User-centered design refers to design processes that focus on users’ needs, behaviors, and preferences. When it comes to designing for users, decisions and choices are driven by users’ goals, desires, and expectations.
In simple terms, a user-centered design is an app or website design that is enjoyed by users. Your website or mobile app should be easy to navigate, appealing to the eyes, and error-free.
In this competitive environment where users’ attention spans are decreasing day by day, standing apart from the crowd has become imperative for businesses. These 7 essential principles of user-centered design can help you do that.
Let’s dive in.
#1 Understanding the Users
Before starting a new app or website design, it is crucial to understand who the users are, what their requirements are, how they need their problems solved, and under what conditions they will interact with you. You need to answer these questions precisely before you prepare your user-centered design strategy.
- Why do users need your products or services?
- What do users expect from your brand?
- Which problems do your users want to solve?
- How and when will your users interact with your business?
Having answers to these questions will help you understand users, which is paramount to strategizing user-centered design for your business website and mobile applications.
#2 Involving the Users
Involving users in the design process helps designers get a clear picture of who their users are and their choices and needs. Therefore, the earlier and more frequent users’ involvement is, the better would be the design process. For example, after designing a website if you come to know that it is not as per the preferences of your target audience, you might end up wasting time and investments.
It requires frequent and consistent user feedback collection through interviewing and testing to ensure that your designs will be useful and beneficial to your customers. As user behaviors, preferences, and needs change with time, involving them from project start to finish enables you to create modern and latest designs that help you set new standards and benchmarks within your industry.
#3 Simplicity and Consistency is the Key
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
This quote very well says why simplicity in design is important. A website that is uncluttered with minimalist design makes it easy for users to find what they are looking for. Simplicity in content and design makes it unambiguous for users and reduces the need to apply unnecessary mental effort to understand the content.
Similarly, consistency is important, as it helps users know what to expect from your brand and interact with your digital products intuitively and confidently. For example, using the same color palette throughout your business website and mobile app would have a positive psychological impact on users and instill a sense of trust and reliability.
#4 Provide Easy Accessibility
Having easy accessibility to elements of a website or app seems to be a blessing for users. When users don’t have to spend a lot of time searching for the information they are looking for, it increases their engagement with the brand which can convert into long-term association with your business. Therefore, intuitiveness in navigation is significant to create a user-centered design.
Also, this principle relates to making sure that your designs are available to users with different abilities. For example, providing the option to resize text or convert text to speech can help users with visual impairments and hearing disabilities to also access your website and mobile app and make the most of it.
#5 Prevent Errors
Errors and glitches in a website or mobile app cause inconveniences and delays, which can drive users away and increase bounce rates. Preventing errors while designing a website or app is better than dealing with them after they occur. Hence, conducting thorough testing while designing a user-centered website or mobile app becomes highly significant. Testing properly will ensure that your digital content remains relevant and meets users’ expectations. It also helps you identify usability issues and find solutions to them.
Also, after launching your website or mobile application, testing is important as it provides insights into real-world problems that can be different from in-house testing environments. Post-launch testing can reveal new challenges and opportunities, leading to new enhancements that deliver better user experiences.
#6 Impart Clear and Immediate Feedback
Providing feedback to users in lieu of their actions is important to ensure that they are doing the right thing. For example, when a user clicks on the like button on Facebook, the button’s color changes to blue. This indicates that the user’s action was successful.
Providing clear and immediate feedback helps users know they are on the right track. Providing tours to an application, simple terms, and popups that guide users through a web page whenever needed are some examples of imparting feedback to users when they click a button or link. Furthermore, there can be some animations, loading screens, or “task complete” pages that can be used to reassure users that their tasks have been completed or processed.
#7 Collaborate Across Domains
When a website or application is being designed, there are different domains involved like designers, developers, testers, and stakeholders. Collaborating well across all these domains is significant to gaining diverse perspectives from different minds involved in the creation process. This also helps in understanding user needs and designing better and higher-quality solutions.
By incorporating ideas from different minds, it is obvious that you can cover several areas of expertise, ensuring that everyone is aiming to achieve the same, and that is user-centric design with a shared vision.
So, these were the 7 essential principles of user-centered design that guide towards creating something awesome for people who actually use it. This means a lot of researching, learning, brainstorming, and tweaking until it’s perfect for your users.
But why is user-centered design so important?
User-centered design is important because it helps in creating functional, intuitive, engaging, and effective solutions. To elaborate on this further, let’s have a look at some benefits of user-centered design.
Benefits of User-Centered Design
User-centered design is a progressive approach that enables designers to design websites and mobile applications that are based on findings from users’ feedback and research rather than assumptions, and therefore has several benefits as mentioned below:
Reduces Errors: A design that results from in-depth research and analysis about users’ preferences and behavior is more likely to be free of any kind of errors.
Ensures Users’ Satisfaction: User-centered design involves users, so web designers and mobile app developers can create solutions that genuinely meet users’ needs.
Broadens Market Reach: As user-centered design is focused towards meeting a wide range of audiences, it broadens a brand’s market reach.
Fosters Smart Decision Making: User-centered design requires gathering feedback from users, and that helps designers make smart decisions about what to include in their digital products and what not to.
Improves Sales: Following a user-centered design leads to a better user experience, resulting in repetitive visits, brand loyalty, and improved sales.
Conclusion: Staying Focused on Users
User-centered design principles can seem to be a never-ending process that might sometimes become practically challenging for web design companies to take forward.
However, looking into the benefits of following user-centered design principles, it would be worthwhile to take this challenge and overcome it.
For that purpose, you can also get help from Tambena Consulting, a team of expert designers and artists who can deliver unmatched results when designing aesthetically appealing websites and applications. In addition to user-centric approach the veterans here take into account design, SEO, and most importantly, responsiveness of the device to give their clients edge over competition.
It is simple – businesses now need to stay focused on users and their evolving demands. This would help them create user-friendly and optimal designs that their audiences look forward to using.
