We adhere to a small number of sensible design principles when crafting Voyce. Go ahead and copy, share, and modify these to make them your own - help make the web a better place.
'Don’t make me think'. We don’t make the user guess; Is that clickable? What does it do? Where does it go? or leave things open to interpretation. Obvious always wins. If you observe only one principle - this should be it!
Our pages are focused on a particular user goal/task in order to not overwhelm the user. We remove irrelevant content to minimize choices. We constantly ask ourselves 'Is this thing really adding value, or is it just noise?' We also use contrast and colour to help guide the user.
We hide parts of the UI and only present/reveal it to the user at the appropriate time (this is called 'progressive disclosure'). We keep things simple and related to the task at hand and relevant to the knowledge & experience the user has at a particular point in time.
We know and can explain why each feature in our software exists, what experience it's enabling, and how it being there helps our users achieve their goal.
We have spoken to users and validated problems they have. We know which problems are worth solving for them, and for the business. We know who our users are, their goals and how they use our site, e.g. which devices they use, the context of their problems, and the motivation behind them. We are comfortable using both qualitative and quantitative methods to help guide our design decisions.
Faster experiences feel more effortless. We reduce clicks/taps and load times with simpler rendering of UI or by making different UX choices such as offering predefined options vs ones requiring heavy cognitive load such as text input.
Where possible we reuse UI patterns (and standards) so there is familiarity and predictability - a user doesn’t need to learn new ways of doing each thing. This also means we are more efficient in designing with more time to focus on the overall user experience.
We use simple language that everyone can understand and is non-ambiguous. It should be friendly, but still professional. We use jargon carefully so we don't intimidate or alienate people new to the game.
We motivate our users toward achieving their goals, and encourage them to learn and thrive. We help users feel like they 'own' the product with us, by feeding them small 'successes' along the way.
We go the extra mile. We define our users' expectations of the tasks they need to complete and then ask ourselves, how can we exceed this? This could be from under promising and over delivering, or by offering small words of encouragement along the way.
