How to Understand Interface Principles in Figma
Have you ever used an app that feels like it’s guessing all of your needs? Navigating through the interface app makes you feel happy? Well, that’s not for free. In this tutorial we will talk about Understand Interface Principles, we will reveal the magic to you so stay tuned.
Principles are everything
As with everything in life, there are rules that we follow to take the best out of something or to make processes simpler and effective, and this is commonly applied to creativity-related careers. Principles guarantee the success of a project because they allow the building of a structure that makes it cohesive and coherent. These are the main principles when creating an interface in Figma.
- Simplicity: Keep the interface straightforward. Does my design serve the user’s experience? Great Interfaces do not necessarily have the fanciest designs. Most of the time, “the less, the better.”
- Support: When you feel like the app knows how to respond to your needs, we are talking about providing as many options for the user to complete a task, so we are supporting the user experience. For example, when you write a message, you have the send option, emoji option, symbols, and so on, meaning that whatever you want to express will be supported by the application.
- Familiarity: PAY ATTENTION TO THIS ONE. We tend to feel biased toward things that feel familiar to us. So, when building an interface, we recommend you to look for what’s familiar to the user, and not only for what looks good or cool in our design. For example, there are icons and properties we distinguish that have the same function in every app.
- Clarity: This principle indicates what an icon’s function is, and must be clear.
- Encouragement: If the user presses the Thumbs Up icon and leaves the newsfeed, they must be able to find that icon again somewhere in the interface and use it later on.
- Satisfaction: You want to ensure that the user uses your app over and over again because they feel satisfied. For example, likes, comments, and sharing are features Facebook has to encourage users to keep engaged with the app.
- Accessibility: Users should be able to visually reach any feature they need in the interface.
- Safety: As users, we want to feel that the app has our back in case of. Confirmation Messages are an example of the Safety Principle. It can look like this: Are you sure you want to erase your account?
- Versatility: The user interface should have a variety of interaction techniques such as menus, shortcuts, dialogue boxes, and so on.
- Personalization: This means being able to change your profile settings such as your privacy, basic info, visual aspect, and much more.
Having these principles in mind will assure the User will have a nice experience with the application or website you are creating. So don’t skip them!
