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16 Guiding principles I live by in UX
A collection of principles I live by when having conversations about design thinking
When you get immersed in the world of UX, you as a designer, researcher or writer will start to see your own ways the world of UX operates. The principles below are a collection that I have either learnt, experienced or believe in based on my time as a Senior UX Researcher.
The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour
Humans are creatures of habit. We get comfort from being able to reference or relate to something including our own actions. The more we do something, the more confident we grow doing it and so we have a tendency to repeat what we have done. It removes risk which is something we are hard wired to do in order to support our survival instincts. This is why when conducting research, rather than posing hypothetical questions about what someone may do in the future, I always believe it is best to ask about what they have done previously. This is factual (albeit with potential memory biases) and is something they are likely to repeat from which we can learn a lot about their future behaviours.
Do not treat everything as equals
It can be very easy to look at your existing product or the experience you are building out and allocate an equal amount of time and resource across it. You should not treat everything as equal though. Users will be more interested in certain elements of the product, more time will be spend on certain parts of it. So interested of having an approach about equality, have a ‘fairness’ approach. It is fair for the team to spend 4 days a week working on one part if 99% of users interact with it on a frequent basis. If for example the data and insights showed no one was interested in a product description but everyone was interested in reviews apportion your focus correctly.
Do not be afraid to pay less attention to certain things. Being truly user centred is knowing where the value lies for the user and making sure that we prioritise and optimse that for them
