Lab 2

The 11 Essential Design Principals: wayfinding, feedback, visibility, consistency, mental mode, proximity, grouping, mapping, symmetry, affordance, and progressive disclosure.

Wayfinding is about helping people navigate through the app. Navigation through an app is essential to prevent the user from getting stressed or uninterested. By providing useful navigation, the user can enjoy the experience.

Feedback is about giving a user a sense guidance. By giving a user information about a completed action or of any other action that notifies them of attention allows them to properly navigate the environment. Without it a user will not know how to proceed.

Visibility is about letting the user clearly see what they need to. Its about allowing them to clearly and simply look at things without them having look for something, miss something, or an overload of information

Consistency is about staying consistent throughout the user experience. Any inconsistency to colors, design, purpose, and mood can throw off a user. Consistency helps keep the user engaged and focused to what they are set to do in the app.

Mental Mode is about getting a mood across to the user. Their expectations of of your app are matched to what they initially or thought before hand is the Mental Mode.

Proximity is about placing to connecting things together. If they work jointly it wouldn’t make sense to have them separated.

Grouping is about grouping related items. By create a group of similar items, user can easily navigate and understand the app.

Mapping is about relating two things together.

Affordance is about giving clues to the user about any interactive or action they can take through the app experience. By giving people a clear message about what they can do throughout the app through visual cues, they can better interact with the app and they understand the app better.

Progressive Disclosure is about allowing the user to accomplish tasks simply and then gradually make them difficult once they are adjusted. This will prevent a user of being discouraged and disengaged. Finding a good balance is important when working with this.

Symmetry is about providing symmetry throughout the app. Symmetry can make the experience less chaotic for the user. Creating a sense of balance, order, and stability throughout the app.

Apps like Hulu, Duolingo, Instagram, and Snapchat do this well.

Hulu provides a clear wayfinding for the users. Users can navigate through endless amount of options without getting lost. They can quickly access any genre or series. Hulu also provides the user to search for certain streaming shows or movies. Hulu also is very symmetrical throughout the sections. They all look very familiar without throwing the user off. They look in harmony and order. Also, everything is visible throughout the app. You can easily see through every option and the navigation process.

Duolingo is also a good example. It is consistent throughout the learning experience. You can expect all lessons to follow a similar path while providing progressive disclosure. At first, they can easily find they first lessons and then as they learn they can swift through different and more complex information.

Instagram also does a very good job. They provide affordance allowing user to pick up cues about certain actions. Each icon in the app gives a user a cue of what those sections can do. The user can expect the sections to do just that because of the cue. It is also very consistent providing information. By making every post visible and a scrolling process, the user becomes comfortable and it becomes easy to use the app.

Snapchat does a good job too. Snapchat provides a lot of feedback. From when a message gets sent, received, not received, friends added, and many other indicators that allow the user to take action.