As with most things in life, there are a variety of ways you can slice and dice what defines “good user design” but here are 5 principles of good User Experience Design:
1. Purpose – Good design serves a number of purposes;
2. Understanding – While it is very important to understand what your clients are looking for, to create a meaningful and successful application it is paramount to understand the user;
3. Efficiency – The primary goal of experience design is to make things efficient for the user before making them efficient for the computer;
4. Empathy – Unfortunately, companies often overstate their relevance to the lives consumers which can generate cynicism and undermine trust;
5. Simple & Intuitive – Yes, these are two separate concepts but they are so closely linked that it makes sense to talk about them as one.
Via Peter Hoeve