Designing a user experience for your product that gives everyone an equal experience is a goal every designer should have when creating a product. But doing this isn’t easy, and lots of work is involved in creating a product that gives all users a similar experience, or as close as it can be to equal.
There are people with specific disabilities that are generally overlooked. This causes the design of products to not be user-friendly for them. This inaccessibility turns these users away from the development and gives them a wrong first impression of the product and brand.
Designers need to create user experiences that give a similar experience to most users—taking into consideration different disabilities and factors that can impact the user experience for people that will be using the product.
What Are Universal Principles?
Universal principles ensure the highest number of users can use the product design. Designers can follow these principles and create great designs that can be enjoyed by everyone who wants to use the product, even if they have cognitive or physical disabilities that would otherwise make it harder for them.
These principles focus on accessibility and how it can be increased in all aspects of the product’s design. The universal design principles are:
Flexibility
The design of the product needs to be flexible. The user should be able to use the product and achieve their goals using whatever method they want. They should be able to work on achieving their goals at their own pace and not be required to complete them in a specific way.
For color-blind users, there should be an option to change the product’s color scheme to help the users see everything the product has to offer easily. This is an example of what can be done to help color-blind users, but designers need to consider all users and how their UX can be improved.
Considering all potential users and factors that can affect their user experience is not easy. You can hire a UX UI design agency to help you account for everyone and understand what design changes need to be made.
Intuitive
The product needs to be easy to use; it needs to be intuitive. The users need to understand how to use the product quickly without needing to be taught. They should know where to click when they want to achieve a specific goal without needing to be told.
Please do not make the design more complex than it needs to be. Remove everything that doesn’t need to be a part of the design, and keep the features the users will want to use. Buttons should be labeled; content should be easy to read and interact with, the color palette should be easy to look at, etc.
Reduce Errors
When designing the product for the highest number of people to use, the designer needs to eliminate whatever they can that could lead to unnecessary errors and problems for the users. Not doing this will cause users to become frustrated, which could cause them to leave the product and not want to return.
If a user makes an error, you should give them the option to undo the mistakes instead of making them do it all over again. This experience will give users a wrong impression of the product and not make them want to keep using it.
If the user inputs something incorrectly, you should give them the option to undo the input. Or you can have confirmation of the user’s actions and require them to click on another button to confirm they want to take a specific action. This will help avoid mistakes the users make.
Less Effort Should Be Required
Users shouldn’t need to go through many actions to complete their goals. The process should be simple and fast. You need to design the product to let the user achieve their goals when using the product with the least amount of clicks. If you are unsure how to design your product this way, you can hire a UI UX consulting agency to help you with the redesign.
Adaptable Design
Users will interact with the product on different devices with varying screen sizes. You must ensure your website is responsive and adjusts to the different screen sizes and devices. More people access websites on their mobile phones than desktops, so you need to ensure your website is ready for use on mobile phones. The user experience should be just as good on mobile phones and desktops.
You need to do that if you haven’t created a responsive website for mobile phones. This is an essential part of any website’s success. If you don’t know how to move the design from desktop to mobile, you can hire a UI UX design service to get this done.
Conclusion
If you didn’t know what universal design principles were before, then now you should. Using this information, you can start creating designs for your products that give the best user experience to the highest number of people who want to use your product.
Before designing the product, you must thoroughly plan the design and how the different universal design principles can be added. Remember who the target users are, what they want from the design, their pain points, and how your product’s design can help solve them.