The Ten Commandments of UX

There are certain ideas in the world of UX that have stuck. I mean, well and truly stuck. Despite being out of date, proven not to work, or going against everything we know about humans and their cognitive laziness, we just can’t shake them off. 

Within the experience team at Dare, we each have our pet UX peeves that invoke a benevolent rage when mentioned in casual conversation. Babs’ eyes burn when she sees centre aligned body copy; Andy grits his teeth when faced with the suggestion of scroll hijacking; and as for me, I go Full UniKitty! when I hear the words ‘above the fold’.

So we put our heads together and compiled our ten commandments of UX. A means to promote a UX way of life that is good and pure. Sadly, there wasn’t enough budget for a stone carver, so we decided to publish them online (which will probably outlast the stone carving anyway, and it’s much easier to lug down mountains). 

1. Thou shalt not confuse a button with a link

A button performs an action, it does something. A link takes you somewhere. Simple? Ok, so there is a slight grey area around major calls to action like ‘Checkout’, but generally speaking, we should reserve the all-powerful button for actions and not a bog-standard ‘read more’.

2. Thou shalt not centre align the body copy

It’s difficult to read as it stops you being able to easily scan the content to find what you need. And Lord knows we humans don’t need any more reasons not to read something. We’re already reading the bare minimum, so do yourself a favour and LEFT ALIGN.

3. Thou shalt not autoplay video

There are so many reasons not to do this. It can cause all sorts of embarrassment as you fumble to turn the sound off as it starts blaring across the office, it distracts you from the task in hand, and it’s a bit arrogant to assume your visitors want to watch it in the first place. If in doubt, always leave the control in the hands of the user.

4. Thou shall not disrupt a person’s journey with overzealous offers of help

All those pesky chat pop ups that open the moment you hit the page. My rule of thumb is that if you wouldn’t behave that way in person, don’t do it in digital. You’re in a shop, and the sales assistant is looking for some sort of verbal or non-verbal clue that you could do with some assistance. Maybe you look a little lost, or are frantically rifling through a rack of jumpers. Learn to read your customers’ digital body language and offer help only when appropriate.

5. Thou shalt not hijack the scroll

Luckily for Andy, you don’t see so much of this around any more. We humans like a little consistency in our digital interfaces. Scrolling is such a universal behaviour, so mucking about with it causes confusion. And as this guy so eloquently puts it, confusion kills usability.

6. Thou shalt not hide content in a carousel

You are sitting in a big stakeholder meeting discussing your website homepage and somebody drops the C-bomb. You look across at your digital client and you both start crying on the inside. Carousels. Carousels are a by-product of a completely outdated ‘fold obsession’. Check the data. It’s very unlikely that people visiting your site are going to pause and flick through all seven of the marketing messages in your homepage carousel. Take that budget, give it to your best UX content strategist and let them decide how best to use it.

7. ... Hamburger menus don’t fucking work

They keep going into user testing and the answer keeps coming back the same. “But our customers are different, they’re so much more digitally savvy!”, I hear you cry. Digitally savvy they might be, but they’re also cognitively lazy, so spell it out for them and forever be their friend. M.E.N.U.

8. Thou shalt not write FAQs

If you need FAQs then you haven’t done a good enough job on the rest of your content. If they are indeed frequently asked, then weave them into your content. No extra clicks or pages to scan.

9. Thou shalt not hide important information in a tool tip

See FAQs. If it’s important enough to include, then make it visible without having to interact.

10. Thou shalt not purchase cheap Post-it notes

Nothing hurts a UXer quite like seeing their super productive, collaborative workshop output flittering to the ground one cheap ‘sticky note’ at a time. Each one is like a tiny stab to the heart. If you have committed any of the UX crimes above, redeem yourself by buying your favourite UXer a pack of genuine 3M Post-it notes, and all will be forgiven….

Disclaimer: one of the equally wonderful and infuriating things about UX is that there aren’t really any hard and fast rules, and you can argue many of the above commandments from both sides. So consider this a bit like the right to parley in the Code of the Pirate Brethren: “It’s more of what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.”

Roz Thomas is director of experience at Dare