UX design process is systematic, iterative, and structured series of actions that is necessary for designing a product’s user experience. It helps teams to follow easy-to-replicate protocols to deliver products while meeting the organization’s quality standards.

Speed up your design process by building prototypes with the same UI components that devs build apps with. Meet tight deadlines and release quality products. Discover UXPin Merge.

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What is UX Design?

UX design (user experience design) is a digital product design methodology to solve a human problem. This human-centered design approach ensures design teams make decisions based on users’ needs rather than assumptions.

Empathy is at the core of this human-centered approach. UX designers must understand what a user wants to achieve using a digital product and the pain points they might encounter along the way.

What is a UX Design Process?

A UX design process is an iterative, step-by-step methodology UX design teams use to complete projects. It is derivative from a design thinking process. As in design thinking process, UX designers spend time empathizing with the user, learning about the business, context, and defining problem scope.

What’s the Difference Between UX Design Process and Design Thinking Process?

The design thinking process is a five-step process for developing user-centered solutions to human problems. A UX design process is a multi-stage, end-to-end methodology that incorporates design thinking for delivering UX projects.

While companies base their UX design process on design thinking principles, the steps and methods might differ slightly.

Why is a UX Design Process Important?

Here are some reasons why companies standardize a UX design process:

• Ensures projects meet quality and consistency standards
• Ensures designers design solutions without bias and assumptions
• Enables designers to test and iterate on many ideas to find the best solution
• Promotes collaboration between teams and departments
• Reduces the risk of rework by following set protocols
• Allows stakeholders to track a project’s progress 
• Identifies hidden risks and opportunities

What are 7 Steps of UX Design Process?

A typical UX design process has 7 UX design steps, from defining the product’s goal to design handoff and making sure everything works as intended. 

Step 1: Define project & scope

The first step of a UX design process defines the project’s goal and scope with team members and stakeholders from multiple departments–usually consisting of representatives from:

• Business – explains business requirements and goals for the project.
• Design – communicate what they need to do prior to design and manage expectations.
• Product – shares context, help plan the timeline and resources needed for design.
• Technical – define feasibility and technical constraints of a UX design.

This early design phase aims to identify the problem the new product or feature must solve. The product team will also outline the project’s scope, plan, deliverables, and delivery date.

Step 2: Perform UX Research

Next, designers research the problem to find possible solutions. During the research phase, UX designers conduct several types of research, including:

• User research: Studies potential users to understand who they are, what they need, and what context they operate. They may invite focus groups to explore user needs or do a desk research. The outcome of UX research are user personas, user journey maps, and so on.
• Market research: Analyzes the market to determine market segmentation and product differentiation.
• Competitive research: A competitive analysis to understand how competitors solve similar problems and identify opportunities.
• Product research: Analyzing insights and analytics from an existing product to understand user behavior.

Step 3: Create rough draft of a solution

With a clear understanding of their users, market, and competitive landscape, designers can run a brainstorming session to make initial drafts of what a solution would look like, which is often referred to as the ideation phase. Designers may use paper and pen during early visual design planning or jump straight to digital UX tools.

Some of these low-fidelity techniques include:

• Sketching: Hand-drawn sketches of user interfaces
• Paper prototyping: Paper versions of a prototype
• Wireframing: Digital versions of paper prototypes featuring basic lines and shapes
• Low-fidelity prototypes: Digital prototypes using wireframes to test user flows and information architecture

The team might also use a design sprint to solve a specific problem with their stakeholders or other team members.

Step 4: Design high-fidelity mockups and prototypes

Next, the UI design team converts wireframes into mockups to build high-fidelity prototypes that look and function like the final product. If the company has a design system, designers will use the UI component library to build interactive prototypes.

Step 5: Conduct usability testing

The primary purpose of high-fidelity prototypes is usability testing. UX designers test these prototypes with real users to:

• Validate ideas
• Identify usability issues
• Test accessibility

Steps 2 to 5 are iterable. Using test results, designers return to stage two or three to iterate on ideas until they find a solution that meets desirability, viability, and feasibility criteria.

It’s important to note that even though user testing is the fifth stage, design teams conduct multiple tests throughout the UX design process to validate ideas and hypotheses. These tests include internal testing with team members or sharing ideas and prototypes with stakeholders for feedback.

Step 6: Arrange Design Handoff

The second to last stage of the UX design process is the design handoff, where the design team hands over the final design and its documentation to the development team to start the engineering process.

Although the design handoff is near the end of the UX process, designers and engineers start collaborating during ideation to streamline the transition from design to development while ensuring designs meet technical constraints. Their collaboration is facilitated through different tools that make communication easier.

Read about 5 Mistakes that Kill Collaboration Between Designers and Developers.

Step 7: Launch your Product

The final stage of the UX design process is a launch and a clear inspection of the new release. It’s time to ensure that the new release meets the project’s business goals, user experience, and accessibility requirements.

Best Practices for a Great UX Design Process

While the UX design process might not be the same for all organizations, projects, or teams, there are some best practices designers can follow to streamline the process.

Apply User-Centric Thinking

Designers must keep end-users at the center of design decisions to ensure designs meet users’ needs. This human-centered mindset delivers products that users want while reducing costs on irrelevant UI components and features.

Practice Empathy

One of the ways to maintain a user-centered mindset is by empathizing with users. As designers progress through the UX design process, they can drift from focusing on users to designing features that look great but don’t serve a specific user need.

By practicing empathy throughout the UX design process, designers stay focused on solving users’ pain points.

Build a Design System

Design systems can significantly reduce time to market while enhancing consistency and coherency across the organization. If you can’t afford to build a design system from scratch, consider using a themeable open-source component library like MUI or Bootstrap.

UXPin has built-in design libraries, including Material Design UI, Bootstrap, iOS, and Foundation so that design teams can build mockups and prototypes quickly.

Take prototyping to the next level using UXPin Merge–a tool that connects UXPin’s design editor to a component library, so designers can build fully functioning prototypes their dev’s components.

Communicate and Collaborate with Devs

Communication and collaboration are vital for a successful UX design process. Designers must connect with other design teams and open communication with engineers, business managers, product teams, and stakeholders.

DesignOps can help facilitate better communication and collaboration while streamlining other time-consuming operational and administrative tasks.

Enhancing the UX Design Process With UXPin

A successful UX process relies on tools that allow design teams to make changes and iterate fast. UXPin is an end-to-end design solution, providing designers with features for every stage of the UX design process.

Fully Interactive Prototypes

Designers can use one of UXPin’s built-in design libraries or import their dev’s component library to start prototyping immediately. Because UXPin is code-based, prototypes feature higher fidelity and more functionality than image-based design tools.

Quality User Testing

With code-based prototypes, UX designers can conduct accurate, more comprehensive tests. Better quality testing means fewer errors and usability issues make it into the final product.

Insightful Stakeholder Feedback

Stakeholder feedback is crucial during the iterative process of UX design. If prototypes aren’t intuitive, stakeholders battle to understand design concepts that could impact buy-in and funding.

Whether you’re using UXPin, prototypes have significantly higher fidelity and interactivity than other popular design tools. In turn, designers enjoy meaningful, actionable feedback from stakeholders.

Level up Your UX Design Process

UXPin Merge allows designers to get better results during testing while streamlining the design handoff, thus reducing time to market and costs. 

Instead of designing from scratch, designers drag and drop components to build fully functioning code-based prototypes that look and work like the final product. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post UX Design Process – An Actionable, 7-Step Guide appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Design handoff tools facilitate smoother transitions from design to development. These tools provide engineers with practical documentation, high-fidelity prototypes, and features to communicate and collaborate effectively.

Without an effective design handoff process, designers and engineers spend hours, days, or even weeks of back and forth trying to bridge the gap between design and development.

Streamline your design handoffs by designing with the same components that your developers use to build the end-product. UXPin Merge allows you to bring components from npm, Storybook, or Git repo and drag and drop them in the editor to assemble advanced prototypes. Learn more about UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

UXPin Merge

With UXPin Merge, you can design and hand over code-based high-fidelity prototypes built with React or Storybook components. This single source of truth enables designers and engineers to work with the same UI elements which speeds up time to market.

Once prototypes are ready, designers share them with engineers who using the Spec mode can see the documentation, style guide, comments, as well as copy the JSX code of components that’s fully usable in development.

Since UXPin Merge makes you design with components that are fully coded, you can be certain that you get quality code and no miscommunication.

Check out Design Handoff: What it Looks Like with UXPin Merge for a detailed look at how Merge can optimize your design process and handoffs.

Zeplin

Zeplin is a popular design handoff tool making it easy for designers, engineers, and other team members to communicate and collaborate effectively. It integrates with collaboration tools like Jira, Slack, Trello, and Microsoft Teams.

With Zeplin, designers can create user flows with annotations to provide engineers with context. A style guide allows designers to save colors, text styles, spacing/layouts, design tokens, and components.

The tool also includes code snippets and other styling so engineers can use to kickstart development.

Marvel

Marvel is a popular design tool with similar design handoff features to Zeplin. You can use Marvel-generated mockups to build prototypes or import from other popular design tools.

Marvel generates starter code and CSS from mockups to save time and bridge the gap between design and development. Engineers can inspect each component and download assets from Marvel, avoiding miscommunication and switching between tools.

Sympli

Sympli is a purpose-built version control and design handoff tool. You could say that Sympli is the designer equivalent of the component directory Storybook.

It integrates with popular prototyping tools to sync UI elements and design systems. Teams can review and collaborate on different elements to provide explanation and context.

Engineers can also view a style guide, spec mode, and specs and assets to start the development process. One of Sympli’s biggest benefits is its ability to sync with IDEs through plugins for Xcode and Android Studio for mobile app development.

Avocode

Avocode creates a design handoff file for the development team. Its “one-click” integrations save designers time by generating downloadable assets, spec mode, and snippets for ten code languages.

Another great feature is Avocode’s design review, allowing designers to invite other teams and stakeholders to critique designs and provide feedback. Designers can iterate on feedback and resync the changes creating a new version so that everyone is aware of the updates.

Design teams can use Avocode’s review feature to discuss inconsistencies and fixes.

InVision

InVision is a design tool with similar features to UXPin. Invision lets you prototype from InVision Studio designs or import files from other popular image-based design tools.

Inspect is InVision’s design handoff tool that automatically generates design specs and code snippets. Designers and engineers can also communicate via comments to keep collaboration and feedback in one place.

With Inspect’s Storybook integration, InVision will inform engineers which components exist in code repositories, saving time searching libraries and preventing accidental rework.

InVision also integrates with software like Jira, Confluence, Trello, and others to sync communication and project management tasks.

Framer

Framer is a leayout design tool with a code editor to sync and edit React components–a fantastic feature for developers but doesn’t help designers with limited code knowledge and experience.

Designers can’t edit the component’s props in the properties panel as they would in UXPin. Instead, they have to make changes in Framer’s code editor–again, not ideal for those with limited code knowledge.

Designers can, however, use these React components for prototyping and testing, giving designers better fidelity and functionality than other popular image-based tools.

Framer’s high fidelity and functionality make design handoffs smooth and efficient. Engineers can copy code from React components to build new products and UIs.

While Framer’s code-based design technology is excellent for React products, it lacks features for other popular front-end frameworks that UXPin’s Storybook integration provides.

Spectrr

Spectrr is a design specification tool with automated annotations for engineers to inspect components and layouts, including colors, fonts, spacing, and more.

Designers can include notes for each component and instructions for creating responsive layouts. Spectrr also generates a complete CSS file for the project, giving engineers an excellent starter template to begin development.

Adobe XD

Adobe XD got discontinued. It was a widely used UX design and prototyping tool. Designers can hand off to engineers via Adobe XD’s Share feature, including specifications and CSS starter code.

Designers and engineers could collaborate using comments and Adobe XD integrated with popular project management software like Jira, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and others. 

Adobe XD’s Share feature was limited by comparison to other design handoff tools, but you could sync designs to Zeplin for more features and better collaboration.

Figma

Figma is arguably one of the most popular design tools. The original release was similar to Sketch but has since evolved to offer prototyping and testing functionality.

In Figma’s Share Mode, engineers can inspect elements and generate code snippets for web, iOS, and Android. You can also install third-party plugins to generate code for frameworks like React, Flutter, Vue, Ember, Angular, etc.

Figma allows you to add “developer seats” to your design projects, so you don’t have to pay to invite and collaborate with engineers. They have complete access to the project and provide feedback through Figma’s comments feature.

UXPin is a code-based tool that renders HTML, CSS, and Javascript rather than vector files like traditional image-based design tools. The benefit for designers and developers is less drift and realistic designs and expectations.

Why are Design Handoffs so Challenging?

One of the biggest design handoff challenges is prototype fidelity and functionality. Designers must use various tools and methods to replicate code-based features–for example, GIFs and videos to display transitions and animations.

Unrealistic Expectations

The problem with these methods is that they don’t have technical constraints, creating unrealistic expectations for designers and product teams. They’re also not part of the actual prototype, so engineers have to go from a prototype to an external file to watch the video animation and see how it all fits together.

Poor Image-Based Tools for Rendering Code

Another issue is converting a design to code. Most image-based design tools offer plugins or applications that generate an HTML template with accompanying CSS. Designers think this is sufficient, but engineers can’t replicate the designs with this code–the two teams are speaking different languages with insufficient interpretation.

Technical Constraints

Another cause of design drift is the rendering engine of the browser or device displaying your product. The most common example is the drift between colors and gradients from mockups to final code.

Too Many Design Handoff Tools

And lastly, design handoffs often include multiple tools for design files, prototypes, documentation, assets, and collaboration. With everything spread across different locations and platforms, handoffs are prone to mistakes and errors.

These are just a few common design handoff challenges that cause friction between design and development. Many of these issues will be familiar if you’re experienced with the handoff process. Luckily, there are design handoff tools to help expedite and streamline the process.

Better Design Handoffs with UXPin Merge

Why use multiple design handoff tools when you can do everything with UXPin Merge? Streamline design workflows, build fully functioning prototypes, enhance collaboration, and improve your product’s user experience with a single tool. Try UXPin Merge to see how easy product development gets when everything is connected. Request access now.

The post Top 10 Design Handoff Tools to Try in 2024 appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Creating wireframes is a critical step in the UX design process, serving as the blueprint for the final product. This guide offers an in-depth look at how to build effective wireframes using UXPin, an end-to-end design tool that stands out for its code-based technology and built-in features. 

The article provides a detailed, step-by-step approach, from assembling basic UI elements to incorporating user feedback. Learn how UXPin’s unique features, like interactive form elements and code-to-design capabilities, can streamline your design process, improve collaboration, and contribute to a more intuitive user experience.

Key takeaways:

• UXPin offers code-based wireframing capabilities that enable designers to create fully interactive and functional wireframes.
• UXPin stands apart from other design tools by offering built-in features like design libraries and advanced prototyping capabilities.
• UXPin facilitates a seamless transition from wireframing to high-fidelity prototyping, allowing for complex interactions and even API integrations, making it a comprehensive full-stack design solution.

Streamline your design process and build wireframes faster with UXPin. Sign up for a free trial to explore UXPin’s full-stack design solution.

Build advanced prototypes

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What is a UX Wireframe?

A UX wireframe is a low-fidelity visual blueprint representing a user interface’s underlying framework. Typically devoid of color, graphics, and intricate details, it primarily focuses on space allocation, content prioritization, and intended functionalities. 

Designers craft wireframes in the early stages of the design process to communicate the structure of a webpage, app, or system. Their primary purpose is to establish the basic layout and interaction patterns before diving into detailed mockups and hi-fi prototypes.

What are the Benefits of Wireframing?

Wireframing offers a range of benefits that streamline the design process and foster effective communication among team members. Here’s a rundown of its advantages:

• Clarity: Wireframes remove ambiguity by visually representing the layout, providing a clear roadmap for everyone involved.
• Efficiency: By resolving issues early, wireframes save time and resources in the later stages of development.
• Alignment: Wireframes help align stakeholders and team members on the project’s goals and functionalities.
• Usability: They provide an opportunity to assess the user experience, ensuring intuitive navigation and layout.
• Collaboration: Wireframes serve as a tool for discussion, allowing designers, developers, and stakeholders to offer early design feedback.
• Prioritization: They help identify the most crucial elements of a design, allowing for effective content hierarchy.
• Flexibility: Wireframes make it easier to iterate and make changes, serving as a lo-fi model for experimentation.
• Architecture: Wireframes provide the foundation for a digital product’s information architecture.

Is UXPin the Right Tool for Wireframing?

UXPin is an end-to-end design tool with excellent wireframing capabilities. Designers have several features to create interactive wireframes effortlessly:

• Box: a flexible UI element that allows you to add text
• Shapes: rectangle, oval, circle, rounded, line, arrow, polygon, and star
• Text: basic text block
• Forms: a set of foundational unstyled form elements, including a button, textarea, select/multi-select, checkbox, and radio button
• Hotspot: make any element or a specific location on a UI interactive
• Icons: choose from several icon sets, including Material Design, Fonts Awesome, Retina Icons, and more.

Unlike other design tools, UXPin’s UI elements are interactive by default. For example, all UXPin’s Form elements are fully functional. You can drag a checkbox or radio onto the canvas, and it already has clickable on/off interactivity.

These interactive elements allow design teams to gather more data and feedback during the wireframing process before moving to the design process’s more costly, high-fidelity phase.

What is the Difference Between UXPin and Other Wireframing Tools?

UXPin’s most significant differentiating factor is that the platform uses code-based technology. Rather than generating vector graphics like Sketch or Figma, UXPin renders HTML, CSS, and Javascript behind the scenes. 

This code-based approach gives design teams enhanced functionality to build fully interactive wireframes and prototypes. For example, in image-based tools, an input field is a graphical representation, whereas, in UXPin, it’s a functional input capable of capturing, storing, and sharing user data.

Built-in features vs. plugins

Another differentiator is that UXPin offers more features as standard than other wireframing tools, eliminating the need for plugins and extensions. UXPin plans come with Design Systems, built-in design libraries, Content and Data, Fonts (Google and custom), Accessibility Features, and much more–many of which would need plugins with other design tools.

Code-to-design

UXPin’s Merge technology allows design teams to import code components into the design process for prototyping. Designers can create fully functioning interactive prototypes using the same UI library devs use for the final product.

If your engineering team uses a specific wireframe component library, you can import this into UXPin using Merge. There are also several built-in Merge libraries, including Material UI, MUI, Ant Design, Fluent UI, and UXPin Boilerplate, which you can use to build interactive prototypes–allowing you to go from wireframing to high-fidelity prototyping to test concepts and ideas fast.

How to Build a Wireframe in UXPin

Here are ten steps for building a wireframe in UXPin, including gathering feedback and collaborating with stakeholders.

You will need a UXPin account to follow this step-by-step tutorial. Sign up for a free 14-day trial if you don’t have one.

Step 1: Open UXPin and create a new project

• Open UXPin and click the blue + New project button.
• Enter a project name and click Create New Project.
• The next screen asks, “What do you want to start with today?” Click New prototype.

Step 2: Choose the wireframe’s canvas size

Choose your wireframe’s canvas size in the Properties Panel on the right. UXPin provides a wide selection of standard viewports, including TVs, desktops, tablets, mobile, and wearables, to name a few. Use Grids and Guides to help maintain horizontal and vertical consistency.

Step 3: Create pages for each screen

Unlike Figma or Sketch, which use artboards and frames, UXPin uses a separate page for each screen.

• Select Pages & Layers at the bottom of the left sidebar,
• Click the + icon at the top of the sidebar to create a new page. You can also use the OPTION+N keyboard shortcut.
• Double-click on the page name to change it–we’ve created two pages: Login and Welcome.

Pro tip: Use the built-in User Flows library to design your user journeys and information architecture to determine the number of screens and navigational layouts for your project.

Step 4: Create wireframe UI elements

You can assemble wireframe patterns and layouts using UXPin’s Shapes, Forms, Boxes, etc. Auto-Layout lets you manage group elements effectively, including size, gap, alignment, distribution, and more. Use UXPin’s Components feature to create reusable wireframe elements for faster iterating and maximum consistency.

Step 5: Define interactions

We will add a basic navigation interaction from the Login to the Welcome screen for this demonstration.

• Click on an element to select it and click Interactions in the Properties Panel.
• Create a navigation interaction as follows:
  • Trigger: Click (Tap)
  • Action: Go to Page
  • Page: Select Welcome from the dropdown
  • Click Add to complete the interaction

Learn how to set up Interactions, including Triggers, Actions, Animations, and Conditions.

Step 6: Collaborate and gather feedback

How to go From Wireframe to Prototype in UXPin

Going from wireframing to prototyping is easy in UXPin. You can design your components from scratch to build mockups or use a design system to generate high-fidelity interactive prototypes quickly.

UXPin provides four key features to enhance your prototyping capability:

• States: allow you to create multiple states for a single UI element and design complex interactive components like menus, drawers, and more.
• Variables: capture data from user inputs and create personalized, dynamic user experiences–like a custom welcome message after signing up.
• Expressions: Javascript-like functions to create complex components and advanced functionality–no code required!
• Conditional Interactions: create if-then and if-else conditions based on user interactions to create dynamic prototypes with multiple outcomes to replicate the final product experience accurately.

Increase prototyping complexity with APIs

UXPin’s IFTTT integration allows you to connect external products and services through an API connection. For example, adding an appointment to a user’s calendar or sending an email, like a welcome message.

With UXPin’s Design Systems, advanced prototyping features, and API capabilities, you can create complex product replicas without technical expertise or input from engineers. These sophisticated prototypes enable you to get meaningful feedback from users and stakeholders to improve product user experiences.

Build wireframes and prototypes faster using the world’s most advanced product design tool. Sign up for a free trial to create your first interactive wireframe with UXPin.

The post UXPin Wireframe 101 – A Short Guide for Product Teams appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Interaction design is one of the most critical facets of user experience design. It makes the product’s interface respond to user’s action, aiding in human-to-computer interaction.

Key takeaways:

• Interaction design is a multidisciplinary design field that focuses on the interaction between users and digital products, systems, or interfaces.
• It involves designing how users engage with and experience a product, with the goal of making that interaction intuitive and efficient.
• It’s often abbreviated as IxD.

It’s one of the most challenging stages of UX design process. UXPin’s code-based design tool reduces those challenges by allowing designers to build functional prototypes with extreme fidelity and interactivity. Deliver better customer experiences today. Sign up for a free trial.

Build advanced prototypes

Design better products with States, Variables, Auto Layout and more.

Try UXPin

What is Interaction Design?

Interaction design is a process of making human-to-computer interfaces (HCI) feel human-like. Interactive digital products create this “human” connection by giving feedback to the end-users. The feedback can be through a scroll-provoked animation, clicked state of a button or transition to another page.

Often shortened to IxD, interaction design uses appropriate interactive elements, such as transitions, microinteractions, animation, but also text, color, visuals, and layout impact users’ feeling and behavior–allowing them to design interactions strategically to elicit the appropriate response.

A good use of interaction design successfully leads to positive user experiences, including:

• Greater product satisfaction
• Deeper usability comprehension
• Faster learnability
• A deeper personal connection
• Increased likelihood of repeated use

Interaction Design vs UI Design

Interaction design focuses on human-computer interaction, including animations, microinteractions, transitions, search, and other motion-based designs. They decide, for example, what happens when a user taps an element.

User interface design focuses on visual design and aesthetics, including color, fonts, iconography, layouts, etc. They decide what a user interface must look like.

To summarize:

• Interaction design is about Interactions and movement
• UI design is about visual design and aesthetics

In smaller companies and startups, a UI designer is often responsible for both tasks, while the roles are separate in larger organizations. Like anything in digital product design, the roles and responsibilities can synergize. It all depends on the company, product, and organizational structure.

Interaction Design vs UX Design

Interaction design is a specialized discipline within UX design. Where UX looks at the entire user experience and how everything ties together, interaction designers focus on user interactions and motion.

User experience designers apply UX fundamentals like design thinking, human-centered design, and user research to make decisions. They’re specifically concerned with a user’s tasks, actions, and environment, while interaction designers focus on making the digital product respond to user actions in an appropriate way. They tend to think about what happens when a user clicks a button, types a phrase into a search bar or hovers over an image.

Interaction Design Principles

We’ve chosen our favorite IxD principles from Don Norman’s (co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group) book, The Design of Everyday Things.

Visibility

With many features and limited space, prioritizing visibility is a significant design challenge. Don Norman’s theory is that the more visible something is, the more likely a user sees and interacts with it. Interaction designers must balance visibility prioritization based on user needs and business goals.

A typical example of visibility is prioritizing navigation links on mobile devices. What links are visible via the app bar, and what do designers place in the navigation drawer behind a hamburger menu?

Feedback

Feedback is how a digital product or system communicates with users. Interaction designers have several ways to express this feedback, including motion/animation, tactile, audio, copy, etc.

They must also consider accessibility and how products relay feedback to all types of users and assistive technologies.

Constraints

Cluttered UIs with too many possibilities confuse users and create usability issues. Good interaction design limits (or constrains) user actions to guide them through the product more efficiently.

We see these constraints most commonly with landing pages. Designers strip away navigation, links, and anything else that might tempt users to leave the page, leaving only a prominent CTA or form. Constraining users to a single action allows them to focus on the content that leads to a conversion.

Mapping

Interaction designers must create a clear relationship between controls and their effect on a digital product. The idea is to map these relationships to feel natural to users.

For example, the top button on an iPhone increases the volume while the lower one decreases. This intuitive layout means users don’t have to think about which button performs which action.

The more intuitive and obvious a product is to use, the easier and more enjoyable the experience.

Consistency

Consistency is vital for interaction and UI design. Inconsistency can confuse users and create usability issues. Designers not only have to design consistent UIs and interactions but also consider consistency across multiple screen sizes and devices.

Many organizations build a design system or adopt an open-source component library to increase consistency with approved UI patterns and interactions. When designers don’t have to think about these choices, they can focus on the user experience and apply the appropriate pattern to help users achieve the desired result.

Affordance

Affordance tells users how to use something or perform an action. It’s an interaction designer’s job to ensure that it’s obvious to users how to complete tasks using UI elements.

For example, a submit button’s disabled state tells users to complete a form’s required fields before submitting. Using a different color and underline for links tells users which text they can click.

Cognition

Interaction designers must have a basic understanding of cognitive psychology in UX design–attention and perception, memory, problem-solving, and creative thinking. The aim is to design products and experiences that don’t overload these mental processes.

Cognition deals with several design psychology principles, including:

• Gestalt principles: how the human brain perceives visuals to create familiar structures.
• Von Restorff effect: predicts that in a group of objects, the one that differs stands out or is most likely to be remembered.
• Hick’s Law: the more choices you give someone, the longer it’ll take them to make a decision.
• The Principle of Least Effort: users will make choices or take action requiring the least amount of energy.
• The Serial Positioning Effect: humans are most likely to remember the first (primacy effect) and last (recency effect) items in a list, sentence, or piece of content.
• The Principle of Perpetual Habit: people rely on familiar routines and habits–which is why it’s crucial to use universal design patterns.
• The Principle of Emotional Contagion: humans will mimic or empathize with the emotions and behaviors of others, including animals and animations–which is why designers use faces (even emojis) to emphasize feeling and emotion.
• Fitts’s Law: the time required to move to a target area is a function between the distance and the target’s size.

Dive deeper into cognition in this article: UX Design Psychology Tricks for Design Excellence and this one: A UX Designer’s Guide to Improving Speed of Use. These principles apply to all UX disciplines.

Interaction Design Checklist

We found this helpful interaction design checklist from the US Government’s Technology Transformation Services website, usability.gov. The checklist includes several questions to consider when designing interactions.

• Define how users interact with the interface – click/tap, push, swipe, drag & drop, keyboard controls, etc.
• Give users clues about behavior before they take action – correct labeling, different colors for links, using consistency for clickable UI elements, etc.
• Anticipate and mitigate errors – how do you prevent errors while providing helpful messages to correct problems?
• Consider system feedback and response time – what happens after users complete an action, and how soon does that feedback appear?
• Strategically think about each element – have you chosen the appropriate element/pattern? Is there enough space between clickable elements to avoid errors? Have you followed design psychology principles (mentioned above)? Scrutinize every decision from a user’s perspective.
• Simplify for learnability – make user interfaces and tasks as simple as possible, use familiar patterns, and minimize cognitive-draining tasks and features to simplify the user experience.

Also, check out the IxD Checklist from Aaron Legaspi and Amit Jakhu.

Interaction Design Resources

• Interaction Design Association
• Interaction Design Foundation
• 50 Best Interaction Design Programs

UXPin–The Ultimate Interaction Design Tool

A lack of fidelity and functionality is a significant problem for interaction designers when prototyping and testing using traditional image-based design tools.

Interaction designers must create multiple frames to replicate basic code functionality, which takes considerable time and effort. With UXPin’s code-based design tool, designers can achieve significantly better results with less effort. Here’s how:

States

UXPin enables designers to create multiple States for a single component. For example, you can build a button with default, hover, active and disabled states, each with separate properties and triggers.

UXPin’s States also allows designers to create more complex UI patterns like carousels, accordions, dropdown menus, and more using a single frame. These UI patterns behave like code, giving interaction designers accurate results and feedback during testing.

Interactions

With UXPin Interactions, designers can build immersive, code-like experiences far beyond the capabilities of image-based design tools. UXPin offers a wide range of triggers, actions, and animations to create fully functional, animated prototypes.

Conditional Interactions allow designers to take prototypes a step further with Javascript-like “if-then” and “if-else” conditions to create dynamic user experiences. 

Variables

In UXPin, form fields look and function like the final product. Variables allow designers to capture user inputs and use that data elsewhere in the prototype–like a personalized welcome message after completing an onboarding form.

Expressions

UXPin Expressions take prototyping to another level with code-like functionality, including form validation and computational components (updating a shopping cart). When combined with States, Interactions, and Variables, Expressions allow designers to build prototypes that function like the final product.

These powerful features mean interaction designers don’t have to learn code or rely on engineers to build fully functioning prototypes for accurate testing. With UXPin, designers can build, test, and iterate faster and achieve significantly better results.

Tired of asking usability participants and stakeholders to “imagine” something happening? Switch to UXPin and start prototyping with the world’s most advanced code-based design tool. Sign up for a free trial today.

The post What is Interaction Design? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

The Double Diamond design process is a widely used methodology for identifying a problem and developing a solution. This outcomes-based framework encourages creativity and innovation while focusing on the core issue and its impact on end-users.

Key takeaways

• Double Diamond is a design framework for developing digital product’s UX and UI design.
• The process is represented by two diamonds that symbolize divergent and convergent thinking.
• It involves four stages (discover, define, develop, and deliver) that go one after the other, but you can jump between them if needed.

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What is the Double Diamond?

The Double Diamond model is a framework for innovation and design developed by the British Design Council in 2003. The Design Council wanted a simple design process for delivering projects, no matter the methods and tools used.

The design framework features two diamonds:

• a diamond that represents the problem.
• a diamond that stands for the solution.

Designers work within these diamonds. They help them to truly understand the problem and thoroughly test their solutions.

Once designers identify a core issue in the first diamond, they create a design brief as a foundation for the second. The second diamond focuses on prototyping and testing a solution until its ready for release. 

The Origin of the Double Diamond Design Process

The Double Diamond we know as a design framework came from the British Design Council, but the inspiration for this process came from Hungarian-American linguist Béla H. Bánáthy’s divergence-convergence model.

Béla’s model looks very similar to the design framework where he used the first diamond to explore an issue widely and deeply (divergent thinking) and then took an appropriate focused action (convergent thinking).

What is a Design Framework?

Design frameworks provide teams with a systematic approach to solving problems and delivering projects. These frameworks include tools, workflows, protocols, and processes that guide designers in delivering a project successfully.

The Four Phases of the Double Diamond Design Process

The Double Diamond design process comprises two diamonds and four phases (also called the four Ds):

1. Discover
2. Define
3. Develop
4. Deliver

Diamond One – Discovering and Defining the Problem

The first diamond is about UX research and exploration, often referred to as the “problem space”–similar to the empathize and define stages of the design thinking process. 

Designers start by researching the problem and user needs. This phase might include reviewing analytics and UX artifacts, interviewing end-users, conducting a service safari, and other early-phase research methods.

In phase two, designers use discovery phase research to define the problem and how it impacts users. Design teams may iterate over phases one and two a few times until they get to the core issue. Some UX artifacts designers might create include:

• User personas
• Customer journey map
• A problem statement
• Empathy map

At the end of phase two, designers create a design brief to guide the second half of the design process towards finding an appropriate solution.

Diamond Two – Developing and Delivering the Solution

The second diamond is about ideating, prototyping, and testing to find a suitable solution. 

The develop phase is a busy stage of the Double Diamond framework where teams use various tools and methods, including:

• Workshops and brainstorming: gathering as a team to ideate, hypothesize, conduct experiments, and discuss possible solutions. 
• Low-fidelity design: sketches, wireframes, paper prototypes, and other lo-fi methods designers use to develop and test many ideas quickly.
• Cross-functional collaboration: designers meet with engineers, product owners, and other stakeholders to discuss ideas for feedback on possible challenges and constraints.

The development phase is an iterable process of ideation, prototyping, and testing several ideas until designers identify a single solution with the most potential to:

• Solve the problem
• Align with user needs
• Meet budget and technical constraints

In some circumstances, designers choose a single solution or select their best two or three ideas for high-fidelity prototyping and testing in the deliver phase. The first goal is to eliminate those that don’t work until you arrive at a single solution.

Once designers arrive at a single solution, they conduct further testing to refine the final prototype. During this round of testing, designers focus on usability and user experience to ensure the final result satisfies the design brief and stakeholders.

If designers encounter a problem, they return to the develop phase to find a solution, iterating and testing until they find a solution.

Once prototyping and testing are complete, design teams prepare for the design handoff, including documentation, annotations, assets, and other instructions engineers will use to develop the final product for release.

Lastly, design teams must conduct a UX audit and quality assurance to ensure the final release meets the project’s requirements, business goals, and user needs.

Try End-to-End UX Design With UXPin

Prototyping and testing are significant in the end-to-end design process, including the Double Diamond framework. Designers must use high-quality prototypes to thoroughly test potential solutions and achieve accurate results.

Unfortunately, high-fidelity prototyping can be slow with certain tools, which isn’t ideal when testing many ideas in the Double Diamond design process.

With fully interactive design from UXPin, designers don’t have to compromise on quality for speed. They can build high-fidelity prototypes that look and function like the final product. Better prototypes yield accurate results during testing, allowing designers to go beyond what’s possible with image-based design tools.

UXPin also comes standard with built-in design libraries, allowing design teams to drag and drop components to build high-fidelity mockups in minutes. In a few clicks, they can add Interactions to create prototypes with code-like functionality, including:

• States: create multiple states for any element, each with separate properties and interactions.
• Variables: capture user inputs and take action based on the data to create dynamic, personalized user experiences during testing.
• Conditional Interactions: create “if-then” and “if-else” rules to execute different reactions to user actions and inputs.
• Expressions: design functions to perform complex operations traditionally only available with code, including form validation, computational components, simulate password authentication, and more.

No matter the framework, UXPin can enhance your design process to create better user experiences for your customers. Sign up for a free trial and discover the possibilities of code-based design with UXPin.

The post Double Diamond Design Process – The Best Framework for a Successful Product Design appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Design insights are the foundation for successful product design and user experience, bridging user needs and business objectives. This comprehensive guide unpacks the importance of these insights, offering strategies to gather, analyze, and utilize them effectively. We explore various methods like user interviews, usability testing, design research, and advanced techniques like AI and machine learning.

Key takeaways:

• Design insights provide a critical foundation for human-centered design, guiding decision-making and reducing project risks.
• Various methods, including user interviews, usability testing, and analytics, can be employed to gather robust design insights.
• Proper analysis of these insights involves categorizing the data, validating with stakeholders, and prioritizing actionable steps to make impactful changes during product development.
• Advanced tools like UXPin offer code-based, fully interactive prototypes that allow designers to test and iterate more accurately than traditional methods.
• Leveraging multiple data sources, such as crowdsourcing and real-time feedback, can provide more profound, actionable design insights.

Make better decisions using design insights with UXPin’s advanced prototyping capabilities. Sign up for a free trial to build your first interactive prototype.

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What is a Design Insight?

A design insight is a deep understanding of user needs, behaviors, and challenges. Insights are pivotal for informing good design decisions. Typically derived from a blend of data and observations, insights bridge the gap between user needs and business goals.

Why are Design Insights Important?

Drive user-centricity

Insights keep the focus on the user. Design isn’t about what you think looks good; it’s about solving problems for real people. Insights allow you to shape a user experience tailored to actual user needs and behaviors rather than assumptions and biases.

Reduce risks

Relying on solid insights avoids the pitfalls of designing something that looks great but has poor UX. Without a clear understanding of user needs, you may spend weeks or months delivering something that no one uses, resulting in massive losses for the organization.

Inform iterations

Design insights are the data points that enable you to test a hypothesis rigorously. Data points you to where adjustments are needed, ensuring that each iteration is more successful than the last.

Align teams

Insights provide a common ground for design teams, developers, and stakeholders to align their efforts. They eliminate subjectivity, making the design process more efficient while eliminating guesswork and disputes about what to build.

Enhance ROI

A design grounded in solid insights is more likely to succeed, improving metrics like user engagement, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction. This data-driven decision-making results in a better return on investment (ROI) for the design project.

How to Gather Design Insights

Obtaining robust design insights demands a multifaceted approach. Each method offers unique perspectives on user behavior, user needs, and business goals.

Run user interviews

Arrange face-to-face or virtual meetings with users. Structure your interviews with a combination of open-ended and targeted questions. Encourage stories rather than simple yes-no answers–for example, if you’re building a trip planner, you might ask, “Could you walk me through how you planned and booked one of your favorite vacations?” Always ask “Why?” to dig deeper into someone’s thought process.

Perform usability testing

Usability testing pinpoints exactly what elements improve or impede user interaction, steering your design modifications. Designers use prototypes to observe user interactions and flows and generate insights to guide the next steps.

Do UX research

Various UX research methods exist, including contextual inquiry, desk research, user feedback, ethnographic studies, user personas, and eye-tracking, to name a few. UX research provides empirical data that either supports or refutes your design assumptions.

Interview others

Other people who are involved in the product development and growth offer insights about business objectives, technical constraints, marketing initiatives, product goals, etc. These insights come from internal sources, including:

• Designers: Insights into visual design, usability, and user needs
• Researchers: Have a deep understanding of end users, their behaviors, and other user-centered data
• Developers: Technical limitations and capabilities
• Product Managers: Product roadmap, analytics and metrics
• Executives: High-level business goals and revenue targets

Analyze the product’s use

Monitor user engagement metrics like session durations, click-through rates, and conversion rates. These insights tell designers when and what problem occurs. For example, a high bounce rate often indicates a mismatch between user expectations and the website’s content. The next step is to conduct interviews to determine the why behind the high bounce rate.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps illustrate where users focus their attention, offering a visual guide to your design’s strong and weak spots. Designers utilize tools like Crazy Egg or Hotjar to obtain these visual insights.

Market research

Market research uncovers trends and user expectations, which should inform your design strategy. For example, market research finds that “75% of users in the 18-34 age bracket prefer mobile apps that offer dark mode settings.”

Designers could prioritize implementing a dark mode feature, ensuring it is easily accessible within the app. This decision directly responds to market demand, likely increasing user engagement and satisfaction among the 18-34 age bracket.

Competitor analysis

A competitor analysis informs industry standards and unveils opportunities for differentiation. Designers often focus on usability, feature set, and user reviews for a well-rounded comparison.

A/B testing

A/B testing offers empirical evidence on what works between two design options, allowing designers to focus on what works and ditch what doesn’t. Testing one element at a time–a button color or a headline–is vital to measure its impact accurately.

AI and machine learning

AI goes beyond reactive data interpretation, offering forecasts on user behavior based on existing data. Leverage platforms like TensorFlow or RapidMiner for powerful predictive analytics.

Social listening

In our hyper-connected world, social listening offers real-time feedback, making it invaluable for adaptive design strategies. Platforms like Hootsuite, Qualtrics, or Mention can automate social listening and track mentions of your brand, product, or relevant keywords.

Leverage crowdsourcing

Use platforms like Reddit or specialized design forums to gather diverse viewpoints. You can also set specific design challenges to attract relevant feedback. The more specific you are, the more actionable the insights.

Implement real-time feedback loops

Integrate in-app pop-ups or chatbots to capture user feedback as they interact with your design. Quick post-interaction surveys can offer instant data without hampering the user experience.

Surveys and questionnaires

Craft questions that are open-ended but focused. Instead of asking, “Was everything okay?”, probe deeper with questions like “What challenges did you face?” Distribute your surveys through multiple channels like emails, in-app notifications, and social media to ensure a wide range of responses.

Correlate Data Sources

Combine data sources for deeper insights. For example, you might correlate user survey insights with analytics data to get a fuller picture. Trend forecasting can also be more accurate when pulling data from multiple places.

How to Analyze Design Insights

Research insights are worthless if organizations don’t use them to make decisions or drive change. Designers use insights with design thinking and problem-solving methodologies to develop effective solutions.

Here’s a step-by-step framework to help you analyze and use your design insights.

Categorize the data

• Step 1: Sort Information: Classify your insights by source and relevance. Whether it’s from user interviews or market research, keep them separate but accessible.
• Step 2: Identify Patterns: Look for recurring themes or issues from multiple sources to identify correlating patterns.

Validate the insights

• Step 3: Cross-reference: Validate your findings by comparing them across different sources. For instance, if users complained about a feature in interviews, does the usability testing support this?
• Step 4: Confirm with Stakeholders: Brief your stakeholders and ensure your insights align with business goals.

Prioritize action items

• Step 5: Create a Priority List: Rank the insights based on the impact and effort required. Tackle the ones that yield the highest impact with the least effort first–these will drive ROI and get you early wins.
• Step 6: Set Deadlines: Associate each action item with a timeline to keep the team accountable. Make sure these deadlines are realistic and align with your organization’s capacity.

Implement changes

• Step 7: Make Adjustments: Begin implementing changes in your design based on prioritized insights.
• Step 8: Document: Keep a detailed record of the changes and why.

Monitor impact

• Step 9: Use Metrics: Employ analytics tools to measure the impact of your changes. You can also use prototypes to test the implementation before release.
• Step 10: Iterate: Use new data to make further adjustments–test, make changes, and iterate.

Share knowledge

• Step 11: Debrief: Share these findings with the team once you’ve made changes and observed the outcomes.
• Step 12: Update Company Insights Database: Keep an insights database for future projects. This database avoids duplicate work and builds valuable first-party data.

Prototype and Test Design Insights with UXPin

UXPin offers powerful code-based features to translate design insights into working prototypes for accurate testing. Designers can build fully interactive prototypes to test hypotheses and use meaningful data to iterate and improve with greater accuracy and confidence.

Step 1: Create your designs

Designers can design from scratch or use one of UXPin’s built-in design libraries to build prototypes fast. UXPin also allows you to import Sketch or Figma designs for prototyping.

Step 2: Add interactive elements

Use UXPin’s rich interactive elements to build realistic components, patterns, and prototypes. Some unique UXPin features include:

• States: Allow you to create multiple states for a single UI element and design complex interactive components like dropdown menus, tab menus, navigational drawers, and more.
• Variables: Capture data from user inputs and create personalized, dynamic user experiences–like a custom welcome message after signing up.
• Expressions: Javascript-like functions to create complex components and advanced functionality–no code required!
• Conditional Interactions: Create if-then and if-else conditions based on user interactions to create dynamic prototypes with multiple outcomes to accurately replicate the final digital product experience.

Step 3: Conduct usability testing

Record user interactions and gather qualitative feedback. The real-time data you collect with UXPin is more valuable because your prototypes are fully interactive, unlike traditional static image-based design tools.

Step 4: Share prototypes with stakeholders

Generate shareable links and send prototypes to stakeholders for feedback via UXPin’s Comments. Comments make it easy for stakeholders to interact with the prototype and share valuable feedback through annotations.

Step 5: Iterate with confidence

UXPin’s interactive prototypes provide actionable insights to iterate and improve on feedback with confidence. Make data-driven design decisions, redesign, retest, and refine until your metrics indicate success.

Generate better design insights with interactive prototypes to deliver high-quality user experiences. Sign up for a free trial to explore UXPin’s advanced prototyping features.

The post Design Insights – 15 Tricks to Get them appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Breaking down silos makes it easier for everyone involved in a project to work together towards a common goal. Unfortunately, traditional working environments make cross-team collaboration different.

Newer tools with a code approach can give you an easier way to eliminate organizational silos. Explore one of them – UXPin Merge. UXPin powered with Merge technology help to break the silos between design, development, and product teams at your organization. It allows you to build prototypes with a single source of truth – coded components. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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Why Do You Need to Break the Silo Mentality?

Silos create inefficiencies that can adversely affect your teams. You might not even know that silos exist within your organization. Once you learn to notice their effects, though, you will likely spot departmental silos everywhere and see how they interfere with your company achieving a common goal.

Here are 5 common problems created by silos:

• A narrow focus on individual tasks that do not contribute to the bigger picture.
• Continued functionality issues that no one within the design team knows how to solve.
• Longer product development, testing, and release timelines.
• Lack of insight into how the company could improve its product development process.
• Inefficiencies that add to project expenses and disappoint stakeholders.

6 Practical Tips to Break Down Silos

With these issues in mind, consider how the following steps could break down silos and build a better company culture.

Tip #1: Form a leadership team that includes a representative from every department

You can build trust and improve communication by creating a leadership team that includes at least one representative from every department. The leadership team can keep the big picture in mind while steering the project toward its final goal.

Tip #2: Establish a unified vision before breaking the common goal into individual tasks

Communication doesn’t always trickle down to every member of a team. You can eliminate this problem by creating a unified vision and breaking the common goal into individual tasks. The tasks can get assigned to teams.

If you start with small tasks and hope that they come together in the end, you will likely find disappointment.

Tip #3: Invite team members from different departments to meetings

The pandemic forced companies to adopt remote working environments. Luckily, videoconferencing apps stepped up to help colleagues and freelancers from all over the world engage with each other in virtual environments.

Since you might need to invite marketers, developers, designers, and other colleagues, you should choose a videoconferencing service that can accommodate several people. You can even get marketing teams engaged to learn from their insights and help them plan for how they will sell the finished product.

Some of the top options include:

• Zoom, 
• BlueJeans,
• Google Meet

If you expect fewer or more participants, you can usually choose plans that match your unique needs. Choosing the right plan helps ensure that you get input from different teams without spending more money than necessary.

Many teleconferencing apps will also let you track metrics and record your meetings so you can focus on interacting with colleagues instead of taking notes. You should notice improved employee engagement when people can talk to each other without writing down their thoughts. You have to put a premium on engagement when working with remote teams.

Tip #4: Choose collaboration tools that appeal to all departments

Until recently, designers and developers often found themselves at odds when creating digital products. Even when they share long-term goals, their specializations encourage them to think about creating products in different ways.

That’s why there’s drift when it comes to the handoff process. It’s best to use a tool that will allow both devs and designers to collaborate without getting in each other’s ways. A solution with code-powered technology can help with that. 

When designers use already-coded components that can be easily reused, there’s no room for a disconnect between what is designed and what can be coded. Not to mention the time efficiency that tools like that offer – both with designing and coding the final product based on the prototype. 

Create a design system that contains all approved assets

Every team working on a product should have access to a design system that contains all approved assets and components. A design system ensures that diverse teams work toward a shared aesthetic and function even when they do not spend much time talking to each other.

When you go for a code-to-design approach in design on top of that, you don’t have to worry about syncing the changes in the code with the design components as that can be done automatically. Thanks to that you have all the approved assets up to date. 

Share information between teams as you make progress

Regular updates can incentivize developers, designers, and team members of other departments to stay focused on their projects.

Working in a vacuum often feels like a thankless—or even pointless—task. Someone designing icons might lose inspiration because they do not see what role the icons will play in the product. Similarly, a developer tweaking interactive forms might not see the point of their work until they witness it in action.

When you reach a milestone, celebrate by showing how everyone’s cumulative efforts have taken you closer to your ultimate goal. If possible, you might enjoy lunch or a drink together. If you work remotely, you can still enjoy a fun meeting that focuses more on building excitement and trust than working on the project.

Eliminate organizational silos with UXPin Merge

UXPin has always been a code-based tool for digital design. UXPin Merge takes the technology a step further by letting designers design with production-ready components That means developers get the opportunity to review designs from the perspective of fully functional code and quickly implement it

UXPin Merge also works in conjunction with several systems, including Material UI, CA Technologies Mineral UI, and IBM Carbon. This approach makes it even easier for engineers to participate in prototype development and making sure designers use components that have already been coded.

Discover more effective, collaborative ways to solve DesignOps challenges. UXPin Merge can help break down silos, reduce design inefficiency, and improve customer experience to meet your company’s goals better than ever.

The post Breaking Down Silos to Improve Digital Product Development appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

UX design framework is a valuable tool that helps us create user-centered, consistent, and efficient digital experiences. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution but rather a flexible guideline that can be adapted to different projects.

Many organizations and startups adopt one or more UX design frameworks to deliver successful projects. Design teams use these frameworks to guide decision-making and solve problems.

Key takeaways:

• A UX design framework is a structured approach that designers follow to create consistent and user-friendly digital products, websites, or applications.
• It helps designers make informed design decisions while ensuring a cohesive and enjoyable user experience.
• Design frameworks can help with project delivery, like Lean UX or Double Diamond, or achieve outcomes for a specific feature by applying the Fogg Behavior Model or Hooked Model.

Solve design challenges throughout the product development process with UXPin–the world’s most advanced code-based design and prototyping tool. Sign up for a free trial to explore all of UXPin’s features.

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What is a Design Framework?

A design framework is a set of tools, workflows, protocols, and processes for design projects. Design frameworks provide teams with a systematic approach to solving problems and delivering projects.

Design frameworks help with onboarding new hires or handing over responsibilities. By following a familiar, structured process, new team members know where they are in the design process and how to carry the project to completion.

In large organizations, with multiple cross-functional teams working on the same product, a design framework ensures teams communicate and collaborate to maintain the highest quality and consistency in workflow and delivery.

Design frameworks guide teams rather than force everyone into a specific way of thinking and working. Instead of telling team members what to do, the framework provides a systematic path to finding a solution.

Why do we Need Design Frameworks?

 Some of the core benefits of design frameworks include:

• Consistency: Ensures a uniform and recognizable design across different parts of a project.
• Efficiency: Saves time by providing established patterns of work.
• User-Centricity: Prioritizes the needs and expectations of users, leading to better products.
• Collaboration: Facilitates communication among design teams, developers, and stakeholders.
• Productivity: Teams deliver projects methodically and consistently.

9 Examples of UX Design Frameworks

UX design frameworks provide structure to the design process and product development. There are several frameworks design teams use, depending on the outcome they want to achieve.

User-Centered Design (UCD)

User-Centered Design (UCD for short) is an approach to design that places the needs, preferences, and behaviors of the end-users at the forefront of the design process. The central premise of UCD is to create products, services, or systems that are intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable for the people who will use them.

Some key principles and aspects of User-Centered Design include:

1. Empathy for Users: The design process begins with a deep understanding of the user. Designers conduct user research to gain insights into users’ needs, goals, pain points, and behaviors.
2. Focus on Usability: Usability is a critical aspect of UCD. Designers aim to make products easy to learn and use, minimizing user errors and frustration. This involves creating clear navigation, logical
3. Prototyping and Testing: Designers create prototypes early in the design process. These prototypes are tested with real users to identify issues before design handoff.
4. Continuous Improvement: Even after the product is launched, this approach encourages ongoing monitoring and refinement based on user feedback and changing needs.

In essence, User-Centered Design is a holistic approach that aims to create products that not only meet business goals but, more importantly, meet the needs and expectations of the people who use them, resulting in a better user experience.

Design Thinking Process

The design thinking process is the basis for most UX frameworks and workflows. It’s the framework every UX designer learns when studying UX design worldwide.

The design thinking process is an iterative user-centered framework with five stages:

1. Empathize: Discover what your users need
2. Define: Determine the problem you want to solve
3. Ideate: Develop possible solutions to users’ problems
4. Prototype: Create prototypes
5. Test: Test your prototypes with users & stakeholders

Read more about those five stages of the design thinking process.

Double Diamond

The double diamond is an outcomes-based framework favored for design innovation. The framework encourages collaboration and creative thinking where team members develop and iterate on ideas.

There are two stages (diamonds) and four steps to the double diamond framework:

Stage One – Preparation:

• Discover: UX teams conduct UX research to understand user needs and problems. Researchers must engage with end-users through interviews and usability studies to empathize and find issues.
• Define: Teams use insights from discovery to define and prioritize the problems their project must solve.

Stage Two – Prototyping & Testing:

• Develop: UX teams use various ideation and prototyping methods to develop ideas and solutions to users’ problems.
• Deliver: Teams must test their solutions with end-users and stakeholders. They reject solutions that don’t work and iterate to improve those that do.

Hooked Model

Nir Eyal developed the Hooked Model as a framework to “build habit-forming products.” The framework encourages designers to approach these projects ethically while delivering value to customers.

The Hooked Model is a four-stage process, including:

1. Trigger: Understand what external or internal triggers users to take a specific actions
2. Action: Define the action you want users to take
3. Variable reward: An unexpected, positive reward users get for completing an action
4. Investment: Provide users with an incentive to invest more time in the product, thus repeating the cycle

 Further reading: 

• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
• UX Design Psychology Tricks for Design Excellence

Lean UX

Lean UX is a collaborative design framework that prioritizes outcomes over deliverables. Designers must use data rather than assumptions to drive decisions. This methodology delivers leaner, problem-solving products because it eliminates features where there is no need.

There are three stages to the Lean UX framework:

• Think: Outcomes, assumptions, user research, ideate, mental models, sketches, storyboards
• Make: Wireframes, UI design, mockups, prototypes (minimum viable products), value propositions, hypotheses
• Check: Analyze data & analytics, usability testing, stakeholder and user feedback

Further reading: 

• Lean UX: Expert Tips to Maximize Efficiency in UX
• Lean UX vs. Agile UX – is there a difference?

Agile UX

Agile UX is a framework designed to align with agile software development. Like agile software development, agile UX has 12 guiding principles.

1. Customer experience (CX)
2. Harnessing technological and social change
3. Development timelines that make good use of resources
4. Adaptive collaboration
5. Building projects around motivated individuals
6. Effective communication across team channels
7. Working applications and high-quality UX as success benchmarks
8. Sustainable development
9. Technical excellence is relative
10. Simplicity
11. Cross-functional teams
12. Adaptable, flexible teams

Further reading:

• How Agile Environments Revolutionize a Design Team’s Workflow?
• The 12 Realistic Principles of Agile UX
• Agile vs. Scrum vs. Kanban: Which Project Management Methodology is Right For Your Team?

BASIC Framework

BASIC UX is “a framework for usable products.” The relatively new framework provides interaction design guidelines for modern product development.

The BASIC acronym follows five principles:

• B = Beauty
• A = Accessibility
• S = Simplicity
• I = Intuitiveness
• C = Consistency

Within each principle are a series of questions designers must ask themselves to achieve a successful outcome. 

Beauty:

• Is the visual design aesthetically pleasing?
• Does it follow the style guide?
• Are high-quality visuals used?
• Is it properly aligned?

Accessibility:

• Can ‘everyone’ use it?
• Does it comply with standards?
• Is it cross-platform compatible?

Simplicity:

• Does it reduce the user’s workload?
• Is it free of clutter and repetitive text?
• Is its functionality necessary?

Intuitiveness:

• Is the functionality clear?
• Can the user achieve their goal with little or no initial instructions?
• Can the user easily repeat the task without further instruction?
• Can the user predict the outcome/output?

Consistency:

• Does the product reuse existing UI patterns?
• Are the design language, images, and branding consistent with the design system?
• Does it appear in the right place at the right time?
• Does the product perform consistently every time?

Organizations can adapt these questions or add their own to ensure they’re relevant to the product and its users.

Further reading: BASIC UX – A Framework for Usable Products.

The UX Honeycomb

Peter Morville’s UX Honeycomb is a holistic design framework listing seven principles. These seven principles guide each design decision to deliver high-quality products and user experiences.

The UX Honeycomb’s seven principles include:

1. Useful: Products must serve users and solve their problems
2. Usable: Designs must be intuitive and easy to use
3. Desirable: The user interface design must be aesthetically pleasing and deliver a positive user experience
4. Findable: Search, and navigation must be clear and obvious
5. Accessible: Designs must be accessible to all users, including those with disabilities
6. Credible: Users must be able to trust the product and its content
7. Valuable: The final product must deliver value to users and the business

The Fogg Behavior Model

The Fogg Behavior Model, developed by B J Fogg from Standford University, suggests behavior or action is the result of three elements converging:

• Motivation
• Ability
• Trigger

Like the Hooked Model, the Fogg Behavior Model helps designers build products that increase usage and engagement over time. Fogg emphasizes that “baby steps” are the best way to develop long-term behaviors.

A fantastic example many of us have experienced is any digital game. The first level is easy, giving players a sense of accomplishment, thus triggering further engagement. The game gets incrementally more challenging as players spend more time engaging with the product.

Further reading: 

• Fogg Behavior Model
• Tiny Habits by B J Fogg

End-to-End Product Design With UXPin

UXPin is an end-to-end design solution with the tools and features to deliver high-quality products. UX designers can leverage UXPin’s code-based design tool to create high-fidelity prototypes that look and function like the final product.

Prototyping and testing are crucial components of any design framework. UXPin’s built-in design libraries enable design teams to build high-fidelity prototypes to test ideas throughout the design process.

Meaningful Testing Feedback

Code-based prototypes look and function like the final product, producing meaningful, actionable results from usability testing and stakeholders. UX designers can make quick changes and iterate on ideas to find a solution that meets both user needs and business goals.

Streamlined Design Handoffs

With higher fidelity and functionality, UXPin’s code-based prototypes play a crucial role in streamlining the design handoff process so that engineers can deliver the final product with greater accuracy and efficiency.

Enhance your end-to-end design process with UXPin’s code-based design tool. Sign up for a free trial to explore all of UXPin’s advanced features and start creating better user experiences for your customers.

The post UX Design Frameworks – What Are The Most Useful Ones? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

This article was written by Nick Elliott who works as a Design System Product Owner and Regional Head of Product Design at Iress.

As with many design systems teams, at Iress, we want our design system (which we call the IDS) to be more than simply a set of components. We want our design system to be a framework that our colleagues love to use and something that helps anyone at Iress create great experiences for the people using our product and services.

As a technology company providing software to the financial services industry, the design team at Iress has always looked to remove inefficiencies that can form in the handover between design and engineering, as well as how we can continue empowering our teams to create awesome experiences together.

Over the last few years, design tools have adapted and our design team has been on a journey to review our own design tools – one of which is UXPin Merge.

Build prototypes using your dev’s design library components. Bring React, npm or Storybook components to UXPin and create prototypes that look and behave like the end product. Discover UXPin Merge.

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Days gone by

Let me spin a story – one that may resonate with you…

Danielle is a designer. Through a discovery session, she gets to understand a user’s problem. This may be based on previous research, data, direct feedback or a combination of all of these. There may be a team ideation session. But at the end of the day, as the designer, Danielle is asked to make a prototype. She uses a design tool that creates a load of linked, clickable images. She may go and test this to confirm that she is solving the problem in the right way. She then gets agreement with stakeholders that this is what they are going to build.

Daaruk, an engineer, then takes this prototype and recreates it in his software development tool of choice. Daaruk quickly realises that what Danielle has designed is really hard to build, and has some issues. There is a bit of to and froing and compromises are made. Then Daaruk finishes the work and presents it back in a UX review. Danielle isn’t happy – she doesn’t really like what she’s seeing – the typography and vertical rhythm are off, the tab order isn’t right causing accessibility issues and some of Danielle’s expectations of how the screen would work didn’t come through from the prototype. Daaruk makes some changes, but is also unhappy as he has to spend time unpicking a lot of work to make what looks like minor tweaks.

And now we’ve run out of time. We promised this would be delivered by a date and we have so many other projects in the backlog. We ship the feature with compromises. And then when it ships, we get a load of feedback from our users. The experience hasn’t quite hit the mark and there are loads of usability issues. This then comes back to Danielle and Daaruk again, stopping them and the rest of the team from working on other projects that will make further impact.

Does this sound familiar? If so, keep reading.

The inefficiencies of the design to delivery handover

So the above is hugely inefficient. Why?

• Danielle is prototyping on her own, rather than as a part of a team. She has to present this back and spend time with other members of the team until they are all happy.
• Danielle is testing something unrealistic with end users – because users can’t interact with the image-based prototype as they would a normal application, usability issues are found out way too late.
• Danielle is creating something that is thrown away. Daaruk has to restart from scratch. ‘Design drift’ occurs.
• There are lots of reviews between Danielle and Daaruk that create rework.
• Danielle and Daaruk are working on different tools that are not connected – there is no centralised way to refer to the same typography, spacing, components and patterns.
• The Support and Product Teams need to spend time understanding the issues that users are finding, once the new feature is released.
• Danielle and Daaruk have to do rework to fix the experience and usability issues that have been found.
• In extreme cases, users are so put off by the experience, they lose trust and it takes a lot of the client-facing team’s time to convince them that we’ve fixed the issues and that it’s worth using again.

Design system maturity scale

Earlier this year TJ Harrop, Design System Product Manager at the NSW Government introduced Global DesignOps conference attendees to a design system maturity scale.

I’m paraphrasing TJ’s concept, but he talked about 4 levels of design system maturity (TJ’s concept talked about ‘Full Stack UX’, which I won’t go into here)…

• 1st stage: Design system assets are created in tools such as Photoshop or Illustrator.
• 2nd stage: We have CSS & HTML style guides – used for guidance only.
• 3rd stage: We have two sets of components that are meant to look alike – one for designers and one for engineers.
• 4th stage: We have a single source of truth where designers and engineers are using the same design system components.

In terms of our journey at Iress, we are currently at stage 3.

But stage 3 can still be hugely inefficient because two sets of people maintain two separate sets of components – one in the design tool, and one the engineers use in production. In addition, every time there is an IDS update, we have to mimic this in the design tool. It can get out of sync really quickly.

Also, because the design tool components aren’t as sophisticated or don’t have the same constraints as the ones used by engineering, it can cause inconsistency – even within the same design team.

And finally, we have to theme our design system. Being able to prototype and test the same components with a client’s brand, means another set of components that again can get out of sync quickly.

Our goal at Iress is to get to the final stage of design system maturity.

How Do I Mature a Design System?

Over the last 12 months, we’ve been reviewing the design tools on the market. While some design tools are great for design agencies working on lots of small projects and many brands, they are not effective for designing at scale with an enterprise design system. And this is why we are excited by Merge.

We are at the beginning of our journey, but it is our hope that:

• With Merge integrating directly with the code repository, designers and engineers will be using the exact same components. Maintained centrally, with one set of components, this will free up our designers’ time.
• And because we are using the same components and settings (props), we hope our designers and engineers will be better aligned. Designers will better understand the constraints of using the design system. If there is reasonable evidence to do something different or bespoke, this can be done within the team, or escalated to the IDS Team to discuss an enhancement.
• It will help us create more interactive and realistic prototypes. People can tab around, or see the same interactions – hover styles, animations, etc – as they would expect in a real app. We can do more insightful user testing and discover usability issues much earlier in the process.
• The markup required to render the prototype can be taken directly from Merge and handed over to the engineer, who can place it in their software development tool of choice. This should hopefully speed up development. The engineer no longer needs to start from scratch and already knows what components and settings to use. It will help us avoid the ‘design drift’ we so often see. Things like spacing and typography should all be aligned, as it is all driven from one place.
• It will give us the opportunity to experiment with theme/brand switchers, as well as test responsive prototypes mimicking different devices.
• It will give non-designers access to a tool, whereby they can also experiment and have exposure to the same design considerations.
• It will allow more collaboration, allowing designers to be facilitators of the design process, not the owners of design.

Final thoughts

In conclusion, we are excited about Merge. It’s not to say that there won’t be any bumps on the way – it’s a different way of working. Some people will love it, others maybe less so. But if Merge can help us scale, empowering our many teams at Iress to use our design system consistently and efficiently, then it’s a massive step forward from where we are today.

Streamline your design and development processes. Bring your own components to UXPin via npm, Storybook or Git integrations. Leverage a single source of truth and build prototypes that developers can quickly translate into code. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post Re-Imagining Iress Design Tools – Iress Case Study appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Everything is about lean these days. The lean startup, lean manufacturing, lean software development, lean UX, and the list goes on! The goal with all of these lean processes is to trim the fat. Remove the systems and processes that slow or disrupt productivity.

Key takeaways:

• Lean UX is a collaborative approach to UX design that incorporates principles from Lean and Agile methodologies.
• It is an off-shoot of a book in early 2000s about Lean software development.
• It has 15 principles such as prioritizing learning, placing importance on outcomes, continuous discovery, and more.

Choosing the right design tool can help streamline UX workflows and processes. UXPin is a collaborative design tool built to increase speed, consistency, and efficiency. Sign up for a 14-day free trial.

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What is Lean UX?

Lean UX is an outcome-based design process that promotes collaboration and encourages lots of testing and experiments on minimum viable products (MVP).

Lean UX prioritizes outcomes over deliverables. Instead of asking “what are we designing,” lean UX asks, “why are we designing?” By replacing what with why designers must find reasons and supporting data to do design—rather than building something because someone thinks it’s a good idea!

In this way, lean UX design is more of a thought process than a workflow concept. Designers must formulate and validate a hypothesis before they commit to building it. This thinking process is why testing and experiments on MVP concepts are a significant part of a lean UX workflow.

The History of Lean UX

Lean UX is an off-shoot of the 2003 book Lean Software Development and the Agile methodology. Janice Fraser, an internationally recognized design and business expert, coined the term lean UX in the late 2000s stating, “Lean UX is UX practice adapted for Lean Startups…”

Janice used her knowledge and experience of innovation and scaling several Silicon Valley startups to apply lean concepts to UX design.

Agile UX vs. Lean UX

Agile UX and lean UX are similar concepts; however, Agile UX is effective for teams using Agile, while the lean UX process is suitable for any startup or organization.

The Lean UX Process

It’s important to note that the lean UX process still involves all of the traditional UX design thinking phases, just in a different protocol.

The five stages of the design thinking process include:

1. Empathize: Discover what your users need
2. Define: Determine the problem you want to solve
3. Ideate: Develop possible solutions to users’ problems
4. Prototype: Create prototypes
5. Test: Test your prototypes with users & stakeholders

While lean UX breaks the process into three stages:

1. Think: Outcomes, assumptions, user research, ideate, mental models, sketches, storyboards
2. Make: Wireframes, prototypes (minimum viable products), value propositions, hypotheses
3. Check: Analyze data & analytics, usability testing, stakeholder and user feedback

As you can see, both processes include the same elements; only the methodology differs.

Lean UX Principles

In an informative article, Ben Ralph outlines 15 core lean UX principles:

1. Cross-functional teams—build teams with members from several departments working on the same project.
2. Small, dedicated, co-located—keep teams small (5-9), focused on a single problem, and in the same workspace (or the same timezone for remote teams).
3. Progress = outcomes, not output—achieving business goals are outcomes, features and services are output.
4. Problem-focused teams—teams must focus on solving problems, not designing new features.
5. Removing waste—remove work and processes that don’t get you to your business goals. Does your team attend meetings or generate reports without explicit reasoning?
6. Small batch size—teams must focus on completing one task or objective at a time.
7. Continuous discovery—engage with customers, end-users, and stakeholders regularly.
8. Get out of the building (GOOB)—don’t debate assumptions internally. Test ideas with real users.
9. Shared understanding—collaborate and share ideas so that the entire team learns and grows together.
10. Anti-pattern rockstars, gurus, and ninjas—every team member is valued the same. 
11. Externalizing your work—create an environment where people are free to share ideas. There are no right or wrong ideas!
12. Making over analysis—don’t waste time debating whether something will work. Try it and learn from the experience.
13. Learning over growth—make the right thing first, then scale.
14. Permission to fail—experiment and take risks! As Mark Zuckerberg famously said, “move fast and break things.” Prioritize speed to market over perfection.
15. Getting out of the deliverables business—keep UX documentation to a minimum. Prioritize the outcome.

There are two common themes across all of these 15 lean UX principles:

1. Take action—turn ideas into minimum viable products and prototypes. Test, and test again!
2. Teamwork—share, communicate, collaborate.

Benefits of Lean UX

Traditional UX design processes involve time-wasting roadblocks like oversight meetings, unnecessary documentation and deliverables, department/team silos, and poor communication.

Lean UX optimizes the UX workflow by encouraging inter-departmental collaboration and avoiding protocols that don’t add business value. 

Lean UX’s outcomes-based means that UX designers focus intensely on solving user problems and testing ideas rather than meeting to discuss the color of the CTA button.

Building cross-functional teams with representatives from multiple departments means that designers can draw from diverse ideas, experiences, and perspectives. With this wealth of knowledge, teams can build better MVPs and test more ideas faster. 

We can summarize Lean UX benefits in five bullet points:

• Eliminates waste
• Fosters collaboration
• Fast
• Efficient
• User-centered

The Lean UX Methodology

There are three main principles central to the lean UX methodology:

• Assumptions
• Hypotheses
• Minimum viable products (MVP)

Assumptions

Assumptions are just ideas. But the beauty of an assumption is that you’re allowed to be wrong—which complements the lean UX philosophy of experimenting and taking risks.

To make an assumption, you must have the research knowledge and a problem statement you acquire during the think phase. With this knowledge, you can make assumptions about:

• Business outcomes—what is a successful outcome?
• Users—be specific about the people you’re helping (user personas).
• User outcomes—what is a user pain point, and how can your product solve it?
• Product features—product improvements required to solve the problem.

Armed with a set of assumptions, you can begin making hypotheses for solving your problems.

Hypothesis

A UX hypothesis is a testable assumption with three variables:

1. What you’re going to do
2. To solve a problem for (users)
3. To achieve a desired outcome

You can write a hypothesis statement as follows:

We believe [doing this] for [these users] will achieve [this outcome].

A theory must be tested, not debated. Team members must avoid getting into debates over opinions on how a hypothesis will turn out. Let the test results determine what to do next!

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Instead of designing an entire product, teams create the bare minimum (MVP) to test their hypothesis. 

If your hypothesis works, you have a small functional product to expand on. If the hypothesis is incorrect, you can ditch the idea and move on with minimal time wasted.

Designers can build an MVP using wireframes, mockups, and prototypes to test anything and everything. Teams may even create a paper MVP during early testing to flush out many ideas quickly before committing to a slower digital design process.

The MVP must be able to test the hypothesis. For example, if you want to test a button interaction, a paper prototype will not give you a meaningful result. It would be better to use a high-fidelity prototype with color and content to test the interaction in the context of the digital product.

Conversely, you don’t need to spend hours or days building a fully functioning high-fidelity product prototype to test a signup form. A simple wireframe will get the job done faster.

Minimum Viable Products in UXPin

With UXPin’s built-in design libraries, designers can drag-and-drop components to build minimal viable products quickly. You can also add advanced interactions, so prototypes look and feel like the final product.

Need more fidelity for better accuracy during testing?

Take your MVPs to the next level with UXPin Merge—a technology that bridges the gap between design and development. Sync UXPin’s design editor to your company’s design system via a repository (Git and Storybook integrations available) so designers can build prototypes using fully functioning code components.

A fantastic case study of how Merge optimizes the lean UX process was PayPal’s experiment when they first adopted the technology. A designer made two one-page prototypes (or MVPs)—the first with a traditional design tool and the second using UXPin Merge. Using the traditional design tool, the designer created an MVP in a little over an hour. With UXPin Merge: eight minutes. And, the Merge prototype had higher fidelity and functionality.

Read more about UXPin Merge and how it solves DesignOps challenges with sophisticated code-based design technology.

Once you designers complete building a minimum viable product, it’s time for testing!

Testing

Finally, teams get to test their hypothesis and MVP. Testing prototypes don’t only help validate ideas, but researchers can also gather valuable insights from observing user behavior and how they interact with a prototype.

Usability testing can also expose usability issues and business opportunities, which designers can add to the next iteration.

With test results, lean design teams can return to the think stage with new insights to start the process again.

Summary

The Lean UX process reorganizes a traditional design process to optimize workflows and enhance collaboration. Your teams don’t have to learn new skills, but rather the organization needs a mindset shift to a new methodology of designing products.

As we’ve highlighted throughout this article, UXPin can help foster lean UX tenets and workflows. Using comments, teams can communicate, assign tasks and mark them as resolved once completed.

With built-in design libraries, designers can skip low-fidelity prototyping and go straight to high-fidelity minimum viable products that deliver meaningful, actionable feedback from usability participants and stakeholders.

Best of all, UXPin also minimizes deliverables with built-in documentation so designers can annotate and create instructions on user interfaces for developers during design handoffs.

Ready to try UXPin to optimize your lean UX process? Experience the power of the world’s most advanced code-based design tool. Sign up for a 14-day free trial.

The post Lean UX: Expert Tips to Maximize Efficiency in UX appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Prototyping is one of the most critical steps in the design process, yet prototypes still confuse some designers and project teams.

A common misconception is that some designers refer to mockups as prototypes—which can confuse those who know otherwise! Prototypes are also not a series of sketches or a functional replica of the end-product.

Key takeaways:

• A prototype is a representation of the end-product that is used in order to see if the product teams are building the right solution for their desired users.
• There are several types of prototypes: a paper prototype that’s basically a sketch of a product, digital wireframe, functional prototype, and more.
• Prototypes differ in terms of their fidelity to the final product. Low fidelity means prototype doesn’t include many details while high-fidelity prototype can be fully functional and behave like a real product.
• There are a couple of ways of creating a prototype depending on the level of fidelity you want to achieve. You can start with a paper or build a prototype in code. Let’s discuss what that means.

Build a living example of your product with components that come from your design library stored in Git, Storybook or as an npm package. Simplify design handoff and make sure that teams are sharing a single source of truth between design and code. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

What is a Prototype?

A prototype is a simulation of a final product which product teams use for testing before committing resources to building the actual thing.

The goal of a prototype is to test and validate ideas before sharing them with stakeholders and eventually passing the final designs to engineering teams for the development process.

Prototypes are essential for identifying and solving user pain points with participants during usability testing. Testing prototypes with end-users enables UX teams to visualize and optimize the user experience during the design process.

Engineering is expensive, and making changes to a final product is often not as straightforward as teams anticipate. So, finding and fixing errors during the design process is critical.

Prototypes have four main qualities:

• Representation — The prototype itself, i.e., paper and mobile, or HTML and desktop.
• Precision — The fidelity of the prototype, meaning its level of detail—low-fidelity or high-fidelity.
• Interactivity — The functionality available to the user during the testing phase, e.g., fully functional, partially functional, or view-only.
• Evolution — The lifecycle of the prototype. Some are built quickly, tested, thrown away, and then replaced with an improved version (known as “rapid prototyping”). Others may be created and improved upon, ultimately evolving into the final product.

Another common misconception about prototyping is that it only needs to be done once or twice at the end of the design process—not true. 

One of our mottos that we believe at UXPin is “test early and test often.”

According to Elementor’s Director of UX, the website building platform’s designers’ – average four to five prototyping sessions, depending on the complexity of a given design.

You should prototype every possible iteration of your design—even your early basic ideas for solving a user need. Prototyping shouldn’t be reserved only for beta tests of the final version; you should test any and every version of your product!

If testing a prototype produces new insights about how end-users will interact with your product, then it’s worth taking the time to gather user feedback and iterate—whether that’s paper, low-fidelity or high-fidelity.

Types of Prototypes

We’re going to explore prototypes in three types of prototypes: paper, digital, and HTML.

Paper Prototypes

A paper prototype is a prototype that is drawn on a paper or a digital whitebaord. Such a prototype is used during the early design stages, like a design thinking workshop while designers still brainstorm ideas.

Paper prototyping works best during early design stages where design teams collaborate to explore many concepts fast. Team members sketch ideas by hand using simple lines, shapes, and text. The emphasis is on lots of ideas and speed, not aesthetics.

UX Teams lay paper screens on the floor, table, or pinned to a board to simulate user flows. A common practice for testing these prototypes is to have one person play “the product,” switching the sketches according to how the real user behaves.

A low visual/low functional paper prototype.

Advantages of Paper Prototypes

• Fast — You can sketch a prototype in minutes, which is why paper works so well for testing lots of ideas. You can draw a prototype quickly (even during a brainstorming meeting), so you haven’t wasted more than a few minutes if an idea falls flat. 
• Inexpensive — You only need a maker pen and paper to create prototypes, making the process cheap and accessible.
• Team-building — Paper prototyping is a collaborative effort, and often teams have fun coming up with fresh ideas. It’s a fantastic team-building exercise, and these free-thinking sessions often inspire creativity.
• Documentation — Team members can keep physical copies of paper prototypes, notes, and todos for quick reference during future iterations. 

Disadvantages

• Unrealistic — No matter how skilled the art or craftsmanship, paper prototypes will never be more than hand-drawn representations of a digital product. So, while they’re quick to draw, paper prototypes produce little or no results when doing user testing.
• False positives — Sometimes, paper prototypes don’t validate ideas properly. What seems like a good idea on paper might not work effectively in a digital wireframe.
• No gut reactions — Paper prototypes rely on the user’s imagination, adding a break between seeing the stimulus and responding to it. That “gut” reaction is crucial for a successful UX.

Considering these advantages and disadvantages, we recommend paper prototyping only during early-stage design. Once you move from paper to digital, there shouldn’t be any reason to revisit hand-sketched prototypes for the same designs or user flows.

For more information on paper prototyping, check out these helpful resources:

• Paper Prototyping as a Usability Testing Technique by Justin Mifsud
• Better Use of Paper in UX Design by Marcin Treder
• iPhone User Interface Design, Paper Prototype Design (video)
• Printable Paper Prototyping Templates courtesy of Tripwire Magazine

Digital Prototyping

Digital prototyping is an exciting part of the design process. Prototypes start to resemble the final product allowing teams to test and validate ideas.

There are two types of digital prototypes:

• Low-fidelity prototypes: a user flow using wireframes
• High-fidelity prototypes: a user flow using mockups

Low-fidelity prototypes allow research teams to outline basic user flows and information architecture. High-fidelity prototypes go into more detail, testing user interfaces, interactions, and how usability participants interact with a product.

Designers build prototypes using design tools like Figma, Adobe XD, and others. Sometimes non-designers, from product teams use Powerpoint or Google Slides to simulate user flows.

UXPin is unique because it allows designers to create prototypes that look and function exactly like the final product—something you cannot achieve with other popular design tools!

Advantages of Digital Prototyping

• Realistic interactions — Testing with high-fidelity digital prototypes lets UX teams see how users interact with the final product, thus effectively iron out any usability issues.
• Flexibility — Test early and test often! You can start with lo-fi prototypes that become progressively more advanced as the product design process moves forward.
• Speed — While paper prototypes might be the fastest way to test ideas, digital prototypes are the quickest way to test usability issues. Once a product gets to the engineering stage, changes cost significantly more time and money.

Disadvantages

• Learning curve — Before you can build a prototype, you’ll need to learn and understand the software—which is why product teams often use Powerpoint instead of a specialized design tool. The good news is that most design software incorporates the same tools, so it’s relatively easy to switch between them.
• Cost — As you move from low-fidelity to high-fidelity prototyping, time and labor costs increase.

A prototype’s success depends on teams outlining clear objectives and KPIs for each usability study. Without a proper plan, designers can get side-tracked, adding unnecessary features and interactions!

Here are some helpful resources for creating digital prototypes:

• A 10-Minute Rapid Prototyping Lesson by Marek Bowers

HTML & JavaScript Prototyping

On rare occasions, teams might build HTML & JavaScript prototypes to get more accurate results. The downside to this approach is that coding comes with considerable time and technical costs.

But with UXPin Merge, that isn’t the case!

Product designers (and non-designers) can create code-based high-fidelity prototypes that look and function like the final product.

For example, with UXPin’s Merge technology, teams can use React components pulled from a Git repository or Storybook components to create fully functional high-fidelity prototypes. With UXPin Merge, participants never have to “imagine” what a button or dropdown will do because the prototype functions like the final product!

Low Visual/High Functional Prototype built-in HTML. (Image credit: Mike Hill)

Advantages

• Final product functionality — HTML prototypes provide participants with an accurate model of the final product.
• The technical foundation for the final product — Building an HTML prototype provides researchers with a valuable research tool and provides developers with the foundations for building the final product.
• Platform agnostic — You can test your prototype on virtually any operating system or device, and the user won’t need to run outside software.

Disadvantages

• Dependent on designer skill level — Your HTML prototype is only as good as your ability to code. Poorly coded prototypes could introduce usability issues that don’t have anything to do with UX design!
• Inhibits creativity — Coding takes time and focus to build a usable prototype. Designers might not achieve the same level of innovation or creativity as using a familiar design tool.

Here are some helpful resources on HTML prototyping:

• Designing with Code by Andy Fitzgerald
• The Advantage of Rapid Prototyping by ZURB
• UXPin Merge for interactive prototyping by Robert Kirkman

The Prototyping Process

There’s no single best process for prototyping; it all depends on the product and application. Below are the three most effective prototyping processes, each intended for different scenarios.

(Note: We advise that you ALWAYS test the prototype when going from lo-fi to hi-fi.)

Paper => Lo-fi Digital => Hi-fi Digital => Code

Most designers follow the paper => lo-fi digital => hi-fi digital => code process for prototyping—it’s how we designed UXPin :).

Teams collaborate to develop lots of ideas, sketching wireframes on paper and creating user flows before committing to digital. Here, UX teams will use common brainstorming methods like crazy eights or asking “how might we” questions to get into an end-user mindset.

A lo-fi digital prototype (wireframe) tests crucial elements like navigation and information architecture early in the design process. Teams can use feedback to make quick adjustments to wireframes before committing to mockups.

Once teams complete navigation and information architecture, designers build mockups resembling the final product—adding color, content, interactions, and animations.

When researchers have exhausted testing, UX teams hand over designs to engineers to develop the final product.

Paper => Lo-fi Digital => Code

Going from Lo-fi prototyping to code is an old approach that few teams ever use these days. While lo-fi prototyping is cheap, it doesn’t catch many of the usability issues high-fidelity prototypes expose.

Product developers without design skills might use the paper => lo-fi digital => code method because it’s quicker for them to code than learn how to use a design tool.

The process is exactly like the example above, except that teams will skip the hi-fi digital step.

Low fidelity prototype created during a Yelp redesign exercise. 

High fidelity prototype created during a Yelp redesign exercise.

HTML Prototyping => Code

Solo developers might skip any early prototyping methods and go straight to code. With no one to bounce ideas with, it can make sense for a developer to jump straight in.

Essentially, the prototype creates a foundation and evolves into the final product. This prototyping method is only effective for skilled product developers with efficient workflows.

Even designers with excellent design skills might want to avoid this method of prototyping. Low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototyping are significantly faster than building and editing code.

Paper =>UXPin Merge – Hi-fi Prototyping => Code

With UXPin Merge, you can accelerate the UX process through rapid prototyping. Create fully-functioning high-fidelity prototypes using UI code components to provide participants with a life-like model of the final product.

UX teams follow the standard paper prototyping processes as outlined above. Next, designers build high-fidelity prototypes using UXPin Merge just by dragging and dropping ready interactive UI blocks on the canvas.

The outcome: no more “imagining!” Your prototype will work just as the final product. Prototyping in a code-based design tool like UXPin Merge means engineers can build the final product significantly quicker than working with vector-based designs. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post What is a Prototype? A Guide to Functional UX appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Rapid prototyping accelerates the prototype phase, so design teams can push final designs to engineering teams faster. As Facebook Mark Zuckerberg once said, “Move fast and break things!”

Striving for perfection can cost precious time, putting product teams a step behind the competition. Rapid prototyping ensures that design teams only focus on a design’s key features and flows to get the project to market quickly.

Key takeaways:

• Rapid prototyping is a methodology of creating a workable prototype of a product fast, considering key features and screens that are absolutely necessary for the next stages of product development
• The process of rapid prototyping involves creating a prototype, testing it with users, and iterating it as fast as possible, so the design is ready for development as fast as possible.
• A rapid prototype allows stakeholders to quickly see how the product will look like and what its user experience will be like before committing resources to building it.
• Rapid prototyping is efficient, fast, accessible and focused on making a product that users will enjoy.

UXPin’s advanced prototyping features enable design teams to build products faster. Use React components in prototyping and build production-ready prototypes 10x faster. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

What is Rapid Prototyping?

Rapid prototyping is the process of creating high-fidelity prototypes to test user flows and validate ideas fast. The goal of rapid prototyping is speed. Designers focus solely on optimizing the user experience to prevent getting sidetracked by “nice-to-have” features and aesthetics.

The quicker teams get a product to market, the faster it can generate revenue to fund growth and product improvements.

Rapid Prototyping vs Traditional Prototyping

In comparison to rapid prototyping, the traditional prototyping process follows five well-defined stages:

1. Sketching – Brainstorm by drawing quick and rough sketches on paper.
2. Wireframing – Start laying out the skeletal framework with boxes and rough shapes.
3. Mockups – Inject detail into wireframes with colors, typographies, photos, and other visual design elements.
4. Prototyping – Add interactivity to mockups by stitching screens together for basic prototypes or adding animations/interactions for advanced prototypes.
5. Development handoff – The engineering team receive a prototype in order to turn it into the final product.

But with the popularization of new ideas such as Lean UX and rapid prototyping, plus the school of thought that wants to get into coding as quickly as possible, this traditional sequential method is becoming outdated.

Benefits of Rapid Prototyping

To recap, let’s look at the four primary benefits of rapid prototyping:

1. Saves money – getting products to market faster through rapid prototyping reduces labor costs while enabling products to generate revenue quicker.
2. Saves time – rapid prototyping catches user pain points during testing eliminating the chance of errors reaching development where changes cost significantly more time and money.
3. User-focused – with limited time, teams must focus on optimizing the user experience and not get distracted by nice-to-have features.
4. Accessible – rapid prototyping creates an environment where non-designers can build and test prototypes. This process saves time by eliminating the necessity for product teams to explain ideas to UX designers, who then present designs back to product teams—often over several iterations.

The Rapid Prototyping Process

Rapid prototyping is less of a separate process and more a filter for efficiency. In rapid prototyping, you revise quickly based on feedback and shift swiftly to high-fidelity prototyping to get as quality feedback as you can.

The key to rapid prototyping is setting clear objectives and KPIs, so teams only focus on the tasks required to meet those goals.

The following steps apply to rapid prototyping and testing phases—assuming that you have already completed the early stages of the design process.

Step 0 – Interactive Wireframes

Where rapid prototyping focuses on the final stages of the design process, interactive wireframes bring speed and efficiency to early-stage design.

With interactive wireframes, UX teams have a massive head start as they move into designing mockups and high-fidelity prototypes.

Download our free e-book on interactive wireframes and learn how this early-stage design strategy can help optimize the rapid prototyping process.

Step 1 – Create a Design System

A design system helps designers maintain speed and consistency—essential elements for effective rapid prototyping. Design systems also streamline onboarding new designers or even allow non-designers to build products (like PayPal does with our Merge technology). 

UXPin lets you create a design system from scratch or use popular systems like Google’s Material Design, Bootstrap, or iOS. Additionally, you can use ready-to-use interactive UI patterns to build reusable components fast!

Step 2 – Create Your Mockups

Once your design system is complete, creating mockups is as easy as drag-and-drop.

If you prefer to design in Sketch, UXPin’s Sketch import makes it easy for designers to upload mockups to begin prototyping and testing.

Step 3 – Creating Interactions – The UXPin Way

With your mockups complete, it’s time to connect user flows and add interactions. 

Keep your interactions simple to start. You can even create guidelines for interactions in your design system, so team members just copy and paste. Not only will simple interactions save time, but they also maintain uniformity, keeping the final product clean and consistent. Designers can always come back to refining interactions at a later stage.

Remember, the goal is to only focus on the interactions that matter for users to complete a flow! UX designers must build prototypes that look and feel like the final product to get accurate feedback from testing.

With UXPin, you can create components, variables, add states, and use real data to make your high-fidelity prototypes look and behave exactly like the final product.

• Components save you time by allowing you to create reusable elements—for example, a button, icon, or card. The Master Component defines the component’s properties, while the Instance Component mirrors the content from its master. Any changes to the Master copies to all Instance Components, allowing designers to make changes to an entire flow by editing a single element.
• Variables allow you to store user inputs and take actions based on the provided data inside the prototype. UX teams can provide a personalized experience during usability testing and demonstrations to stakeholders—a powerful UXPin feature to enhance rapid prototyping.
• Another powerful UXPin feature is the ability to create element and component states—for example, default, hover, active, and disabled. Additionally, you can set up triggers to activate or switch between states, like a drop-down or navigation menu.
• UXPin Merge lets designers take high-fidelity prototypes to a level no other design tool can! As you design with components that were coded, UXPin Merge enables prototypes to look and function exactly like the final product—more on UXPin Merge later in this article!

Step 3 – Test, Tweak, Repeat

Once high-fidelity prototypes are complete, it’s time for testing. With UXPin, you can test prototypes in the browser or download UXPin Mirror (iOS & Android) for testing on mobile devices—you can even lock prototypes in UXPin with password protection to prevent unauthorized access.

UX teams can collect feedback from stakeholders and usability studies to tweak designs before returning to the testing phase to validate the changes.

UX designers might make minor changes during testing to get instant feedback and accelerate the rapid prototyping process.

How UXPin Merge Accelerates Rapid Prototyping

Traditional design tools render vector or raster graphics. While these graphics might look like the final product, they have limited functionality which doesn’t provide meaningful feedback from testing and stakeholders.

Prototypes created this way require the user to “imagine” that they have entered data or activated an element’s state—like adding a product to their cart or playing a video.

UXPin is a code-based design tool. When a designer draws something on the canvas, UXPin renders HTML/CSS/JS code. As UXPin is code-based, we went one step further and introduced Merge technology that integrates with Git or Storybook, and brings all the components your devs coded for the design system into UXPin library so that you can reuse them!  The result? You can prototype with ready and fully interactive UI elements without designing from scratch. 

Test participants and stakeholders no longer have to “imagine” what will happen when they interact with a UXPin prototype because it looks and functions like the final product! Using actual data from JSON, Google Sheets, or CSV, designers can also simulate an authentic product experience and make quick changes to test multiple scenarios.

Not only does UXPin Merge accelerate rapid prototyping with an authentic user experience and meaningful feedback, but it also makes the transition from designing to engineering and on to the final product significantly quicker.

PayPal’s DesignOps 2.0 – A UXPin Merge Success Story

UXPin Merge forms the core of PayPal’s DesignOps 2.0—where product team members (not designers) use rapid prototyping to build interfaces for PayPal’s internal tools.

Essentially, UXPin Merge provides PayPal’s product team with a no-code drag-and-drop tool to build user interfaces and test high-fidelity prototypes with React components. Additionally, PayPal’s product managers import real information from JSON, Google Sheets, or CSV—giving prototypes final product functionality.

Instead of taking part in the prototyping and testing process, PayPal’s UX designers (of which there are only three to 3,000 developers!) act as mentors to product teams, providing guidance and support when necessary.

With code components, PayPal’s engineers can develop the product team’s prototypes significantly faster than using a vector or raster-based design tool.

If PayPal can achieve efficient rapid prototyping with just three UX designers, imagine what UXPin Merge could do for your design process. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

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The post Rapid Prototyping Process and Fidelity – A 5-Minute Guide appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

According to IDEO, a truly innovative product must have desirability, viability, and feasibility for sustainable long-term growth and success.

The design thinking process involves research, or a design review, to determine what product and features will serve your customers the best. A successful design review identifies a problem your competitors aren’t solving that will benefit both your end-users and the business.

But, where do you start? How do you find this competitive edge? And how do you know if it’s a viable business model that serves users and the organization?

This article explores research during the conceptualization phase of design thinking and how to identify an idea that meets three key criteria:

• Desirability – is a need that the user have to use a product.
• Viability – is a commercial value of releasing a product.
• Feasibility – is practical and technical constraints of creating a product.

Does your design tool provide you with features to take a product from concept to design handoff? UXPin is an advanced end-to-end design tool that makes it easy to create prototypes with live React, Storybook or npm components. Check why this approach to prototyping can help you. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

What are Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility in Design?

Desirability, viability, and feasibility is a design thinking methodology to test ideas, concepts, and hypotheses to determine if you have a unique value proposition (aka unique selling point) and whether it’s worth pursuing.

Without checking all three boxes, you increase the risks, costs, and potential for failure. You could say desirability, viability, and feasibility are a risk analysis methodology for ideas – a toolkit to find that innovation sweet spot.

By applying this methodology, you can pinpoint the weak points in your design concepts, do further research or scrap the idea and move on.

Where Does this Methodology Originate?

IDEO, a global design company, conceptualized the desirability, viability, and feasibility design thinking methodology in the early 2000s as a way to test ideas.

IDEO recognized that the best ideas succeed when they fulfill this trifecta. Conversely, “great ideas” often fail when they miss one or more of these three criteria.

Let’s look through these three lenses to understand how this trifecta fits together.

Desirability

The first box designers must check is desirability. If your product idea has no market value and people don’t want or need it, it won’t sell. 

Researching desirability will also tell you whether your product is a want or a need. For example:

• You need to get to work which you can do by walking, taking public transport, driving, carpooling, etc.
• You want a car to get to work because it offers convenience, and maybe more luxury than public transport.

A need is something your customers cannot live without, while a want is often a more desirable option to fulfilling that need. Both check the box for desirability, but a product that fulfills someone’s need is far more valuable than something someone wants or is “nice to have.”

To find a desirable product, you must research your customers and identify pain points (wants and needs) that you can fulfill. 

• Does your product solve someone’s problem?
• Do your competitors offer a solution? 
• Do you have a better idea? 
• What makes your idea unique, and why would someone choose yours over the competition?
• How will your product make end-users feel?
• Is your product so desirable that people will tell their friends?
• Will your product be something that once people try it, they won’t want to live without it?

When researching desirability, the intention is to stress-test your idea to find the gaps that need fixing. The more gaps you fill, the stronger your product and the better it will stand up against rigorous stakeholder questioning and customer satisfaction.

Viability

Viability tells you whether or not your product makes business sense. Even if you have the most desirable product in the world, if it’s too expensive or isn’t profitable, then it’s not a good business model.

A truly viable product idea makes business sense in the short-term and into the future. The quicker and longer it can deliver a positive return on investment, the higher the viability of your design idea.

A fantastic example of viability is how Coca-Cola designed a beverage formula in 1886 that’s still one of the most consumed drinks in the world today! That initial investment created massive wealth for its inventors and still delivers incredible returns for shareholders more than 135 years later.

Viability is also about societal and environmental impact—the ethical aspect of your design. Will your digital product provide a positive gain for society? In 2021, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen released documents showing that the social media giant’s internal research showed that Instagram creates anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts among teenage girls.

Instagram might deliver high financial returns in the short term, but is this harm to teenagers sustainable long-term? And what will governments do to regulate Facebook and Instagram?

Facebook is a massive company with the resources to overcome societal controversy, fines, and lawsuits. But, a smaller company or startup will mostly like fold when confronted with similar pressures. 

So, when we look at viability, it must provide value for the business, customers, and society. Some questions you might want to consider include:

• What has to be true for this design to work?
• What will it cost to turn your design into a functioning product?
• Do you have the capital investment to build the new product or feature?
• What is the pricing model? And, can the business make a profit?
• How long will it take to see a positive return on investment?
• Is the product sustainable?
• How does the product impact society?

Like desirability, viability requires you to research, analyze, and stress-test ideas to ensure they’re viable and sustainable.

Feasibility

Feasibility looks at your current resources to determine if you’re capable of developing the product in the foreseeable future. Designers must consider how the product will impact the business.

Some feasibility factors include:

• Technical constraints
• Financial constraints
• Product’s impact on branding, marketing, customer support, and other areas of the business
• Estimated time-to-market
• Operational capabilities

Ideally, you want to design a new product or feature within the company’s current capabilities using available resources. When you have to build infrastructure to support a new product, you increase the risks and costs.

Here are some feasibility questions you might want to consider when designing a new product or feature:

• Does the current design system have the components to develop the new product?
• How long will it take to design and develop the product?
• Do you have enough product designers, UX designers, and engineers to build and scale the new product?
• Can our technical constraints support the new design?
• Will the organization need to hire new talent?
• If you have to extend the organization’s capabilities, how can this benefit future products?
• What impact will the product have on the brand?
• Will the product’s release impact other areas of the organization, like marketing, sales, and customer support? And do these departments have the capacity for more work?

Using Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility in a Design Review

Organizations conduct a design review during the early stages of a product design to evaluate the design against specific criteria. The goal is to identify any problems with the design or prototype before developing it–which carries the costs of infrastructure, marketing, sales, customer support, and more.

Essentially, the organization wants to know the product design’s desirability, viability, and feasibility.

A UX Design Review Template

Applying the desirability, viability, and feasibility design thinking methodology will give you the insights and data to present a comprehensive and objective design review to stakeholders. 

Below is a structure or template you can use to present your design review so that it’s easy for stakeholders to read and digest.

The problem: State the problem succinctly. The design and business teams will build a shared understanding from this foundation.

The system (current state): Show how the current system works (if it’s an existing product) to help put the problem in context. Later, you can show how the system could work with your proposed experience.

The Jobs To Be Done (JBTD): A shared understanding of what motivates your customers is crucial for a design review. As Tony Ulwick defines JBTD: “a lens through which you can observe markets, customers, user needs, competitors, and customer segments differently, and by doing so, make innovation far more predictable and profitable.” This lens helps stakeholders understand how customers decide whether to “hire” or “fire” your solution.

The business objective: State the business value and ROI for solving this customer problem.

The metrics that matter: You can’t improve what you don’t measure. These metrics should enable you to quantify the business and customer value you’ll create through your new product design.

The proposed experience: Summarize the proposal in a sentence. Make it clear and understandable. The people in the room need to understand how this proposal relates to the problem you’ve previously articulated.

The implications of your proposal: How will your proposal impact other parts of the business? Maybe you don’t know. Understanding this early in the product design process is critical to achieving balance in desirability, viability, and feasibility.

Basic experience design: Present your wireframes, mockups, prototypes, or minimum viable product (MVP) so that stakeholders can visualize how a customer might find the product desirable.

Insights informing the design: What led you to choose this design? What were the insights, hypotheses, etc.? Show your depth of thought in a few bullet points.

Hypotheses about the new design: 

• What are your hypotheses about the new design? 
• How did you arrive at this hypothesis? 
• How can you align these hypotheses to the metrics you believe matter?

These should be clear and testable. By conducting tests with clear pass/fail metrics, these hypotheses should also give you a strong foundation for measuring the incremental progress you’re making.

The team’s collaborative focus: Why are you all in the room? What input do you need from stakeholders? This section of the design review template helps set a clear context and focus for the stakeholders responsible for the product’s success.

With UXPin Merge, you can use built-in component libraries to quickly assemble high-fidelity prototypes and MVPs and present these to stakeholders during the design review. This will definitely speed up your time to market, and make you release quality products faster. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post What is Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility? [+ Design Review Template] appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Mobile-first design is an approach to designing UIs that prioritizes small-screen experience.

Given that different devices need different layouts based on their screen size and orientation, it makes sense to design multiple arrangements for your users. This article will show you how to create a mobile-first prototype of a product and transform it into tablet and desktop screens.

Make your own responsive or adaptive variations right in UXPin. Create a mobile-first design and scale it up for tablet and desktop views in UXPin – an advanced prototyping tool. Go ahead and create a free trial and follow along below.

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What is Mobile-First Approach?

The mobile-first approach is exactly as it sounds: designing for the smallest screen and working your way up. It is one of the best strategies to create either a responsive or adaptive design.

• The mobile-first approach is a tenet of progressive enhancement. It is the ideology that mobile design, as the hardest, should be done first. Once the mobile design questions are answered, designing for other devices will be easier. What it boils down to is that, the smallest of the designs will have only the essential features, so right away you have designed the heart of your UX.
• The opposite approach is graceful degradation. This incorporates all of the complexities right from the start, then strips them away later for smaller devices. The problem with graceful degradation is that when you build the all-inclusive design right from the start, the core and supplementary elements merge and become harder to distinguish and separate. The entire philosophy runs the risk of treating mobile design as more of an afterthought since you’re “cutting down” the experience.

We, along with others, strongly recommend progressive enhancement with a mobile-first approach. In this post, we’ll explain tips & techniques, then finish off with a hands-on lesson in which we build a hypothetical website with the mobile-first workflow.

Mobile-First = Content-First

If your site is good on a mobile device, it translates better to all devices. More important, though, is that a mobile-first approach is also a content-first approach. Mobile has the most limitations, screen size, and bandwidth to name a few, and so designing within these parameters forces you to prioritize content ruthlessly.

The mobile-first approach organically leads to a design that’s more content-focused, and therefore user-focused. The heart of the site is content — that’s what the users are there for.

One caveat, though, is that mobile users sometimes require different content than desktop users. Device-specific content can be gauged by considering context — what, in a given situation and a given environment, will your user appreciate more. The best way to plan ahead for these is by creating user scenarios.

Another advantage to the mobile-first approach is that the small-screen breakpoints can better fit around the content. Again, the alternative is worse: having to squeeze an already plump design into a tiny framework. But with the mobile-first approach, the breakpoints develop naturally around content, so you don’t need any awkward edits.

The Mobile-First Design Process

We’ll describe a process that helps our designers at UXPin.

As usual, wireframing is a recommended early step to most efficiently structure your layout. When wireframing or prototyping, we use the responsive breakpoint menu to streamline the process of moving to different screen sizes, starting with the smallest.

These presets layout the proper screen size for you, so you can wireframe keeping only the content in mind.

Our procedure follows these steps:
1. Content Inventory — This is a spreadsheet or equivalent document containing all the elements you want to include. Learn more about doing an inventory of content.

Source: Maadmob

2. Visual Hierarchy — Prioritize the elements in the content inventory and determine how to display the most important elements prominently. Learn more about visual hierarchy.

3. Design with the smallest breakpoints and then scale up — Build the mobile wireframe first, then use that as the model for larger breakpoints. Expand the screen until there’s too much negative space.

4. Enlarge touch targets — Fingers are much wider than pixel-precise mouse cursors, and so need larger elements on which to tap. At the time of this writing, Apple recommends 44 pixels square for touch targets (read about mobile design for iOS and Android). Give hyperlinks plenty of space, and slightly enlarge buttons, and make sure that there’s enough space around all the interactive elements.

5. Don’t count on hovers — It almost goes without saying, but designers often rely on hover and mouseover effects in their interactive work. If you’re thinking mobile-friendly, don’t do that.

6. Think “app” — Mobile users are accustomed to the motion and a modicum of control in their experience. Think about off-canvas navigation, expandible widgets, AJAX calls, or other elements on the screen with which users can interact without refreshing the page.

7. Avoid large graphics — Landscape photos and complex graphics don’t display well when your screen is only a few inches across. Cater to mobile users with images that are readable on handheld screens.

8. Test it in a real device — Nothing beats discovering for yourself how usable a website is (or isn’t). Step away from your desktop/laptop computer and load up your product on a real phone or tablet. Tap through pages. Is the site easy to navigate? Does it load in a timely fashion? Are the text and graphics easy to read?

This is just a basic outline. For the complete guide to our process, download the free Content Wireframing for Responsive Design.

A Mobile-First Design Tutorial

Set your content priorities

A “mobile-first approach” differs from “desktop-first” in that we add information to each progressively larger layout rather than cut away as we design smaller. Thinking mobile doesn’t mean eliminating information. It means sorting information into primary, secondary, and tertiary content.

In this example, we know that the home page should have certain elements, like the company’s name and links to products. A blog post wouldn’t hurt either. But like we said, not everything will fit into a smartphone view, so we set priorities based on what will achieve the site’s goal: selling bikes.

1. The newest model bike

2. The best-selling bike

3. “Find your perfect ride” CTA

4. Company name and hero image

5. Navigation

6. Search

7. The second-best-selling bike

8. Gift certificates

9. A testimonial

10. The latest blog post

Based on that ordered list, we can create with the confidence that our work will solve a design problem of getting sales.

Smartphone View

How much do users need?

Thinking mobile-first forces us to think about what’s really important. In this smartphone view, the top-selling bike and newest model will lead directly to sales, so can we leave other items — such as gift certificates, a less-popular model, the latest news — for inside pages. The final call to action is especially prominent and easy to hit with a single tap of the finger.

Tablet View

As we design for a tablet-sized view, we’re better able to add secondary information like additional products (e.g. “The Capacitor”). We can also expand the navigation at the top of the page and add content that encourages sales without actually leading to them — namely, the testimonial.

Because more options are available, this can be surprisingly more difficult than deciding what to include in a smartphone UI. The difference between secondary and tertiary elements is a blurry line, and temptation is strong to include everything.

Resist the urge. Use the ordered content list. Like smartphones, space is still limited.

Desktop View

Finally, the desktop view can support as much information as you decide is important. This is where the home page can accommodate all of the information you see fit, whether or not it fits. Notice some of the additional content we’ve included:

• Gift certificates
• Customer testimonials
• Blog post exploring the newest Lightning Bolt bike

Design device-appropriate layouts yourself

If you’re using UXPin, it’s fairly easy to create different layouts for these views.

1. Open a UXPin prototype.
2. Tap “Add new adaptive version” at the bottom right of the UXPin editor
3. Choose a preset size or enter your own dimensions.
   
4. You don’t have to recreate everything from scratch. Choose a size from which to copy your design’s elements.
   

And that’s it. Switch between breakpoints by tapping the different sizes above your canvas, and adjust each to suit your needs. If you’d like to try prototyping mobile-first yourself, go ahead. Start a free trial in UXPin.

The post A Hands-On Guide to Mobile-First Responsive Design appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

The design process is a collaborative effort where designers seek input and ideas from other design teams, product teams, engineers, and other stakeholders. Design collaboration tools help bring these people and ideas into a centralized workflow to increase productivity and streamline projects.

UXPin Merge is a design technology that’s able to sync design and development, so designers and engineers share a single source of truth and work more collaboratively. Take your design collaboration to a level that allows you to work at scale ans bridge communication gap between designers and devs. Learn more about how UXPin Merge brings design and engineering closer.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

What Makes a Good Design Collaboration Tool?

Here are some things to consider when choosing design collaboration tools for your organization:

• Integrations are essential to syncing other platforms and departments. These integrations also automate workflows to reduce operational redundancies so teams can focus on more important tasks.
• Single sign-on (SSO) helps reduce time switching between tools while providing security benefits. Check with your IT department about SSO requirements and which tools they recommend.
• Try to use products within your existing suite wherever possible. For example, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace offer chat, file storage, whiteboarding, and project management products, to name a few. Keeping everything in one place increases productivity while reducing costs.
• Try to find tools that solve multiple problems. Again, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are great examples, but you can also find comprehensive design tools. For example, UXPin offers features for design collaboration, design systems, wireframing, mockups, interactive prototyping, and testing (native and web).

UXPin Merge

One of the biggest product development challenges is creating a single source of truth between design and development. Even the best design systems have two separate libraries:

• A UI kit for designers to use in an image-based design tool
• A component library with UI components for engineers

UXPin Merge solves this issue by importing a component library hosted in a repository into UXPin, so designers use the same UI elements during the design process as engineers use for front-end development–a true single source of truth!

Once you connect Merge to your repository, UXPin automates everything else. Any changes to the repo automatically sync to UXPin and notify design teams of the update. Merge’s Version Control lets designers switch versions and control when they want to update a project.

Merge is just one element of UXPin’s end-to-end design tool. Designers can use UXPin, like any other design tool, to create wireframes, mockups, and interactive prototypes. Designers can test web designs in the browser or use UXPin Mirror for mobile apps (iOS and Android).

UXPin’s Comments enable designers, product teams, engineers, and stakeholders to discuss design files and prototypes in real-time–even if they don’t have a UXPin account. Slack and Jira integrations keep everyone connected with design project updates.

There are three ways to use Merge:

• npm integration: import components from open-source libraries from the npm registry
• Git Integration: connect Merge directly to a React repository
• Storybook Integration: use any Storybook component library, including React, Angular, Vue, and other front-end technologies

This leads us to our next design collaboration tool…

Storybook

Storybook is a sandbox of sorts for developing UI elements in isolation. While engineering teams primarily use Storybook, the platform’s UI Review feature enables designers, product teams, and other stakeholders to test components and provide feedback before release.

Storybook is an essential tool for cross-functional design system teams, where designers and engineers work closely to build, update, and maintain components. Storybook’s Merge integration automates releases to design teams, so designers and engineers are always in sync.

Miro

Miro is a cloud-based collaborative ideation tool for whiteboarding and brainstorming ideas. Design teams use Miro for in-person and remote team collaboration, including workshops, design sprints, and collaborative prototyping.

Mural

Mural is an excellent Miro alternative, and both platforms offer comparable features and pricing–it comes down to which user interface you prefer. 

Google Jamboard

Google Jamboard is perfect if you’re looking for a free whiteboarding tool. The downside of Jamboard is that you don’t have access to the templates available with Miro and Mural, so you’ll have to create everything from scratch.

Slack

Slack has become the town hall for many organizations where teams can communicate, collaborate, share files, record videos (Loom alternative), and host calls.

Slack is a fantastic design collaboration tool because its extensive integration options mean teams can connect tools and platforms from other departments.

Google Chat & Spaces

If your organization uses Google Workspace for email and cloud storage, it makes sense (and saves money) to use Google Chat & Spaces instead of paying extra for Slack and other messaging apps.

Google Spaces works similarly to Slack, where you can create different channels or connect directly with team members through Chat. Its seamless integration with the Google Workspace suite means product development teams keep collaborative efforts, including file sharing, calendars, spreadsheets, documents, presentations, etc., in one centralized platform.

Google Chat offers native integrations with many design tools and connects to Zapier to sync with other products and platforms.

Notion

Notion’s minimalist UI, the vast range of templates, and versatility make it an excellent project management tool for product development teams. Teams can use Notion for product roadmaps, meeting notes, task management, wikis, documentation, and more.

Jira

With its issue tracking and DevOps integrations, Jira is one of the most popular project management tools for software development. If your organization uses other Atlassian products, Jira is an obvious choice with many benefits and integrations.

Trello

One of Jira’s native integrations is the popular design project management tool Trello–another Atlassian product. Trello’s many workspace features allow for brainstorming, meetings, task management, CRM (perfect for user testing participants), and calendar syncing at every stage of the design process.

Asana

Asana is a fantastic Trello alternative with similar features and many integrations to keep designers connected to the rest of the organization. Asana’s task automation and project tracking features help streamline design operations.

ProofHub

ProofHub is a comprehensive product management platform with features for every department, including design, engineering, and product teams.

Unlike other project management tools, which charge per user/seat, ProofHub works on a flat-rate model with unlimited users–great for cash-strapped startups and multi-national organizations with thousands of employees.

Improve Cross-Team Collaboration with Merge

Traditional product development workflows create silos because everyone is using different tools. Often these tools don’t sync, resulting in manual updates that cause errors and delays.

UXPin Merge brings UX teams, product teams, and engineers into a single product development workflow where everyone is connected via a single source of truth–a process PayPal’s Erica Rider refers to as DesignOps 2.0.

Merge creates a drag-and-drop design environment that makes prototyping accessible to more team members. For example, PayPal’s product teams (who had no previous design tool experience) build, test, and handoff all of the organization’s internal products. The lean UX team jumps in to assist with complex usability issues and provides user experience mentoring.

Merge’s ready-made components include properties and interactivity defined by the design system, so there’s no need to design from scratch, significantly reducing the design tool and prototyping learning curve.

Prototype quality is another significant Merge benefit. Because Merge prototypes use the same UI components as front-end engineers from the same repo, designers can build replicas indistinguishable from the final product.

These prototypes enhance usability testing but also result in meaningful feedback and collaboration from stakeholders. 

“One of the significant impacts of UXPin Merge is our ability to create higher fidelity prototypes. There’s a lot more confidence from everyone (including designers, C-suite, directors, and developers) about what the final product will look like, the user experience, and interactivity—giving us higher quality feedback from stakeholders.” Erica Rider – UX Lead EPX @ PayPal

Enhance your design workflows and achieve higher-quality design project outcomes with the world’s most advanced collaborative design tool. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

The post 12 Design Collaboration Tools for Fast and Organized Work appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Assumptions mapping is important because it creates awareness of team members’ assumptions and potential associated risks. By making assumptions explicit and visible, teams can critically evaluate their validity and test them through research and validation methods. This approach fosters a more user-centered, data-driven design process, improving outcomes and user experiences.

Test your user assumptions and get meaningful results with interactive prototypes from UXPin, an end-to-end design tool for creating advanced prototypes and handing them off to development. Sign up for a free trial.

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What is Assumptions Mapping?

Assumptions mapping is a technique used in product design to identify, analyze, and validate the assumptions made during the design process.

It involves systematically uncovering the underlying beliefs and hypotheses that influence design decisions and mapping them for better visibility. This technique removes guesswork from the design process and replaces it with evidence-based insights to develop better product experiences.

Common types of assumptions

• User Behavior Assumptions: Assumptions about how users interact with the product, their preferences, motivations, and needs.
• Technology Assumptions: Assumptions about the capabilities and limitations of the underlying technology, such as platform compatibility or data processing speed.
• Business Assumptions: Assumptions about the market, target audience, competitors, and business goals, including assumptions about user demand and willingness to pay.
• Design Assumptions: Assumptions about the effectiveness of specific design choices, such as the placement of elements, color schemes, or visual hierarchy.
• Context Assumptions: Assumptions about the broader context in which the product will be used, including the user’s environment, cultural factors, or regulatory constraints.

The Consequences of Unaddressed Assumptions

How unaddressed assumptions can lead to design failures

Unaddressed assumptions can lead to design failures by introducing risks and uncertainties into the design process. Designers may base their product decisions on inaccurate or incomplete information when assumptions go unchallenged and unvalidated, leading to ineffective or irrelevant solutions. 

Unaddressed assumptions can result in misaligned designs that fail to meet user needs, resulting in poor user experiences and low user satisfaction. By ignoring assumptions, designers risk investing time and resources in designs that don’t address the real problems or resonate with the target audience, ultimately leading to design failures.

Negative impact on user experience and product adoption

Unaddressed assumptions can harm user experience and product adoption. When assumptions about user behavior, preferences, or needs are left unverified, designers risk creating experiences that don’t meet user expectations. This misalignment can lead to frustration, confusion, and a lack of engagement with the product.

Unaddressed assumptions can also hinder product adoption, as users may find it difficult to understand or navigate the product due to unvalidated assumptions.

The Benefits of Assumptions Mapping

• Improved design decision-making: Assumptions mapping enables informed and data-driven design decisions by challenging and validating underlying assumptions.
• Enhanced user understanding and empathy: By challenging user assumptions, designers gain a deeper understanding of their needs, preferences, and behaviors, leading to more empathetic design solutions.
• Mitigating risks and reducing design iterations: Assumptions mapping helps identify potential risks and uncertainties early, minimizing the need for extensive design iterations and reducing the likelihood of design failures.
• Fostering collaboration and shared understanding within teams: Assumptions mapping promotes collaboration, shared understanding, and effective communication among team members and stakeholders, leading to a more harmonious and cohesive design process.

Challenges in Assumptions Mapping

• Identifying implicit assumptions: Teams may struggle to uncover deeply ingrained or implicit assumptions. Overcoming this challenge requires fostering a culture of open communication and critical thinking, encouraging team members to question and challenge underlying assumptions.
• Prioritizing assumptions: With limited time and resources, teams must prioritize which assumptions to focus on. To overcome this challenge, teams can use criteria such as impact on user experience, risk level, or alignment with project goals to determine which assumptions are most critical and require further validation.
• Validating assumptions: Validating assumptions can be challenging, especially concerning user research or testing. Teams can overcome this challenge by conducting thorough user research, using various validation methods such as interviews, surveys, or usability testing from diverse users.
• Addressing resistance to change: Some team members may resist challenging existing assumptions or adopting a new approach. To overcome this challenge, teams should foster a collaborative and inclusive environment, encouraging open discussions, providing evidence-based arguments, and showcasing the benefits of assumptions mapping in improving design outcomes.
• Iterative process: Assumptions mapping is an ongoing process that may require multiple iterations. Teams should embrace an iterative mindset, continuously reviewing and updating assumptions as new insights emerge and adapting the design accordingly. Regular team communication and feedback loops can help address challenges and ensure continuous improvement.

How to Get Started With Assumptions Mapping

Here is a foundational framework for creating an assumptions map.

Step 1: Identify and articulate assumptions

Begin by identifying the assumptions that underlie your design or product. These are your team’s beliefs or expectations about users, their behaviors, and the problem you’re solving. 

It’s a good idea to hold design thinking workshops or brainstorming sessions with diverse team members to gather assumptions from across the organization. Articulate these assumptions clearly to gain a shared understanding among team members.

Step 2: Prioritize assumptions for mapping

Once you have a list of assumptions, prioritize them based on their potential impact on the design and the level of uncertainty surrounding them. Focus on the assumptions that have the highest risk or those that are critical to the success of your design to allocate resources and attention effectively.

Step 3: Create an assumptions map

Visualize the assumptions using an assumptions map using a diagram, matrix, or other visual representation. This map helps you see your assumption relationships and how they interact. 

The assumptions map provides a holistic view of the landscape, aiding analysis and decision-making. 

For example, an assumptions map for the mobile banking app might show the interdependencies between assumptions about user security concerns, user familiarity with mobile banking, and user preferences for transaction speed.

Step 4: Validate assumptions through research and testing

Conduct research and testing to validate the assumptions identified in the previous steps. This process involves gathering data, user feedback, and insights to determine the accuracy and validity of the assumptions.

Designers use research methods, including user interviews, surveys, usability testing, or analytics, to gather evidence and challenge assumptions.

Tools and Techniques for Assumptions Mapping

Affinity mapping

Affinity mapping organizes and analyzes a large amount of information or assumptions. It involves grouping related assumptions into categories or themes to uncover patterns and insights.

For example, after conducting assumption mapping sessions, the team can use sticky notes or digital whiteboards to group similar assumptions, such as user preferences, technology limitations, or market trends. This visual representation facilitates discussions and prioritization of assumptions for further validation.

Desirability, feasibility, and viability framework

Mural outlines a framework for mapping assumptions using the desirability, feasibility, and viability design thinking methodology developed by former Precoil CEO David J Bland:

• Desirability assumptions: Do They? – is this what users want?
• Viability assumptions: Should We? – assess whether you should do this. i.e., why hasn’t it been done before?
• Feasibility assumptions: Can We? – does the organization have the resources?

This framework is also excellent for testing business ideas or developing unique value propositions. Teams map these assumptions to visualize them and identify trends, patterns, and areas of focus. 

Mural’s assumptions mapping webinar provides a high-level overview of this desirability, feasibility, and viability framework and why it’s important for developing new products.

User research and feedback

User research and feedback are essential tools for validating assumptions. Teams gather insights and data to challenge or support their assumptions by directly engaging with users through interviews, surveys, or usability testing. UX research methods like card sorting, diary studies, and service safaris can provide valuable insights into user behavior.

Data analysis and metrics

Data analysis and metrics play a crucial role in assumptions mapping. By analyzing quantitative data, such as website analytics or user engagement metrics, teams can identify patterns and trends that challenge or confirm their assumptions.

For example, tracking user behavior through heatmaps or clickstream data can reveal insights about how users interact with a product or website, shedding light on user flow or navigation assumptions. By using data to inform assumptions, teams can make more data-driven decisions and reduce reliance on guesswork.

Prototyping and usability testing

Prototyping and usability testing allow teams to gather feedback and validate assumptions through real user interactions. Teams use interactive prototypes to observe how users interact with the design and gather insights about potential assumptions. 

For example, usability testing can help identify assumptions about a user interface’s intuitiveness or the content’s clarity. By observing and gathering user feedback, teams can uncover hidden assumptions and iterate on the design to improve user experience.

Integrating Assumptions Mapping into Design Processes

Incorporating assumptions mapping in agile and iterative workflows

Teams can seamlessly integrate assumptions mapping into agile and iterative design processes, enabling teams to address them at different stages of development. 

For example, during the sprint planning phase in an agile workflow, the team can identify and prioritize assumptions that need validation and allocate time for research or testing activities. This iterative approach allows continuous learning and refinement throughout the design and development cycle.

Collaborative approaches to assumptions mapping within cross-functional teams

Assumptions mapping is most effective when done collaboratively within cross-functional teams. You can tap into diverse perspectives and expertise by involving stakeholders from different disciplines, such as designers, researchers, product managers, and developers. 

For example, conducting assumption mapping workshops where team members collectively identify and discuss assumptions fosters shared understanding and generates valuable insights. This collaborative approach ensures that assumptions are thoroughly examined and helps build a culture of shared ownership and accountability for the design’s success.

Testing Assumptions With UXPin’s Interactive Prototypes

Interactive prototypes are crucial for testing assumptions, allowing product teams to simulate user interactions and gather valuable feedback early in the design process. Teams can observe how users navigate user interfaces, interact with features, and uncover usability issues or gaps in their assumptions. With UXPin, design teams can create fully interactive prototypes that look and feel like the final product. 

Some of UXPin’s key prototyping features include:

• States: allow designers to create multiple states for a single UI element and design complex interactive components like dropdown menus, tab menus, navigational drawers, and more.
• Variables: capture data from user inputs and create personalized, dynamic user experiences–like their name and profile image in the app bar.
• Expressions: Javascript-like functions to create complex components and advanced functionality–no code required!
• Conditional Interactions: create if-then and if-else conditions based on user interactions to create dynamic prototypes with multiple outcomes to replicate the final product experience accurately.

Increase prototype fidelity and functionality with the world’s most advanced UX design tool. Sign up for a free trial to build your first interactive prototype with UXPin.

The post Assumptions Mapping – How to Remove Guesswork Out of Design appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Constructive feedback provides UX designers with different perspectives, helping to highlight areas that may require improvement or revision. This process is essential as designers are often too close to their projects, blinding them from possible flaws or enhancements.

Feedback helps align product design with user needs and business goals, improving the design’s usability, user experience, and business value. Incorporating feedback can foster more collaborative, user-centric, and outcome-focused designs.

Does your design tool elicit good feedback? Deliver products that exceed user needs and stakeholder expectations. Discover how UXPin can enhance your prototyping capability to elicit more meaningful, actionable feedback. Sign up for a free trial.

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Understanding Feedback

It’s important to understand what type of feedback you receive, who it’s from, and its relevance. This understanding will help differentiate valuable feedback vs. negative feedback and what information you use to drive decision-making.

Constructive vs. destructive feedback

Constructive criticism aims to foster improvement and is generally given with positive intent to drive design decisions. For example, a colleague might say, “The call-to-action button doesn’t stand out. Maybe making it more prominent would lead to higher user engagement.” 

Conversely, destructive feedback is negative, unhelpful, and does not provide any direction for improvement. An example would be, “I don’t like the design. It’s dull.”

User vs. stakeholder or client feedback

User feedback refers to insights provided by a product’s end-users, often gathered through user testing or surveys. For example, a user might suggest, “I prefer websites and apps with dark mode because I suffer from screen fatigue.”

Stakeholder feedback typically comes from people involved with a design project. For example, a stakeholder from the branding team might say, “This color scheme doesn’t align with our brand identity.”

Peer vs. expert feedback

Peer feedback refers to input from fellow designers or colleagues, typically during design critiques or standups. An example might be, “I think we need to adjust the typography to improve readability.” 

Expert feedback comes from seasoned professionals or individuals with significant experience or expertise in a specific domain. An expert might provide insights such as, “The current design might have accessibility issues for visually impaired users. This project requires a color contrast of Level AA–contrast ratio of at least 3:1 for text not smaller than 24px or 4.5:1 for text smaller than 24px.”

This example demonstrates that peers might spot a problem but not know how to fix it. Designers must contact domain experts to gather more data and implement a suitable solution.

Techniques for Eliciting Great Design Feedback

Asking the right stakeholder questions

It’s crucial to ask the right questions when eliciting feedback from stakeholders. Instead of general queries like “What do you think of this design?” guide your reviewers with more specific questions about your design goals. 

For example, asking, “Do you think we have prioritized the primary and secondary navigation appropriately?” or “Does the color scheme evoke the emotions we’re aiming for in our target audience?” These pointed questions will encourage more targeted, actionable responses that you can incorporate into your designs.

Using open-ended questions

Open-ended questions can be a powerful tool for eliciting user and stakeholder feedback. Unlike closed questions that limit responses to yes or no, open-ended questions encourage users to share their thoughts, feelings, and ideas in detail.

For example, rather than asking, “Do you like feature X?” you could ask, “How does this feature X help you?” By allowing users to express their thoughts freely, you gain deeper insights into their experiences and needs, which can guide you in refining your design.

Setting clear expectations

Feedback is more valuable when designers set clear goals and expectations. Clarify what kind of feedback you’re seeking and when you need it. For example, if you’re in the initial design stage, you may say, “I’m looking for feedback on the overall layout and color palette by the close of business tomorrow.” This way, reviewers understand the feedback’s scope and urgency, enabling them to provide more thoughtful, timely responses.

Design Feedback Framework

Here is a basic design feedback framework designers can apply to users and stakeholders.

Step 1: Set your feedback goal

Before you even start collecting feedback, it’s essential to identify the purpose and goal. What aspect of your design are you focusing on? Is it usability, aesthetic, or functionality? Or are you interested in how well your design aligns with your target audience’s expectations? 

By establishing clear feedback goals, you can set the direction for your feedback session, ask the right questions and ensure responses are meaningful and actionable.

Step 2: Identify who you need feedback from

Identifying the right stakeholders for your feedback session is crucial. For example, if it’s a question about usability, you have to recruit participants from a specific user group, while a technical question will require input from an engineering stakeholder. In some instances, you may need diverse feedback to ensure your solution meets many needs.

Identifying who you need to speak to and what questions to ask is essential for gathering feedback to propel your project forward while meeting user and business goals.

Step 3: Collect feedback

Once you’ve defined your goals and identified your audience, it’s time to collect feedback. You might do this through one-on-one interviews, group workshops, or digital tools for remote feedback collection. Remember to create a comfortable space (virtual or in-person) for stakeholders and users to express their thoughts. Be sure to ask open-ended questions to encourage in-depth responses.

Step 4: Organize responses

You’ll often have lots of data and UX assets at the end of a feedback session. For example, one 30-minute interview will produce several transcript pages, a video, notes, and a report. You must organize and store these so it’s easy for team members to fetch and analyze the data.

To make sense of it all, you need to organize and categorize the feedback–for example, usability, aesthetics, functionality, technical, etc. This step will make it easier for you to analyze and prioritize the feedback.

UX researchers often use tools like Condens, Dovetail, and Productboard as asset repositories to organize and distribute data.

Step 5: Evaluate

Once you’ve organized the feedback, it’s time to analyze the data objectively. Focus on understanding the underlying concerns or ideas behind what users and stakeholders have shared. Look for common themes or recurring issues, as these can highlight areas to prioritize.

Step 6: Prioritize

After evaluating the feedback, you may have several changes, but they’re not equally important. It’s essential to prioritize these changes based on their impact on the overall user experience and the project’s goals–according to the goals you set in Step 1. You can add the non-essential items to the product’s backlog.

Step 7: Implement

Now that you’ve identified and prioritized the necessary changes, it’s time to implement them. For example, stakeholders have asked designers to improve conversions with a more prominent CTA. The design team must build prototypes based on the feedback to begin testing.

Step 8: Iterate and improve

The process doesn’t end with implementing the changes. The next step is to prototype and test these changes with users and stakeholders to see if they’ve improved the design.

Collect feedback on these new iterations, evaluate them, and make further changes if necessary. Design is an iterative process, and each round of feedback takes you one step closer to a design that meets user needs and business goals.

Incorporate feedback with UXPin

The quality of your prototype significantly impacts the quality of feedback you get from users and stakeholders. Digital products are highly interactive, but the prototypes from traditional design tools are not! 

This lack of interactivity limits prototyping scope, the questions designers can ask, and the feedback quality. For example, most design tools don’t have functioning input fields. Design teams must use multiple frames or plugins to achieve basic functionality–which still doesn’t provide a realistic user experience.

A stakeholder might comment, “This button doesn’t do anything,” or “Why can’t I enter my name in this input field?” Unfortunately, these are the frustrating limitations of image-based design tools.

Better Design Decisions with Interactive Prototypes

UXPin is a complete end-to-end design tool with features to create wireframes, mockups, and high-fidelity prototypes faster and with enhanced functionality. 

UXPin is interactive by default. When designers add an input field to the canvas, it’s fully functional and ready to receive data–no plugins or additional frames required.

Designers can use UXPin’s Variables to capture user inputs and create dynamic prototypes to impress stakeholders while providing usability participants with a realistic user experience.

Variables are just one of UXPin’s many advanced prototyping features:

• Conditional Interactions: take interactions to the next level with if-then and if-else rules to determine outcomes based on user actions.
• Expressions: design Javascript-like functionality to validate passwords or update a shopping cart.
• States: create multiple variants of a component that respond to specific user interactions, including dropdown menus, accordions, image carousels, and more.
• IFTTT: connect other apps or products to create realistic prototyping experiences, like adding an event to a user’s calendar or sending an email verification.

Ready to see how UXPin can enhance your digital product design process? Sign up for a free trial.

The post How Do You Incorporate Feedback into Your Designs? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Heuristic evaluation is the review of a user interface based on a set of usability principles.

It helps surface usability problems throughout the design process and can save countless hours of development time by fixing usability issues before they go live.

A formal heuristic evaluation consists of 3–5 usability experts examining an interface to highlight potential issues based on their guidelines.

This article was written by Andrew Coyle from NextUX. NextUX can accommodate your workflow in UXPin by enabling anyone on your team to quickly capture a screenshot and add markup directly on top of it.

Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich pioneered heuristic evaluation in the 90s, and their usability heuristics for user interface design still serve as a guide today. I highly recommend memorizing their 10 heuristics and learning more about how to conduct a heuristic evaluation.

Throughout my experience as a designer, I’ve defined and refined the heuristics I use to review web projects. Although I weigh countless variables and best practices when evaluating a UI, these 5 principles best encompass how I assess designs.

Apply knowledge in practice. Use UXPin to design advanced prototypes that look and feel like an end-product. With UXPin, it’s so easy to transform a vague idea into a functional prototype that can be sharable with other team members. Try UXPin for free.

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Users should know where they are

The user should always know where they are in an interface and understand how to navigate where they need to go. Establish straightforward navigation and sign markers throughout your app or website. Also, make your design interactive to thoroughly check what may cause troubles in the final product. 

Example: Add an indication of progress and state in stepped flows and provide a descriptive header to communicate where they are and what’s next.

Rule exception: If the user derives entertainment or value from discovering where they are or what’s next, like in a game.

Make user interfaces consistent and aesthetically pleasing

Elements and flows in a user interface should be consistent with each other.

Example: A design using a sentence case for some buttons and a title case for others is most likely violating this principle unless there is an overriding stylistic reason for the inconsistency.

I believe the value placed on different aesthetic styles is in the beholder’s eye, but the overall aesthetic appeal is not. How a creator uses balance, symmetry, hierarchy, and other visual principles can make universally pleasing designs.

Example: An interface with a lot of visual noise caused by unnecessary borders and drop shadows reduces aesthetic appeal and, in turn, usability.

Reduce the need to read, wait or memorize

“If you make me read, I leave.”

“If you make me wait, I leave.”

“If you make me think, I leave.”The user

Unfortunately, people have extremely low attention spans when it comes to the digital world. Never rely on a user to read, wait, or memorize anything. Always omit unnecessary text and design for scannability.

Automate as much as possible, so the user doesn’t need to rely on their short-term memory. 

Example: If your app has a long load time for specific processes or interactions, consider adding a fun loading animation with an indication of time left to ease the burden of waiting.

Example: If your app has a complicated setup process, don’t assume the user will read instructions or memorize requirements. Instead, break up a long setup process into short steps with concise and contextual information.

Prevent errors and make actions reversible

Reduce the potential for errors by creating safeguards and clear communication in your application.

Example:

1. Make deleting important data a more dexterous interaction to reduce inadvertent deletions.
2. Add extra steps to the deletion process and make sure the user knows the outcome of their action.
3. Add the ability to undo critical actions.

Enable experienced users and accommodate new users 

Don’t overwhelm new users with complexity and choices. Provide a great first-time use experience that gets a user up to speed as fast as possible.

In making a powerful application easy to use, don’t limit the ability of experienced users. Provide optionality and customization for frequent users to achieve their goals and solve their needs as quickly as possible.

Example: Add keyboard shortcuts to actions presented in a user interface. New users don’t need to know the keyboard shortcuts to interact, but experienced users can interact faster with the shortcuts.

Use these usability principles to improve product design

I hope these 5 principles help you evaluate designs. Together we can build a better user experience! If you’re looking for an end-to-end design tool, use UXPin. Design, iterate, and deliver a prototype 10x faster. Try UXPin for free.

The post Heuristic Evaluation – 5 Usability Principles to Help Guide Your Work appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Striking the right balance between user and business goals is crucial for an organization and its products’ success. To deliver win-win solutions, product teams must encompass user objectives, desires, and challenges while meeting a company’s strategic goals.

We explore user vs. business goals and common associated KPIs. We also look at two real-world examples from Airbnb and Spotify, where product teams were able to balance these goals successfully.

Build fully interactive prototypes to enhance testing with end-users and stakeholders. Get meaningful feedback throughout the UX design process to deliver digital product experiences that meet user and business needs. Sign up for a free trial.

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User Goals vs. Business Goals 

What are User Goals?

User goals refer to the objectives, desires, or problems users want to achieve, satisfy, or solve when using a product. Understanding and prioritizing user goals ensures a product is usable, functional, and delightful–the core principles of design thinking.

What are Business Goals?

Business goals are the objectives that a company aims to achieve through its product or service. Some examples include increasing revenue, expanding market share, or improving brand reputation.

Understanding User Goals & KPIs

User goals vary depending on the type of product and its target audience. Some common user goals and KPIs organizations use to track them.

Efficiency

Users want to complete tasks efficiently with minimal effort. Products must streamline processes and reduce users’ time to complete tasks and accomplish goals.

KPIs for efficiency:

• Task completion time
• Number of clicks/steps/interactions required to complete a task

Usability

Users want products that are easy to understand, learn, and operate. Intuitive products with simple navigation and helpful guidance enhance the user experience.

KPIs for usability:

• Error rates
• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• System Usability Scale (SUS)

Accessibility

Designers must create product experiences that cater to diverse users and abilities. Features like adjustable font sizes, alternative input methods, and compatibility with screen readers are essential to delivering inclusive user experiences.

KPIs for accessibility:

• Level of compliance according to an accessibility checklist.

Personalization

Personalization enhances the product experience with content and features tailored to meet individual needs and preferences. Satisfying this need increases enjoyment, retention, and the likelihood that someone will share their positive experience.

KPIs for personalization:

• Percentage of users who customize settings
• Number of customizations available
• Number of customizations utilized

Reliability

Users expect products to work consistently without errors–especially if they’re paying for something. Products must function correctly without errors, glitches, or performance issues to maintain user trust and satisfaction.

KPIs for reliability:

• Technical error rates (crashes, downtime, etc.)
• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
• Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)

Security and privacy

Users expect organizations to secure personal information and data. Implementing robust security measures and transparent privacy policies reassures users that their data is protected.

KPIs for security and privacy:

• Number of security incidents
• Number of data breaches
• Number of privacy complaints
• Number of privacy complaints per jurisdiction

Aesthetics

An attractive and visually appealing product can enhance the customer experience and contribute to a favorable product perception. Good aesthetics also reinforce a brand’s identity and make a product stand out from its competitors.

KPIs for aesthetics:

• User feedback on design elements (interviews, reviews, surveys, etc.)

Enjoyment

Incorporating elements of fun, delight, or entertainment can make a product more engaging and enjoyable.

KPIs for enjoyment (engagement metrics):

• Average session length
• Retention rate
• Frequency of use
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Social interactions

Users often seek social interaction or the ability to share their experiences with others. Integrating social features or facilitating user communication can improve a product’s appeal.

KPIs for social interactions:

• Number of comments, likes, shares, etc.
• Average follows per account
• Number of invitations sent to friends

Support and assistance

Providing accessible and responsive customer support and comprehensive documentation or tutorials can enhance user satisfaction and build loyalty.

KPIs for support and assistance:

• Number of customer support tickets
• Customer support response times
• Ticket resolution rates
• Satisfaction scores from support interactions

Understanding Business Goals & KPIs

Business goals vary depending on the business, industry, and the organization’s strategic priorities. Here are some common company goals you’ll find across multiple sectors in product design.

Revenue growth

Increasing sales and revenue is a primary objective for most businesses. The product design team can contribute to revenue growth by creating appealing, functional, and well-priced products. They can also streamline revenue-generating interfaces and user flows to increase revenue.

KPIs for revenue growth:

• Total daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/annual revenue
• Revenue growth rate
• Average revenue per user (ARPU)

Market share expansion

Market share is a crucial product metric because it represents a company’s percentage of an industry’s total sales. Increasing market share relies on organizations being competitive in many factors. Those most relevant to product teams are innovation, features, performance, and good user experience, to name a few.

Innovative design can help differentiate a product and make it more attractive to potential customers, thus increasing market share.

KPIs for market share expansion:

• Market share percentage
• Market penetration rate
• Customer acquisition vs. industry/competitor benchmarks

Customer acquisition

Acquiring new customers is crucial for business growth and influences many other business objectives. Designing products that cater to the needs and preferences of target audiences can help attract new users and convert them into paying customers.

KPIs for customer acquisition:

• Number of new daily/monthly/annual customers
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Conversion rates (from trial to paid plans, subscribers/users to customers, etc.)

Customer retention

Keeping existing customers engaged and satisfied (customer life cycle) is essential for long-term success. Product design can help improve customer retention by addressing user feedback, implementing feature requests, and continuously refining the user experience.

KPIs for customer retention:

• Customer retention rate
• Churn rate
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Brand reputation and recognition

A strong, consistent brand identity can help businesses stand out and build consumer trust. Product design can enhance brand reputation by ensuring that products align with the company’s values, aesthetics, and overall brand strategy.

KPIs for brand reputation and recognition:

• Measuring brand awareness
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Periodic sentiment analysis
• Social media sentiment analysis

Cost reduction

Costs impact profit, which means lower salaries, bonuses, and shareholder returns. Businesses often seek to reduce product development, manufacturing, or support-related costs. 

Efficient product design can minimize these costs in several ways:

• Optimizing product performance (reducing server costs)
• Reducing input costs
• Simplifying workflows and processes
• Improving product quality
• Reducing time to market for new releases
• Reducing support tickets

KPIs for cost reduction:

• Product design costs (design, prototyping, testing, etc.)
• Product development costs (programming, servers, API requests, etc.)
• Operational costs
• Labor time and costs
• Employee onboarding costs

Scalability

Businesses must often scale to meet increasing demand or expand into new markets–especially growth-hungry startups. Product design teams must consider scalability to ensure products and supporting resources can adapt or grow to meet future needs.

KPIs for cost scalability:

• Time to market for new product releases
• System performance under increased load or demand
• Product adaptability to new markets or customer segments

Innovation and differentiation

Remaining relevant and competitive requires continuous innovation. Product teams are crucial in driving innovation by exploring new technologies, products, and approaches.

KPIs for cost innovation and differentiation:

• Number of new features or product improvements released
• Percentage of R&D budget allocated to innovation
• Number of patents filed or industry awards received

Regulatory compliance

Businesses must ensure products comply with relevant laws, regulations, and industry standards. Product teams must ensure that products, UIs, and processes meet regulatory requirements, making necessary adjustments for specific jurisdictions–for example, Californian and European users.

KPIs for regulatory compliance:

• Number of compliance audits passed
• Number of non-compliance incidents
• Fines or penalties incurred due to non-compliance

Environmental and social responsibility

Many companies prioritize sustainability and social responsibility initiatives, particularly in countries and states where the laws mandate they meet specific goals and requirements. Product teams can contribute to these goals by reducing e-waste (digital waste), optimizing performance (reducing server requests), and reducing product file sizes to minimize storage.

KPIs for environmental and social responsibility:

• Measuring and reducing greenhouse gas emissions related to the product
• Measuring and reducing energy consumption during the design and development process
• Measuring and reducing e-waste
• Measuring the social impact of products

How do you Balance Business Goals and User Goals?

Balancing business goals and user goals is challenging. It requires continuous iteration to develop features and improvements that address user needs and business goals.

Here are two real-world examples where product teams have managed to strike the right balance.

Example 1: Spotify

User goals: Spotify users want a personalized and enjoyable listening experience, with easy access to their favorite songs, artists, and playlists. They also appreciate discovering new music based on their preferences.

Business Goals: Spotify aims to grow its user base and increase revenue through premium subscriptions and ads. Product teams also constantly update the user interface, features, and performance to maintain a competitive advantage in the streaming industry.

Balancing Approach: Spotify addresses user and business goals by investing in algorithms that generate personalized playlists, such as Discover Weekly and Release Radar. These features enhance user satisfaction by providing tailored music recommendations, encouraging users to spend more time on the platform, increasing ad exposure, and driving subscription upgrades. By focusing on features that improve the user experience while also supporting its revenue model, Spotify successfully balances user and business goals.

Example 2: Airbnb

User Goals: Airbnb guests want a seamless booking experience, accommodation variety, and reliable communication with hosts.

Business Goals: Airbnb aims to grow its network of hosts, increase bookings, and generate revenue through service fees. The company also wants to maintain its reputation as a trusted accommodation marketplace.

Balancing Approach: Airbnb addresses user goals by investing in an intuitive user interface, robust search and filtering capabilities, and a reliable messaging system between guests and hosts. To meet its business goals, Airbnb offers support and resources for hosts to improve their listings and customer service, such as the “Airbnb Host Resource Centre.” (for the UK, but there are similar resources for other countries.)

By implementing a review and rating system, Airbnb ensures transparency and trustworthiness for guests and hosts. This balance between user and business goals has been vital to Airbnb’s growth and success.

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The post User Goals vs. Business Goals – Finding the UX Tipping Point appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Customer journey maps are effective visualizations that help organizations understand their customers and create better experiences. Product teams use these journey maps during the design process to solve usability issues, streamline user experiences, and identify opportunities that help the organization achieve its business goals.

Creating customer journey maps requires research, collaboration, the right tools, and an appropriate visualization format. Luckily, there are plenty of tools to streamline journey mapping, which we cover later in this article.

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What is a UX Customer Journey?

A customer journey represents the steps customers go through when interacting with a product, service, or business process. Companies use journey maps to visualize this end-to-end process and identify customer needs across multiple touchpoints.

User journey map vs. customer journey map

While the theory and application are similar, there is a slight difference between a user journey map and a customer journey map:

• User journey map: A visual representation of the steps to complete a specific task or goal.
• Customer journey map: A broader view of the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints, including all the interactions with an organization.

Benefits of mapping the customer journey

Mapping customer journeys offer many benefits for organizations and teams, notably improving user experience and customer satisfaction by identifying pain points and opportunities.

Some key benefits of customer journey maps include:

• Enhanced customer understanding: helps organizations gain insights about their target audience’s needs, preferences, motivations, and pain points by visualizing the experience from the customer’s point of view.
• Pinpoint issues and opportunities: allows teams to identify which steps cause difficulty or frustration for customers. Conversely, the organization can find areas for improvement and innovation.
• Streamlined and consistent experiences: organizations can identify and fix inconsistencies and gaps across multiple touchpoints, creating a more cohesive and consistent user experience.
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty: by streamlining and optimizing product processes, organizations improve customer satisfaction leading to increased loyalty, recommendations, and growth.
• Informed decision-making: journey maps help teams across the organization make decisions about design, development, marketing, etc. Many organizations use these visualizations to prioritize features, updates, and investments.
• Cross-functional collaboration: customer journey maps allow organizations to visualize how customers pass through each department, creating opportunities for teams to collaborate and find ways to improve the customer experience at each touchpoint–UX design, marketing, customer support, social media, etc.
• Creating benchmarks and continuous evaluation: organizations can use customer journey maps to evaluate projects and how products evolve and improve with releases.

Customer Personas – The Foundation for Customer Journey Maps

A user persona (customer persona) is UX research artifact design teams use as a fictional representation of a user group, including their demographics, behaviors, goals, and pain points.

These user personas are the foundation for customer journey maps because they provide the framework for understanding how different types of users engage with the organization and its products.

For example, if a company is designing a fitness app, the research team might create personas for three primary user groups:

• Gym-goers
• Runners
• Yoga practitioners

These three user personas will have different needs, priorities, goals, challenges, and ambitions. Their interactions with your brand and how they enter customer journeys will also differ.

Incorporating personas into the customer journey

User personas give designers a start and end goal for customer journey maps. They can use the persona’s behavioral patterns to highlight how these users interact with a product or service and tailor content that meets their needs.

Returning to our fitness app example above: Researchers learn that yoga users prefer to use the desktop application at home, while gym-goers use the mobile app in their local gym. The runners view their daily running program on a mobile device before their run and don’t view the app again until they return.

The customer journey maps for these three users will look completely different, each with varying steps, challenges, and goals.

This example demonstrates how customer journeys for each persona vary and the importance of separately acknowledging each group’s needs, behaviors, challenges, and goals.

Stages of a Customer Journey

There are several key stages of a customer journey:

1. Awareness: the moment someone becomes aware of your brand through social media, paid ads, word-of-mouth, etc.
2. Consideration: customers research your product and compare it to others by reading reviews, comparing prices, and evaluating features.
3. Onboarding: once customers decide to use your product, they set up an account and learn to use its features. If your product uses a freemium model, these people may be users before converting to paying customers.
4. Engagement: customers regularly use and engage with your product, its features, and its content. During engagement, they often upgrade to paid services and make purchases.
5. Support: customers may require support during their journey. Organizations must answer questions (customer service, docs, etc.), identify ways to streamline experiences, and reduce support queries.
6. Retention & loyalty: when customers have positive engagement and support experiences, they will continue using the product and recommend it to others.

Touchpoints and Channels

Touchpoints and channels are points of interaction between a brand and its customers.

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are the interaction points between a customer and a brand, including physical, digital, and emotional. Some touchpoint examples include paid ads, social media posts, customer service interactions, and product experiences.

Channels

Channels are the mediums or platforms delivering these touchpoints–for example, social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), email marketing, ad channels (Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads), digital products, and physical locations (stores, service centers, events, etc.).

Organizations map these touchpoints and channels to identify areas for improvement and optimize the customer experience.

Emotions, Motivations, and Pain Points

Understanding a user’s emotions, motivations, and pain points throughout the customer journey is crucial, as these elements drive user actions and decision-making.

Here is a rough outline of how these core user elements relate to each other:

• Emotions: The feelings people experience at each stage of the customer journey, including excitement, happiness, frustration, disappointment, and anger. Designers use empathy maps to visualize these emotions across the customer journey. 
• Motivations: The reasons why people take action at different stages of the customer journey.
• Pain points: The challenges or obstacles customers experience during a customer journey.

By identifying these factors at each stage of the customer journey map, product teams can create solutions to reduce and mitigate problems while streamlining customer experiences.

Creating a Customer Journey Map

Select the appropriate format and tools for your journey map

The format and tools required for your journey map will depend on its complexity, level of detail, and available resources. Here are some tips:

• Consider your audience: who is the journey map for, and what are their needs? Do you need a high-level overview or a detailed step-by-step analysis?
• Choose a format: the level of detail will dictate the structure and medium of your journey map, including flowcharts, diagrams, infographics, and spreadsheets.
• Use tools: there are many tools for creating and sharing high-quality journey maps, including Lucidchart, UXPressia, Canva, Miro, Mural, and design tools.
• Find collaborators: identify teams, stakeholders, and departments that can offer insights and different perspectives about your customers to make journey maps as accurate and relevant as possible.

Collect and incorporate data from various sources

1. List the touchpoints and channels customers will have with your brand for the specific journey, including website, social media channels, customer service, etc.
2. Gather research data from customer surveys, user research, user interviews, analytics (product, social media, etc.), and other relevant sources.
3. Analyze the data to identify patterns, trends, and behavior. The key is to find common customer pain points and friction across the journey.
4. Create a visual representation of your customer journey, illustrating touchpoints and interactions and noting customer emotions, motivations, and pain points at each stage.

Visualize the customer journey in a clear and engaging way

Use your research to create a visualization of your customer journey. Start by sketching the journey and touchpoints or create a simple flow diagram mapping each step.

We recommend using customer journey map templates from Mural, UXPressia, or Miro to streamline the process and produce beautiful visualizations to share with your organization. You can even use a free whiteboard tool like Google Jamboard or create your journey map in a spreadsheet.

Recommended reading from UXPressia: Customer Journey Mapping Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.

Customer Journey Map Examples of Templates

Here are some customer journey map examples of templates that you may use at work or as an inspiration for your own visualizations.

Design, Prototype, and Test Customer Experiences with UXPin

Prototyping and testing are crucial for iterating and evolving customer experiences. Designers must assess various user experiences within a customer journey to ensure they’re free of roadblocks, usability issues, and friction.

Product design teams can use UXPin’s advanced features to build prototypes that accurately replicate the final product experience. These interactive prototypes give designers meaningful, actionable feedback from usability participants and stakeholders to iterate and improve. Create beautiful, intuitive product experiences your customers will love with UXPin. Sign up for a free trial.

The post UX Customer Journey — How to Map Out User Experience appeared first on Studio by UXPin.