How to Evaluate and Improve User Experience: Practical UI Design Standards

The ultimate goal of user experience is to make the interface intuitive so users don’t have to think, allowing them to develop a habit of using the product. Continuous product improvement changes the UX, and the final test is always user feedback.

Three fundamental UI design principles are: keep the interface under user control, reduce the user’s memory load, and maintain consistency across the interface.

UI design work is divided into three parts: structure design (conceptual design), interaction design , and visual design . Structure design creates the skeleton of the interface based on user research and task analysis. Interaction design ensures the product is easy to use, emphasizing human‑machine interaction. Visual design covers color, typography, and layout to create a pleasant experience.

A scoring system evaluates UX with three levels (0, 1, 2) for each criterion. A total score is calculated: higher scores indicate poorer UX. Scores 0‑5 (each item ≤2) denote good UX, 5‑10 denote poor UX, and scores above 10 or with two items scoring 2 denote very poor UX.

Structure design criteria include sufficient space for main content, limiting table nesting to three levels, keeping page length under three screens and width under one screen (1024×768 baseline), minimizing or optimizing iframes, and emphasizing important content in prominent positions.

Interaction design criteria cover clear and concise form flows, prominent placement of required fields, mixed input methods with examples, clearly visible buttons, distinct states for visited links, limiting new windows, providing timely feedback and error messages, offering tooltips, fast feedback with cursor focus, clear naming of sections, shallow navigation hierarchy (max three levels), visible search and sorting controls, page load time under five seconds, and giving users control over window size, position, and scrolling.

Visual design criteria focus on a consistent style (with optional skinning), readable fonts (Chinese 12 px SimSun, English 12 px Arial), coordinated animations with loading screens for assets larger than 10 KB, clear and undistorted images, intuitive icons that match real‑world metaphors, pagination for long articles (after 1.5 screens), a limited color palette (no more than five colors, avoiding excessive red/green), prominent shortcuts with clear relationships, and computer‑assisted memory aids such as remembering usernames or passwords.

For mobile UX, the same three directions—structure, interaction, and visual design—apply, with specific attention to platform‑standard fonts on iOS and Android and adhering to Apple’s UI guidelines for the best experience.