce excess learning of new paradigms of interaction.
People look to the behavior of others to guide their actions and decisions.
This can take many forms; including, but not limited to: ratings and reviews, testimonials, validation logos (through brand association), and user generated content.
Be mindful of persuasive design mechanisms (like scarcity or fear of loss tactics) and be respectful in their implementations.
Don't trick people with Dark Patterns – tricks used in websites and apps that make people do things that they didn't mean to do, like buying, downloading/installing, or signing up for something; which is further compounded if the designed experience targets those that may lack technical aptitude or experience (like children).
Be conscious of implementing more addictive interaction design patterns, such as infinite scrolling. An experience can and should be engaging, but it should also be humane.
References: UX Honeycomb, Facets of User Experience Design. Peter Morville, 2004 • semanticstudios.com Optimized Honeycomb, Small amendment to the classic diagram – improving connections. Katerina Karagianni, 2018 • workwithk.com "The UX Lenses", A collection of mental lenses to consider when designing and evaluating experiences. Damien Dalli, 2020 • theuxlenses.com
