UX Design: 7 Key Factors to Assure the Best User Experience

Many of us have heard about the UX design term and most people know that it refers to the User Experience design, but only a few of them know what we really mean by it and its different rules.

Let’s discover all that in this article!

In fact, User experience design is a concept that has many dimensions, and it includes a bunch of different domains, not just the digital world. It has also many definitions which differ from a UX designer to another.

In other words, UX design is the process of designing (digital, physical “material” or non-material) products that are useful, valuable, easy to use, and interact with. It’s about enhancing and improving the experience that people have while interacting with your product and making sure they find value in what you’re providing in your solution so it answers what they really need. UX design is also defined by solving the different problems of the users through empathizing in order to remove the obstacles from their journey while using a certain product.

What Are the 7 Factors of UX Design?

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

— Steve Jobs.

It’s about the user, not you, as a UX designer you should always think of the users while designing the different stages of your product, and to do that you need to understand first the 7 factors of UX design and their utility in providing the best experience for users.

The 7 factors created by Peter Morville, an information architecture, in 2004 in order to guide designers throughout their design process are:

1. Useful: It is clear and simple. Since you are designing a solution, it must be useful for users, it answers their needs and solves their problems. The term ‘useful’ refers to how much users will benefit from your solution (product).

2. Usable: Your product needs to be easy to use if you really want users to benefit from it. Let’s imagine that you are designing a mobile game that needs 3 hands to play, here the factor of usability is missing since your target group which is the human being only has 2 hands.

3. Findable: Dun Rubin said, “If you find an element of your interface. requires instructions, then you need to redesign it.” Your products need to be available and availability leads to the fact that the content of your product, for example, a website, needs to be easy to find with few clicks.

4. Credibility: There must be no cheating between you and your user. The information you provide must be correct, for example: if you add a section for feedback it must contain real feedback and not only .png pics. The term of credibility lies also in gaining the trust of your users from the first use since it will be difficult to change their first impression of your products.

5. Desirable: What if users find a better product than the best you have to offer? Desirable means that your product must be well made so it can leave only a positive impression in your user’s mind. A good impression can’t be achieved without a good user experience. Also, several criteria contribute to the desirability of a product such as Aesthetics, design, branding …etc.

6. Accessible: Usually, we find that the products of the biggest companies are not accessible for everyone since they don’t think about the minority of people who can’t have access to all the features, like people with blurred vision, impaired mobility… etc, since that costs them a lot of time and effort. Accessibility in terms is making your product accessible so people with limited capabilities should never be left out while designing. These factors show that you have thought about your users and your UX research is really a user-centric one.

7. Valuable: The product must give value to both the users and the stakeholders. As the user will benefit from the service provided by the product, the stakeholder will benefit from the proceeds. The value of the product can be measured by the costs of solving the problem so a valuable product is a product that can solve 100000$ problems with 100$ of costs.

To sum up, knowing the 7 factors of UX design and working with them is the key to make a good UX design research, assure that users will benefit from your product and it is going to be 100% successful in the marketplace.