10 Guiding Laws of Professional Website Design

10 Guiding Laws of Professional Website Design

Design isn't a precise science by any stretch of the imagination. There are, however, several valuable ideas and guidelines that can help you improve the usability and aesthetics of your projects. We'll go through design principles and why you should be aware of them in this article.

The success of your website can be determined by how well you follow the fundamentals of Web Design Company. It's the difference between customers leaving virtually as soon as they arrive on your homepage and those who explore your services and products before converting.

Design isn't a precise science by any stretch of the imagination. When it comes to creating a professional website, there are several important ideas and rules of thumb that can help you improve your project's usability and aesthetics.

We'll go over what design principles are and why you should be aware of them in this article. We'll also go through some of the most well-known and successful rules to follow. Let's get going!

What Are the Principles of Web Design?

Professionals from a variety of fields, including psychology and behavioural science, physics, ergonomics, and more, have contributed to the design concepts. These principles, in general, are flexible laws that steer designers toward effective final products. They have an impact on which aspects are chosen or ignored, as well as how they are structured.

User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design concepts make it simple to construct a visually beautiful and efficient product (UI). Conversions are boosted when they're used correctly. For instance, after following a crucial best practice – simplicity — Pipedrive saw a 300 per cent boost in signups.

Design principles will increase the usability of your websites, impact how they're perceived, and ultimately allow you to make the best decisions for both your users and your web design firm.

Effective Website Design: 20 Key Principles

Many definitions of design principles can be found online, and individual designers and other experts will interpret them differently depending on their needs. However, some best practices are universal.

According to scientists and usability experts, the following are some of the most common website design principles.

The User Experience (UX) Laws are a set of ten rules that govern how people interact with products and services.

The UX laws are a set of design principles developed by Jon Yablonski, a senior product designer at GM, and published in his book "Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products and Services." These are sound guidelines that should be followed by every designer. The following are a few of Yablonski's most important principles:

1. Fitts' Law: Make the main actionable targets accessible

Fitts' law is based on research done by psychologist Paul Fitts on the human motor system. The size and distance of a target element have a direct impact on how long it takes a user to travel to and interact with it, according to this law. As a result, you'll want to make it simple to achieve your major actionable goals.

There should also be ample space between targets if you have numerous targets. Clickable icons, for example, should be large enough to tap when designing for mobile:

Users will not unintentionally click on the wrong symbol because of the extra gap between buttons. Mobile designs should have a minimum clickable area of 40 x 40 pixels as a rule.

2. Hick's Law: Keep the number of options available to users to a minimum

If you've ever been so overwhelmed by the number of options available to you that you couldn't decide between them, you'll understand how users might become paralyzed by too many options. In a nutshell, Hick's law is this. The more options there are and the more complex each one is, the longer it will take consumers to make a decision.

Hick's law, sometimes known as the Hick-Hyman law, is named after two psychologists, William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman, who investigated the relationship between the number of stimuli shown to a person and their reaction time.

This approach simply indicates that you want to eliminate clutter and only display your consumers the necessary alternatives. When confirming an action, most websites will give you the option to "Save" or "Cancel" and "Yes" or "No":

Similarly, you can use this law to streamline your navigation menu, display items or services, and other website design features.

3. Group similar items in common areas (Law of Common Region)

The law of the common region, one of several from the Gestalt psychology school, simply asserts that elements on a page are regarded as related to one another if they are clustered together closely.

Borders, backgrounds, and spacing can be used to achieve this. For example, to create a menu, navigation links are usually grouped:

This principle is all about composition and spacing, so make the most of it. The title, description, and image of each article should be visually grouped on the homepage of a blog where previews are displayed chronologically, for example.

4. Jakob's Law: Apply Logic and Familiar Scenarios

Jakob's law, coined by Jakob Nielsen, a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, encourages the use of common scenarios and logic in user interface design. Your users will anticipate — and prefer — that your site operates in the same way as others they've used before.

Each of us creates mental models based on web conventions. This frees up your consumers' time to focus on their goals rather than figuring out how to navigate a new user interface.

This means you should stick to what they're used to and avoid putting them in situations they're not accustomed to. For example, a "burger" icon will normally bring up a menu:

If you include this icon in your design, it should function as expected by your consumers.

5. Pregnanz Law: Avoid complex shapes and use simple structures

A set of lights blinking on and off at a railroad crossing were noticed by psychologist Max Wertheimer in 1910. It appeared that a single light travelled across the marquee between lamps, but it was a succession of bulbs turning on and off.

This discovery led to the development of a set of guidelines governing how humans see items visually. The law of Prägnanz, for example, suggests that basic structures should be used instead of complex shapes.

Users will interpret your design with the least amount of mental effort. The most basic versions of complex visuals will be perceived. One of your design aims should be to reduce cognitive overload.

Instead of scattering elements throughout the page, you can use this approach to arrange and align them into meaningful blocks, columns, and sections:

It will be easy to interpret if the structure and elements are simple.

6. Law of Proximity: Keep the elements in a group close together

Another Gestalt psychology principle is the law of proximity, which asserts that elements that are close to one another are regarded as a group. Your users' cognitive overload will be reduced as they will be able to make greater sense of the material.

It all comes down to making good use of space when applying this idea. A group's elements should be closer together than those of other groupings.

Menu links are often grouped in website headers, while CTAs are oriented to the side or separated from the navigational elements: The law of proximity is perfectly illustrated in this case. They're visually separated because menu links and CTAs serve different purposes.

7. Law of Similarity: Group elements based on their similarity

The law of resemblance is another Gestalt law that claims that no matter how far apart two items are, they will be viewed as connected. This is why feature sets with comparable colour schemes, icons, and text are styled the way they are:

You'll want to make good use of this idea to group with Web design company-related content with a similar and consistent layout.

8. Make connections between design elements to show how they are related (Law of Uniform Connectedness)

The law of uniform connection, which is also found in Gestalt psychology, argues that visually connected items are perceived as more related than those that are not. Using a progress stepper in your onboarding or checkout journeys is one example of how this law may be put to use. This establishes a visual link between the processes, demonstrating that they are all part of the same procedure.

9. Miller's Law: dictates that content is divided into small chunks

Miller's law is named after cognitive psychologist George Miller, who claimed that the average person could only keep five to nine items in working memory. The idea behind this strategy is to divide stuff into parts. Credit card numbers, for example, are typically divided into four groups to make them easier to understand.

The need for effective design planning is highlighted by this law. It becomes more difficult to utilize as a program grows in size and features. You should consider this while designing your user interface so that it can accommodate additional features while remaining simple to use.

Limiting the amount of content your user must perceive at any given time is another method to implement this guideline. Instead of displaying all of the content in one block, divide it into parts.

Also, consider the most common screen sizes while designing, and limit the number of elements people view at a look.

Examine your design critically. If a section has too much content, relocate it to a different section and logically divide the elements.

10. The first and last items in a series should be highlighted (Serial Position Effect)

Herman Ebbinghaus, a pioneer in experimental memory measurement methods, coined this law. Users remember the first and last elements in a series the best, according to this theory. This propensity can be used to draw attention to the most significant parts of your web pages.

CTAs, forms, and purchasing options, for example, are more successful when placed near the top or bottom of a page.

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