Apply UI Principles to improve daily work performance.
From enhancing morning routines to elevated energy management, I’m a lover for optimising productivity.
Having spent most of the year embracing remote work culture, my interests and perspective on what productivity means to me has shifted greatly.
It wasn’t so much purely based on how much work one can get done away from office parameters anymore. More so, it was about doing valuable work, preventing burnout, and overall having a healthy relationship with remote work.
While working my day job, I found myself diving into the world of UX and UI. I grew a strong interest in the visual works of the web, such as the components that contribute to an impactful user story and experience and what drives those behaviours.
One of the resources that positively impacted my daily performance mentally, and emotionally was applying the principles of UI.
I’m always looking for the next tool to improve my personal growth daily. The Principles of UI was another effective means to achieving this. From research to reflections, here’s how I adapted the Principles of UI to optimise my daily routine and increase work performance
Consistency — An Essential Component of Excellent UI
In the lens of UI, consistent design is intuitive design. Consistent design means the elements of a user interface are uniform. The way they look, is reflected in the element’s behaviour, significantly contributing to a user’s assumptions of the interface. This consistency enables a sense of ownerhip, control, familiarity and reliability of the interface, overall adding to a user’s usability.
We can apply this particular lens to how we work.
Staying consistent with our work habits and routines can ultimately be an enabler of productive work.
Just as different platforms have their own UI and usability, we all have different ways of working.
One way of working will be different for another. Hence it is incredibly important to design a consistent working routine which resonates with you.
It is no secret that users will spend hours on a particular app. This is because they will build a strong familiarity and be comfortable with certain patterns.
Similar to a productive work environment, for me, I found myself building a way of work that I enjoy. One that is consistent with my daily life routine. Work is an aspect of my life but I make it work for me. I adapt my work routine to my daily life, not the other way round.
Lastly, the beauty of an individualized work routine is that it can always be improved in iterations. As changing and developing human beings, constantly sticking to your routine or finding ways to improve it sets you up to developing positive and consistent habits to help you thrive.
Usability — Placing Users At The Forefront of Interface
In the lens of UI, usability is an important factor that places the user at the forefront of the user interface. By placing the users at the forefront of the product, they will be more comfortable and grow to like the product more, learn quickly and gain a sense of mastery. This UI element instills a sense of control and ownership to its users.
This is the same for optimising your work space.
You are given a set of tasks to accomplish daily, but who is to say that you have to strictly adhere to their recipe of achieving it?
Organise and situate yourself in a position to enable your best working self in order to achieve that task.
For example, I have follow up emails to write on a daily or weekly basis to my team. However, I don’t necessarily send out these emails in the morning. As it is a simple task, I leave it to the end of my day or week, as it suits my work schedule.
Comfortability — The Product UI Should Be Comfortable For The User To Interact
A favorable UI interface is one that eliminates all elements that are not helpful to the user. As a rule of thumb, any irrelevant information introduces noise into the UI. Noise competes with the relevant information and leads to diminishing any relevant visibility and purpose of the UI.
This is one of my favorite UI principles as it highlights the importance of elements that are beneficial to you.
I used this comfortability principle by placing emphasis on selecting a style of work and adjusting my daily routine to make sure I get the most out of it.
Personally, I am an energy enthusiast. In our daily life, we constantly dedicate our energy to various life, work, and social responsibilities. However, giving back to ourselves is a key ingredient to self-care. The comfortability principle advocates for this. From the perspective of work, I adapted this principle to my daily work style. I adjusted my workflow in ways that concentrated on one that benefitted me the most.
My advice to find a way to approach this is to make yourself comfortable as much as possible. Hence ask yourself, where does your energy thrive the most? In quiet or loud environments? Working from home or working in office?
Some other examples:
- If you thrive off discipline: then you can try the pomedoro technique
- Thrive off various times throughout the day: tackle the most challenging tasks during the morning or afternoon, or the time that gets you most excited
- Thrive off external simulation: head to your local cafe and smash out your best work
Lastly, Low Cognitive Load
As a HUGE optimal living enthusiast, I am a big lover of life hacks that enable improved living. I mean, why not?
A significant principle of UI is minimizing overall cognitive load by using chunking techniques.
‘Chunking’ introduced by George Miller human states that the working memory can handle seven-plus-or-minus two “chunks” of information while we’re processing information. Hence why phone numbers are simplified into smaller chunks.
In mobile development, this UI feature is demonstrated in various ways. Some include:
- Avoid asking users for data they have already entered — users can get frustrated
- Avoiding complex terms, jargon or system-oriented terminology for a more user-friendly experience
So when it came to building my optimal workspace, I applied the low cognitive approach to my environment. This can include decluttering of physical items, minimizing clutter in my mental state by doing mindfulness meditation, and writing down the ESSENTIAL tasks only.
Physical items can be associated with mental clutter. As humans, we can place values on objects and physical items. I’ve learned to reduce mental noise by clearing the non-essential physical items in my working environment. The rest is clutter.
I challenged myself to write down only the 3 important tasks throughout the day. I set myself a number of 3 important tasks as it allows me to carefully make conscious decisions on the tasks to focus on mentally. Why do we have long To-Do-Lists that can easily become overloaded and we never make the finish line? A to-do list does not have to be entirely lengthy. In fact, in my mind, a to-do list should be a clever tool in your repetoire and how you can use it effectively.
Reducing my to-do list to be as minimal as possible also declutters any added stress of the ‘responsibilities’ I am obliged to do. I want to make a conscious effort on where I dedicate my cognitive energy.
I hope this enlightens your world of productivity. Just as we optimise UI for mobile developments and our web apps, we too can apply the UI principles to our daily life.
