The 5 Most Visually Important Principles of UI/UX Design for Beginners

by Nitin Kumar Digital Marketing Company

Being able to implement the principles of UI/UX design is the meatiest part of the design process. This is the part where you narrow down your design decisions once you’re done defining the user problem and solution. You could be starting with a white screen or one bursting to the seams with design elements. There are many acceptable principles when it comes to being creative.

As you progress in your UI/UX design career, you will find that you can create principles of your own and combine them with traditional principles to forge a design vision that is unique, simple, and effective. This article will discuss the 5 most indispensable guidelines of design that you will find yourself using over and over again throughout your career.

Essentially, you can break down design principles into 3 parts:

• Visual Design Principles

• Interaction Design Principles

• Psychological Principles affecting how users may perceive and engage with your design

Here, we will talk about visual design principles exclusively, because these are the ones most immediately likely to make an impact on your user or client.

1. Unity and Variety:

Screens or pages must run along a common visual theme. You can’t let your user get too distracted and become confused about what he or she is supposed to do with too many options. (If you do have a large number of pathways/product pages, use the principle of visual hierarchy. Steve Krug’s book, ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ is an excellent resource for visual hierarchies).

On the other hand if everything were to look the same, your design risks being too dull, not giving way to curiosity and exploration.

2. Visual Hierarchy:

By hierarchy, we mean the established order in which the user is supposed to view design elements on a screen. Type size, color, contrast, and location are important cues for the user in determining the relative importance of actions to be taken. Images and motion elements are other ways to attract user attention.

3. Proportion and Balance:

This refers to the relative sizes of elements or sections on the screen. To ensure consistency across screens that change orientation or size (tablets, iPads, smartphones), you should set rules regarding the ratio of length to breadth or between text types.

4. Associations and Affordance:

“Think of your favorite eCommerce app and remove your hands from the touchscreen. Now look at how the different categories of products are organized. If you’ve been using a newer online store, chances are that the categories are organized along tabs. Our knowledge of file folders and tags helps us in forming associations with the tabs that the store products are distributed into,” says Harsha Kakkeri, CEO and founder of Designboat UI/UX school, who impart one of the most popular UI/UX design courses in India and beyond, with campuses in Bengaluru, Delhi, Gurgaon, Chennai, and other metros.

An affordance of an object is the degree to which how the object looks and feels make it clear how that object can be used. The most common example teachers use is that of cricket bat and a cricket ball. A ball is round and can be gripped in one hand. However, the bat has a long handle that is ideally gripped in two hands to balance the weight of the blade.

Digital objects cannot be touched but the affordance principle acts in a similar fashion in the look and feel of mobile screens or webpages. Clickable objects, for example, need to be distinguished from non-clickable ones by the use of changing colors, varying brightness, or moving pointers to an action button.

5. Minimizing Motion Between Tasks:

For a digital application to be successful, it should help you to complete a task in the minimum number of steps possible. These steps should be so designed as to become part of the subconscious and users shouldn’t have to stop to think before making a conversion decision. This principle is at the heart of habit-forming apps and digital products.

One example for how this principle works is that of a travel app. You can usually fill out a form that mentions the destination and your budget. As you can imagine, unless you have a clear choice of destinations which you can glimpse instantly by hovering over to country or city names, it would take too much cognitive load. The user may go off to search for suitable destinations on Google and never return. Hence, designers need to take into account the number of tasks that the user will need to perform before making a purchase or use decision.

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