There are a myriad of directions you can move towards when it comes to UX design. You can focus on the design elements to be more pleasing to the eye, you can improve the findability of your site, or you can focus on providing a rewarding navigation path for the users just to name a few things. It’s a better idea to focus on some of the more important rules for UX design. Here are five that you should pay attention to.

Rule #1 Meet the Expectations of Your User

Even if the goal is to improve the experience of the users, design projects can often sidetrack and lead to a big departure from the primary focus. If you neglect everything else, the most important rule that you should follow is to meet the expectations of the user. Where did the user come from and what did the user come to your website for? Can you deliver on their expectations while also meeting the goals you have for your website? Finding solutions to these questions will help you design an experience that is rewarding to the users.

Rule #2 Simplify Complex or Confusing Elements

What may seem obvious to you may not be so obvious to users. You want to figure out what aspects of your design is too complex or confusing for its own good. The less is more approach is the way to go if your goal is to provide a user centric design. You don’t want your users to think or click more than they have to. Make everything as intuitive and simple as possible, even if the element itself is complex (like a built-in web app).

Rule #3 Draw Engagement with Your Content or Message

Without getting the attention of your users, they’ll end up randomly browsing your website. You want to avoid this by using some simple techniques like creating a headline (in a font that’s much regular than the content) that gets their attention, using visual cues to draw the eye, and creating great lead-ins that transition into the content or message. Using these techniques focuses the users into a specific direction to help them get what they were looking for while also helping you meeting your goals with design rules.

Rule #4 Make Improving Usability a Strong Concern

Because users spend hours surfing a web that’s full of clutter they crave something that’s easy on the eyes. That’s where you come in. You want to improve the usability of your website by creating an intuitive UI, creating enough space between text/images, having a clean layout, properly formatting your content, and making sure that loading is quick. Working on all of these design rules will make it feel like using your website is seamless and even relaxing to use.

Rule #5 Provide an Experience that’s Unique to Your Brand

These days, everyone seems to copy each other blindly simply because if everyone is doing it, it probably works. In many cases that would be true. But if one of your goals is to make your brand stand out, you must give your users a unique experience that they won’t get from any of your competitors. A good example might be that your ecommerce store allows users to rotate a product 360 degrees to analyze every aspect of it before making a purchase. It’s up to you to come up with a way to deliver a unique experience that will get your audience to remember your brand.