Building a strong user experience means understanding and integrating the foundations of the craft, and in this article I aim to learn alongside you the principle of mapping, something that greatly affects the way users interact with interfaces, both in enjoyable, and unenjoyable experiences!

What is Mapping?

“Define the technical relationship between A & B as logically as possible”

Mapping dictates the relationships between actions that our user takes, and provides a clear Action > Result blueprint, an example of this being a speaker knob wheel.

Turn the knob wheel right, and the volume increases, turn it left, and it goes down. This is an example of natural mapping, where the user’s choice is clear and visibly related to the result, providing them with immediate feedback. This would work just as well for moving a dial up and down thanks to the physical and cultural analogies that surround such an action, but say we made our users pull towards and away from them, would this mapping be as obvious?

How does Mapping affect UX?

Creating confusing mappings leads to errors and a rise in questions that our users have, eventually resulting in loss of value for our products.

Mapping problems become increasingly abundant as we evolve as a technological society, and we can only imagine the ingenuity that we will have to employ as designers to adopt the new landscape of UX that will feature such things as AR, VR and more! I for one am very much excited to see how we tackle this challenge and change the way we interact with technology!

What can we learn from good Mapping?

Building logical and natural relationships between the actions our users take with our products and their desired results is incredibly important, as it lets them achieve their tasks with minimal disruption or error.

In Summary

Armed with a greater understanding of the principle of mapping, we can now create experiences for our users and are not only optimised, but also easy to use and navigate with little thought or cognitive load being put on our users, the ideal UX!

I’m in the process of writing on 2 more foundational principles of UX for you, so keep an eye on this space or drop a follow to check them out!

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