9 UX tips and strategies for software developers

This is a key part of UX, and in my experience, nothing other than perfect will do. As Todd DeCapua says in "Why performance engineering is essential to business success," if your page takes more than two seconds to load, people are likely to assume that it has issues and walk away. So it’s important to test performance and latency under real-world conditions, using 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi, and then test while moving between these networks.

Help users orient themselves, and make it easy to go forward and backward easily within your app—not just when scrolling but also after page refreshes. Users should know where they are in the application at any given time, regardless of the actions they’ve taken.

A door doesn’t have a sign saying “Open me." People know that's what a door is for. What they want to know is where it leads. The better approach is to explain what a link does and where it will take them.

Double scrolling occurs when you have two scrolls in the same direction, with one of them in a frame, or when you have a combination of horizontal and vertical scrolls. This is extremely confusing for users and often leads to errors. It also makes it nearly impossible to use the app on a device with a touch/swipe user interface.

Skeuomorphism, the design practice of making items resemble their real-world counterparts, is your friend, but you should only take it so far. Having a disk icon for saving or a printer icon for printing is intuitive, but don’t invent new concepts or representations. Limit yourself to reusing well known visual concepts.

Users access most pages from mobile as well as tablets, laptops, and desktop computers, so your pages should look good and be easy to use on any platform and at any resolution your users might require. Make sure fonts as well as graphics are part of your responsive design, and be sure that you honor any accessibility settings that the user has configured.

Errors happen, but if messages are not clearly visible and informative, they're just an annoyance. […]

Looking at both the strategic and tactical levels where you can affect user experience, engagement, and satisfaction will help you avoid some mistakes and create a truly differentiated product.