The Core Principles of Beautiful User Experience with Sven Lenaerts

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Fueled – Sven Lenaerts

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About the Episode

Everyone talks about creating beautiful, simple apps, but I frankly still have no clue where to start. Well today’s guest breaks down the core principles of user experience and how you can apply each one to your next project. Also, listen to the part of the show where he breaks down how to use the pomodoro timer to break out of the creative funk.

Sven Lenaerts is the Product Manager at Fueled.

Show Notes

The Core Principles of User Experience

Connecting design, development and all the necessary elements needed to come up with great mobile products all equate to user experience. Focusing on each of the core principles separately will help you come up with better products:

Psychology – we need to understand what user psychology is because our design should inspire the user to be driven to accomplish a particular action.
Usability–great apps are usually very simple. Focus on one particular thing (the core values of your products) and do it really well.
Design – User interfaces usually makes users feel a particular way so you should plan out your interface designs. Colors, for example, should be well-thought of as they can connote different meanings.
Copywriting –we are under the impression that users are only focused on design and does not read text anymore but it still impacts experience. An example would be your decision in naming a button as ‘Save’ or ‘Continue’ may affect your conversion and retention rates. Actively thinking about this component will help your improve your products.
Analytics – when it comes to testing products and figuring out what works and what doesn’t, test more than just one item. Changing just a color of a button might work for big sites but for regular apps, you need to tweak whole structures and other functionalities to see how the combined changes will affect user behavior.

How to Use the Pomodoro Timer

There will be instances wherein we will need to have our creative juices flowing in a short amount of time due to deadlines and this is where the Pomodoro technique can be used. The concept behind the Pomodoro Technique is spending short intervals of time paying dedicated attention to something you’re doing so you can be productive in a short amount of time.

Find out what you want to achieve – what is the problem that you are trying to solve? Write it down in paper and start gathering inspiration, like browsing the web, to start solving that problem. Do this for 25 minutes to get your creative juices flowing.
After this, take a quick break for 5 minutes – take a walk, grab a drink, step outside.
Then for the next 25 minutes, continue what you have started. Write down all your ideas, including the one you think is terrible.
Then it’s time for a longer break as you need to spend 35 minutes doing something completely irrelevant – go for a run, cook dinner, etc.
After that, spend another 25 minutes to get back to finish where you have started.

The mental breaks are crucial because it replenishes the brain of the energy you need to focus and complete the task at hand.

What advice would you give to anyone looking to build a mobile app?

Fail early, fail often and believe that somebody you are going to get across that million dollar idea. If you’re not ashamed of your first release, you have waited too long to release your product.