Good and Bad Design, Explained by UX Principles

Design surrounds us all day long. But often, we don’t even notice it. As part of the course “User Experience & Interaction Design” we were asked to keep a UX diary: short notes on moments when we came across good or bad design.

Here are three that stuck with me the most – each explained by a UX principle. Keeping this diary taught me a lot about what separates good design from bad.

Observation 1: The Hotel I Didn’t Book

I wanted to book a hotel on Booking.com. An easy task, I thought. Then I opened the detail page of a hotel and was overwhelmed by the amount of room options: rooms in different price categories, with or without air conditioning, with or without breakfast, with or without free cancellation, and endless combinations of all of these.

Instead of picking a room, I postponed the booking altogether. Not because I didn’t like any of the rooms, but because I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choices.

More choice sounds great at first glance. In practice, it can drain energy or – in cases like mine – lead to no decision at all. A UX principle called Hick's Law describes exactly this.

Hick’s Law: The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

→ More on Hick’s Law

Observation 2: How I Ended Up Booking a Room on Airbnb

A few days later I booked a room through Airbnb instead. And the experience felt like night and day. The interface is extremely clean. I wasn’t faced with hundreds of decisions at once. Rather than facing hundreds of decisions at once, I was guided through the options step by step. This is a UX principle of Chunking in action.

Chunking: Individual pieces of information are broken down and grouped together into a meaningful whole.

→ More on Chunking

Observation 3: The Headphones That Just worked

I bought a new pair of Bluetooth headphones. I took them out of the box, switched them on, and connected them to my phone – without reading the instructions. It made me realise I can’t remember the last time I read instructions before using a product. You get used to things just working the way you expect them to, or to be guided step by step by an app. This behaviour is captured by another UX principle, the Paradox of the Active User.

Paradox of the Active User: Users almost never read manuals but start using the software immediately.

→ More on the Paradox of the Active User

Where to go from here

If you want to explore more of these principles yourself, lawsofux.com is a great place to start.