Designing for a good user experience (UX)

Some recent studies have found that:

• Form labels work best above the field
• Users focus on faces
• Quality of design is an indicator of credibility (i.e. users do judge a book by its cover, so make a good first impression!)
• Most users *do* scroll
• Blue is the best color for links
• The ideal search box is 27 characters wide
• White space improves comprehension
• Effective user testing doesn’t have to be extensive
• Informative product pages help you stand out
• Most users are blind to advertising

(All from: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/24/10-useful-usability-findings-and-guidelines/)

Coming from a slightly different angle, a psychologist’s view of UX design came to these conclusions:

• People don’t want to work or think more than they have to (so provide examples, give them defaults etc.)
• People have limitations (so make it easy for them to find and scan information)
• People make mistakes (so make it easy to recover from the error)
• Human memory is complicated (so don’t provide too much to remember at once)
• People are social (so give them the opportunity to be part of a group)
• Attention (so grab attention with color or features that stand out)
• People crave information (so give them choice and offer feedback options)
• Unconscious processing (so use metaphors or match your conceptual model to a user’s mental model)
• Visual system (so group like things together and make fonts large enough)

(from http://uxmag.com/design/the-psychologists-view-of-ux-design)

[Links last checked June 2010]