1. Keep An Ear to the Ground
User research is the most significant, highly-regulated part of the UX/UI design process. You should acquaint yourself with the best practices and design should be led by research-backed user-focused data.
You can get inspiration from Behance or Dribbble, but if you prioritize only aesthetics without focusing on usability, you will fall into a UI impasse.
Large companies share openly their research-backed design decisions that can give you a leg up on the completion.
Useful sources will give you an advantage over others:
- Understanding Your Users: A Practical Guide to User Research Methods
https://research.google/pubs/understanding-your-users-a-practical-guide-to-user-research-methods/
- UX best practices for on-demand delivery
https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/feature-delivery/ux-guidelines
- IBM Design Research
https://www.ibm.com/design/research/
2. Remember Your Main Task
You are not designing only to make something look fan or aesthetic. You’re designing to make a functional, intuitive, and useful product for the user. You have to be able to identify problems and create a design that works best and appeals most to them.
- Keep the content and visual design of UX focused on the essentials.
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors.
- Cognitive and behavioral science dictates many usability principles.
- Don't let unnecessary elements distract users from the information they really need.
- Prioritize the content and features to support primary goals.
3. You ≠ user
Try to avoid the false consensus effect which means that all people think that saving the environment is important because you feel, and that our personal qualities, characteristics, beliefs, and actions are relatively widespread among other people.
The false-consensus effect can be found in the design process when there’s a lack of data on how the actual users respond to your designs.
How to avoid it?
- Practice self-awareness.
To tackle the false consensus effect, practice self-awareness and self-questioning. Recognize that your point of view is not universal, but rather one among many.
- Test with real users.
User interviews are critical in understanding the decision-making process, needs and frustrations, opportunities, and how steps are taken to complete tasks. Usability tests are also quite effective for understanding how actual users respond to your designs by watching them use these designs and challenging your assumptions.
- Keep it simple
What makes Apple's design so good? Apple always designed its products to look clean, simple, and straightforward.
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Use UX elements that are designed for touch gestures to make interaction with your app feel easy and natural.
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Create a layout that fits the screen of a device. Users should see primary content without zooming or scrolling horizontally.
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Create controls that measure at least 44 points x 44 points so they can be accurately tapped with a finger.
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The text should be at least 11 points so it’s legible at a typical viewing distance without zooming.
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Make sure there is ample contrast between the font color and the background so the text is legible.
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Create an easy-to-read layout that puts controls close to the content they modify.
How you should design depends largely on your specific users. Terms, concepts, icons, and images that seem perfectly clear to you may be confusing to users. By nature, human beings find comfort in familiarity.