There’s no denying it, design is a key factor in helping brands to differentiate and become more competitive. UX is the backbone for enhancing consumers perceptions, emotions and responses to a company’s product, system or service. Good design:
Enhances brand loyalty, creating an emotional connection through meaningful and relevant experiences, drives consumers intent to purchase, bridging the gap between products and customers’ needs and wants, captures the users attention by effectively communicating information.
Perhaps the most important element of good design is its ability to make digital products intuitive and easy to use. But what exactly does this mean and how can you achieve this for your digital product?
What on earth is Fitts Law?
Question: Do you ever get frustrated when you can’t find the button to bookmark a page or turn your screens brightness up?
I think we’ve all had this problem, not just grannies who’ve bought their first iPhone.
Well, Fitts Law alleviates this problem. Fitts law is a predictive model that determines the amount of time it takes for a specific user to move their mouse or cursor to a target area on a website. If you don’t quite understand, let’s take an example.
The perfect example of Fitt’s Law in action is the Touch Bar on Apple’s MacBook Pro. It’s a touchscreen above the keyboard which speeds up a users experience when using Google, bookmarking a page, changing screen brightness and more. These options change depending on what page you are browsing on your laptop.
This touch bar isn’t just a fancy gimmick. Apple have used this to simplify the users experience, by placing many commonly used settings in one compact location. As Fitts law suggests, the further away and smaller an object or button is for a user, the harder it is for them to click on it, thus the touch bar is a genius method for improving usability and intuitiveness.
Here at iNQ Digital, we implement Fitts Law into each digital product that we design. Take a look at our latest project:
http://www.inqdigital.com/work/
We were recently tasked with designing a mobile application for a data heavy financial product. Our main aim was to create a beautiful user experience and Fitts law was an essential element in our design process. We implemented this via the toggle bars shown in the image. As you can see, on the Cards page, users are able to easily switch between their cards. On the Balance page, users are able to easily switch between this month and this week. Both of the options are in one compact location. This might not seem like a big deal, but trust me, it is.
If your customers find it difficult to complete actions on your application or website, they will not use your service again, or recommend it to any friends. If they can’t work out how to check their balance or switch to another credit card, then why would they want to use your service again?
If you want to retain and gain new customers, you need to ensure that they have a positive experience when using your app or website. Utilise Fitts Law to ensure its easy for the user to navigate through pages and be able to use the services that your digital product offers.
Find out more about our design process: