User Experience Design for 7 Essential User Abilities

In UX design, we often encounter a whole bunch of words, all united by the idea of ability as the root of their essence. And they all name significant features that define how positive the user experience will be. So, in this post, we invite you to review them briefly. Let’s talk about seven user abilities that are directly ignited by how UX designers do their work.

Illustration by Maryna Solomennykova

Usability

Usability means that the website or application is convenient, clear, logical, easy to use, and corresponds to the situation and the environment. This is perhaps the most common and popular term used in user experience design for apps and websites. Usability covers everything that helps a user interact with the product effortlessly to achieve the objective or solve the problem they chose this product for, in the context in which they use it.

Usability defines the digital product as not only effective, which means allowing users to reach their goals, but also efficient, which means that they do it in a straightforward way, saving their time and effort. The primary goal is to maintain this focus from the earliest stages of ideation, wireframing, and design through prototyping, product launch, testing, and maintenance of the digital product.

Certainly, usability as a feature can be applied not only to digital interfaces but also to physical things, devices, appliances, and tools we interact with; still, it’s the sphere of UX design that made the term really widespread.

Mobile app design for Kaiten food marketplace

Mobile design for Crezco fintech service

Flower Store app interactions

Gin School website design

Accessibility

Accessibility means making a digital or physical product easy for people with different abilities to interact with it. It also means taking a set of practical steps and techniques that eliminate possible pitfalls and difficulties that can arise in the interaction process for some categories of users.

In particular, the aspect of accessibility may be considered with the following potential problems users may have:

• Motor issues: difficulties or inability to use hands properly, such as paralysis, tremors, or low muscle control.
• Auditory issues: deafness, low hearing, etc.
• Visual issues: blindness, low vision, color blindness, seizures provoked by flashing effects, etc.
• Cognitive issues: dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, PTSD, etc.

However, make no mistake, accessibility is not only addressing users with permanent or temporary physical or mental disabilities. Accessibility is also about considering user categories with different levels of tech literacy, language proficiency, age-specific characteristics, and specific environments and conditions in which the product can be used. Also, the basic thing about making a mobile application or website accessible is to consider and implement its adaptation to different devices and screens so that the product looks attractive and works effectively from any point of contact with the user.

Pass-On landing page design for the web, for mobile, and for users preferring the Arabic language

Scannability

Scannability is a way to present the content and navigation elements in the web page or app screen layout so they can be scanned easily. Interacting with a website, especially the first time, users don’t read all the text attentively and don’t take into account each and every element; they first look through the content to analyze whether it’s what they need. Any piece of the content may become a hook in this process: words, sentences, images, or even animations. Scannability is based on solid visual hierarchy and knowing the typical scanning patterns people unconsciously apply to make a decision if they want to read this page or engage with the product.

Scannability is definitely worth investing time in the user experience design process because well-scanned pages and screens become much more efficient in the following aspects:

• users complete their tasks and achieve their goals more quickly
• users make fewer mistakes in the search for content they need
• users understand the structure and navigation of the website faster
• the bounce rate is reduced
• the level of retaining users gets higher
• the website looks and feels more credible
• the SEO rates are affected positively.

University website design concept

Nibble Health website design

ProAgenda website plans and pricing page

Learn more in the article sharing tips and design practices on how to improve scannability.

Readability

Readability is the term used in UX design to define how easily people distinguish different elements of text and how easy it is for them to read it. In user experience, it deals not only with the simplicity of words and sentences, clarity of thoughts, ease of consuming information, and understandable structure of the text blocks, but also with the visual presentation of the text content as well as its placement in the general layout and composition of the web page or mobile screen.

Among the factors that significantly influence the visual performance of the text content readability are:

• typography: types and combinations of fonts, size, line length, leading, etc.
• background color
• contrast level
• white space

MOVA Brewery website design

Juno website design

Nonconventional Show podcast website design

Learn more in the article sharing tips and design practices on how to improve readability.

Navigability

In the physical world, navigability is the term from the sphere of transportation, originally by water: navigability means the extent to which a water area, for example, a river, is deep, wide, or safe enough so that a boat could go through. Echoing the idea, in user experience design, navigability is the quality of the digital interface to make it easy to move around and find the interactive elements or information users want. Simplicity, consistency, and intuitiveness of navigation directly and crucially influence the level of usability, user engagement, and user retaining. Over the years, UX designers developed a diverse system of navigation elements: buttons, bars, tags, filters, toggles, switches, cards, checkboxes, and many others. Picked up and organized wisely, based on familiar mental models and interactive patterns, they set the most efficient and clear shortcuts leading users to achieve their goals and, this way, making a website or app user-friendly, helpful, and converting.

Otozen safe driving app interactions

BlockStock website product page

Clinic website design

Physica Magazine web design

Learnability

Learnability defines how easily and quickly users can learn how the product works and how to use its various features and functions. The more complex is the product or software, the more techniques and elements user experience designers consider to help users quickly grasp the functionality at different stages of interactions. Among features and tools that can increase learnability, you can find:

• onboarding tutorials and app tours for first-time users
• in-context and action-driven tooltips
• product videos
• tutorials and guides
• empty-state tips
• FAQ sections
• checklists and hotspots

Onboarding screens for the Flower Store application

Onboarding tutorial screens for the Vertt application

Learn more in the article sharing tips and design practices on improving learnability via user onboarding techniques.

Desirability

Last but not least on our list of user abilities is desirability. Desirability is the quality of a digital product that establishes a visual and emotional connection that appeals to users’ tastes, encourages them to interact with the product, and increases their satisfaction.

It is perhaps the most subjective factor in the list, dealing with subtle emotional and aesthetic appeal matters. The digital product’s beauty and emotional appeal will help users interact with it more straightforwardly, trust it faster, and be tolerant of minor issues. However, if the product has them, they will not help with major problems. So, desirability should not be put at the forefront of the user experience design, but rather enhance and amplify the other factors dealing with functionality and solving users’ problems.

Glup delivery application

Komuso website design

Neon signs website product page

FarmSense website design

More posts about user experience design terminology, processes, and practices are coming soon. Stay tuned!

Useful Articles

Here’s a bunch of articles to dive deeper into the theme of usability and user experience design.

Negative Space in Design: Tips and Best Practices

The Anatomy of a Web Page: Basic Elements

Guide into 6 Effective Types of Web Animation

5 Basic Types of Images for Web Design

How to Improve Website Scannability

Error Screens and Messages: UX Design Practices

How to Design Effective Search

Originally written for Tubik Blog