Some design principles are universal

 W

hen I started in UX design, I often wondered how seemingly even decent designers knew the reasoning and techniques behind good design. The short answer I discovered — experience. The long answer? Learning and honing in on the many psychological principles that have proven to be effective in design over time.

Enter designers William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler with their excellent reference book Universal Principles of Design exploring and researching exactly this. An invaluable cross-disciplinary resource I’d been recommended before, and now can myself recommend to any designer as a solid addition to your bookshelf.

With that, let’s jump into four principles I want to share that I think will help you on your UX journey.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio

“The ratio of relevant to irrelevant information in a display. The highest possible signal-to-noise ratio is desirable in design.” (Lidwell, Holden, Butler, 2003)

I think most people have an intuitive understanding of what design means, and signal to noise ratio is at its core. It’s what we’ve all heard at one point or another before from people like Don Norman or Jared Spool:

Good design is invisible.

It’s our job to create something you want to look at and interact with, but really, at the end of the day our job should be helping to communicate what needs communicating to the person using our product. Communicating clearly means striking a good signal-to-noise ratio.

Both tables display exactly the same data, only the latter is easier to read and understand.

When someone asks you to “make it pretty” or “do your design thing” what they really mean is “give me a good signal-to-noise ratio.”

“[…] every unnecessary data item, graphic, line, or symbol steals attention away from relevant elements.” (Lidwell et al., 2003)

Try to keep this principle in mind the moment you realize form is taking center-stage in relation to the actual data you are trying to present the person using your design. If things feel overdesigned, take a step back and see if maybe you’re designing around the content rather than designing for the content.

Performance Load

“The greater the effort to accomplish a task, the less likely the task will be accomplished successfully.” (Lidwell et al., 2003)

Similar to Fitt’s Law, if you’re not too careful, Performance Load is something that can really manage to creep its way into what you’re solving. Before you know it, your flows become needlessly complex; either requiring too much from the user in order for them to accomplish their task or by introducing steps that make little sense unless deeply thought about.

This is… not good.

What is good, however, is Performance Load can be broken down into two types of load: Cognitive Load, and Kinematic Load.

“Cognitive load is the amount of mental activity — perception, memory, problem solving — required to accomplish a goal.” (Lidwell et al., 2003)

An easy way to remember this is to think about the first thing someone does when perceiving something you’ve put in front of them — they think about it. A lot of us are already draining precious brain juice thinking about whatever it is we’re thinking about during the day; your users are no different. The last thing they want to do is think about how to use your product. What they want to do is get something done. So we don’t want to use up any more of their brain power if we don’t have to.

“Kinematic load is the degree of physical activity — number of steps or movements, or amount of force — required to accomplish a goal.” (Lidwell et al., 2003)

I remember when I first started working professionally, one of the first ever solutions I came up with for a UX problem was perfect.

As in, a perfect disaster.

I was working on an enterprise software project involving a lot of graphs and data — and the feature I was given to solve for pertained to the dashboard’s PDF generator. How could we enable users to be able to save custom graph presets?

My solution made sense… that is if you called me every time, so I could explain to you how to use it. In other words, it didn’t. I broke both of these rules, and not only made the user think too much, but made them physically move their mouse in a non intuitive way by not designing the flow by thinking about how they would use it, and what would be the least amount of effort with the most amount of gain.

Think about kinematic load anytime you’re working on flows that require a little more work from the user. Shopping checkouts, repetitive tasks, filling out forms, and other similar scenarios.

After all, there is a reason Steve Kruger named his book Don’t Make Me Think.

Proximity

“Elements that are close together are perceived to be more related than elements that are farther apart.” (Lidwell et al., 2003)

Proximity feels like one of the unsung heroes of the many psychological usability principles researched in this book and elsewhere. As part of commonly held to be six Gestalt principles of perception (similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, figure/ground, and symmetry & order), on the surface it seems like a basic concept, but I believe is one of the most powerful principles in UX design and in design in general.

The best products we enjoy using utilize proximity to its maximum potential.

Here’s a quick screengrab of YouTube’s now playing screen on the desktop — let’s take a look at how this principle works when applied.