Out of sight out of mind quite well sums up this foundational principle of UX, and in order for us to produce the best experiences that we can for our users, we must fully comprehend visibility, what it is, and how it affects our users interaction with what we create.

What is Visibility?

“Make important parts visible”

Visibility, also known as discoverability, is the ease in which users can navigate through a product and find what it is they are looking for (most often a certain feature).

Say you’re getting a phone call on your brand new iPhone 14XL Pro Max (I’m sure they’ll give it a better name), but all you’re shown on the screen is 3 little dots… Now, the designers’ thoughts here were to prevent errors and make sure people didn’t accidentally hang up or make other mistakes, but in doing so, they’ve confused the user by not following the principle of visibility — Make important parts visible.

How does Visibility affect UX?

When the user has to spend cognitive battery to perform a task, it means spending less time on your product, and possibly valuing it less — resulting in failed conversions and loss of users. We don’t design to hassle our users, we design to do the opposite, to alleviate them from excess effort and to make reaching their goal as simple as possible. The doherty threshold plays its part here as well, as when users are able to interact with something at a pace they prefer, usage and productivity greatly increases!

What can we learn from good Visibility?

Designing for visibility means applying many learned principles, such as Miller’s law (Average users can only keep 7 +/-2 items in their working memory), in order to create experiences that carefully guide the user to where they want to go without cluttering their view, ultimately providing an even worse cognitive load.

Good visibility design applies behavioural science understandings such as colour theory, cognitive biases, psychological principles and many others that come to the designer with practice, as well as from a voracious appetite for learning!

In Summary

Creating experiences that embody the foundations of UX means that we are giving our users the opportunity to utilise our products in the way they are intended to be, without any pesky interferences or issues slipping them up midway, and now thanks to us better understanding the principle of visibility, we are better equipped to achieve this!

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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