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User Experience

lastmod 2026-05-05created 2014-02-1927 edits

User experience (使用者經驗, User Experience [*], UX for short) refers to the overall experience a user feels and thinks about while using a system, product, or service directly or indirectly. It is not merely satisfaction with functions or procedures, but a valuable experience that the user comes to know through participation, use, observation, and interaction in every perceivable aspect. Creating a positive user experience is an important task in industrial design, software engineering, marketing, and business administration, and it is a key factor that can bring satisfaction of user needs, improved brand loyalty, and success in the market. A negative user experience can occur when users fail to achieve their intended goal, or when, even if they achieve it, the experience is emotionally, rationally, or economically inconvenient or provokes a negative reaction.

The academic and practical work of developing and creating a positive user experience is called user experience design, and depending on the area it is mainly researched and developed in fields such as product design, interaction design, user interface design, information architecture, and usability. However, user experience is based on the core principle that it must be approached from a multidisciplinary, holistic perspective across many fields.

Categories

Tips for better signup/login UX

Brief summary:

  • Autofocus the first field
  • Set special keyboards for mobile (email, tel, url, num)
  • Validate field values immediately
  • Make labels clickable
  • Show requirements while entering a password (remove when leaving)
  • Let users reveal the password or enter it twice
  • Don't use Sign In and Sign Up together: Sign Up & Log In, Register & Sign in
  • Make it easy to switch between Sign in and Sign Up
  • Allow login with Email rather than Username
  • When the password is wrong, tell users which requirement it failed
  • Carry over the previously entered email in the password reset/recovery window

Other opinions:

  • Don't split the email input into ID/domain
  • Don't force a mix of uppercase/special characters/digits in passwords
  • Don't limit password length or allowed characters
  • Don't force periodic password changes

Brunch Book: Teaching yourself design

Practical UX improvements for startups surviving without a designer

Using a component library like Material UI may be the easy route, but it provides basic building blocks while designing the overall user flow still takes separate work

If you need to invest your time in making the product unique, how can you define a good user experience as quickly as possible?

The blank page is a trap

  • Don't stare at a blank canvas wondering "What should the email input field look like?"
  • You can use patterns already proven by large companies
    • Saves time and can improve the user experience
  • Approaches to avoid
    • Design award sites – original, but no guarantee of usability
    • Dribbble – focused on aesthetics, unrelated to functionality
  • Approaches to reference
    • Competitor sites – create an account and record with screenshots
    • Pattern collection sites – quick references on PageFlows, Mobbin, etc.
  • Note common UI patterns
    • Common UI elements such as email and password fields and confirmation flows
    • Visual and layout rules:
      • Center-aligned forms
      • Responsive design
      • Clear buttons
      • Logo at the top
  • Intentional friction
    • Some companies ask for credit card details → a strategy to secure serious users
    • A fast experience is not always good

Define the goal clearly

  • The goal is not just "build a signup page" → but "make signup as easy as possible"
  • Turn it into a question: "How can we make it easy for users to sign up?"
  • Example solutions
    • Show password strength while typing
    • Give a reason to fill out the signup form
  • Further questions
    • Log in right after signup vs log in after email verification
    • Show a confirmation page after signup vs show a success message

Consider edge cases (exceptional situations)

  • Real users don't behave as expected → they rush, ignore instructions, and make mistakes
  • Check for possible problems with questions:
    • What happens if a user makes a mistake while typing quickly?
    • Are errors in input fields clearly communicated to the user?
  • Fixes when problems occur
    • Carelessness when creating a password → possible account lockout later
      • → Add a "confirm password field" requiring re-entry
    • Password mismatch → show an error message
      • → Show a warning immediately when the second password is entered

Use AI to find UX problems

  • Tools like ChatGPT can be used to check for UX problems
  • Not perfect, but allows fast and effective checks
  • Useful prompt examples
    • Red Team vs Blue Team:
      • "Where might users get stuck in this signup flow?"
      • "Why is this design intuitive?"
    • Industry standards: "How do top SaaS companies design their signup flows?"
    • Edge cases: "What happens if a user mistypes their email and doesn't notice?"

Other UX improvement tips

  • Set metrics
    • Conversion rate, user retention, user satisfaction, etc. → evaluate performance with objective metrics
  • Use simple colors
    • Primary color, secondary color, accent color → Coolors recommended
  • Use friendly language
    • Instead of "Database error" → "Your changes could not be saved"

Conclusion

  • Speed matters at a startup → no perfectionism
  • In UX, usability comes before originality
    • An intuitive, clear user flow is more effective than a complex, original design
  • Innovate only on core value → use proven patterns for the rest
  • Following patterns users already know reduces the learning burden

The 3 bottlenecks that slow down UX decision-making

What holds back UX decision-making in the field can be seen as three main moments.

  1. The first bottleneck is when ideas stay only in documents/meetings. Everything seems agreed upon in words and writing, but it never gets down to information architecture (IA) or user flows. If this stage drags on, all subsequent work becomes time spent interpreting "planning done only in words." When interpretation grows instead of decisions, speed drops.
  2. The second bottleneck is when the structure exists but doesn't carry through to screens/prototypes. The flow has been drawn, but if moving it into actual screens takes a lot of effort, testing gets delayed. When testing is delayed, the point of checking "Is this the right flow?" also gets pushed back. Then it goes back to meetings, and the back-and-forth increases.
  3. The third bottleneck is when the screens are out but the rationale for "why this is good UX" is weak. Even with a deliverable, if there's no agreement, the discussion starts over from the beginning. At this point the team ends up fighting over taste in front of the screens. That is why 'something explainable' speeds up decisions more than 'something made.'

6 tools to resolve the bottlenecks

Here are 6 AI designer tools to help resolve these 3 bottlenecks. They are divided not as "tools that generate screens well" but by which stage's back-and-forth they reduce. From idea to execution, the selection criterion is what part they shorten. Following the categories below, you can find more quickly where your team gets stuck.

  • Tools that shorten idea → structuring: Relume, Uizard
  • Tools that shorten structure → working design flow: Figma Make, Stitch
  • Tools that shorten design → actual screens (production/prototype): Framer AI, v0

Laws of UX

  1. Aesthetic-Usability Effect
  2. Cognitive Bias
  3. Cognitive Load
  4. Selective Attention
  5. Working Memory
  6. Choice Overload
  7. Hick's Law
  8. Mental Model
  9. Doherty Threshold
  10. Fitts's Law
  11. Flow
  12. Goal-Gradient Effect
  13. Zeigarnik Effect
  14. Chunking
  15. Miller's Law
  16. Serial Position Effect
  17. Law of Common Region
  18. Law of Proximity
  19. Law of Simplicity / Law of Prägnanz
  20. Law of Similarity
  21. Law of Uniform Connectedness
  22. Jakob's Law
  23. Paradox of the Active User
  24. Peak-End Rule
  25. Von Restorff Effect / Isolation Effect
  26. Primacy-Recency Effect → Serial Position Effect
  27. Tesler's Law / Law of Conservation of Complexity
  28. Postel's Law / Robustness Principle
  29. Occam's Razor
  30. Pareto Principle / 80/20 Rule
  31. Parkinson's Law

Documentation

[Highly recommended] Development of cognitive-response-tailored UI/UX technology for cultural enjoyment by the smart senior generation - Content service senior mode UI/UX guidelines
http://www.initiondata.kr/SeniorUX/Senior%20UX_Spread.pdf
Senior_UX_Spread.pdf
UI/UX guidelines for services targeting seniors. They reportedly reflect experimental results on measuring seniors' cognitive responses and survey results on the current state of seniors' cultural enjoyment, and were written based on a literature review of domestic and international accessibility standards, related reports, research papers, and more.
Distribution and Utilization Guidelines for E-Government Website UI·UX
Ministry of the Interior and Safety > Work guide > Digital Government Innovation Office > Informatization standards and guidelines archive
https://mois.go.kr/frt/bbs/type001/commonSelectBoardArticle.do?bbsId=BBSMSTR_000000000045&nttId=69451
Distribution_and_Utilization_Guidelines_for_E-Government_Website_UI_UX.pdf

See also

Favorite site

Guidelines

Article

References

  1. Sample movie: Human_Interface_Guideline_1~4.zip ↩

  2. Distribution_and_Utilization_Guidelines_for_E-Government_Website_UI_UX.pdf ↩

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