Product Design Archives https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/category/product-design/ Fri, 01 Dec 2023 13:21:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.3.2 The Code-Based Adobe XD Alternative – UXPin Merge https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/adobe-xd-alternative/ Tue, 05 Dec 2023 13:08:46 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=51387 Overwhelmed by the plethora of Adobe XD alternatives? Are you looking for an upgrade to Adobe XD rather than a copy of your existing workspace? Discover why UXPin is the best Adobe XD alternative and the benefits of using a code-based design platform. We also introduce Merge and how this revolutionary technology bridges the gap

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AdobeXD Alternative

Overwhelmed by the plethora of Adobe XD alternatives? Are you looking for an upgrade to Adobe XD rather than a copy of your existing workspace? Discover why UXPin is the best Adobe XD alternative and the benefits of using a code-based design platform. We also introduce Merge and how this revolutionary technology bridges the gap between designers and engineers while creating a single source of truth for design systems.

Key takeaways:

  • Adobe XD was a prominent vector-based design tool, but its standalone version is no longer available for new buyers.
  • Consider intuitive UI, prototyping capabilities, design systems, collaboration features, and cost-effectiveness when seeking an Adobe XD alternative.
  • UXPin Merge is a great choice, offering advanced code-based design capabilities over traditional vector-based tools.
  • Unlike many Adobe XD alternatives, UXPin Merge addresses challenges across the product development spectrum, streamlining workflows for all stakeholders.

Connect design and development teams with a single source of truth – coded components that can be used across prototyping, design handoff, and app development stages of product creation. Learn more about it. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

What is Adobe XD?

Adobe XD is a vector-based UI/UX design software developed and maintained by Adobe. It caters to web and mobile app design, an end-to-end solution for designers to create wireframes, mockups, and prototypes.

Some noteworthy features include:

  • Vector Design and Drawing Tools: Adobe XD enables designers to create and edit intricate vector designs, ensuring sharp outputs regardless of the display size.
  • Repeat Grid: This feature streamlines design processes. Designers can replicate elements like lists or photo galleries with a few clicks, reducing tedious, repetitive tasks.
  • Prototyping: Designers can link artboards, adding animations and microinteractions to mimic interactivity. 
  • Voice Design: Adobe XD supports voice commands, making designing voice user interfaces and integrating voice triggers possible.
  • Responsive Resize: Automatically adjust and resize elements to fit different screen sizes, ensuring designs look good on all devices.
  • Collaboration Tools: Adobe XD isn’t just for solo designers. Teams can comment, share, and co-edit in real time with in-app collaboration tools.
  • Integration Capabilities: It seamlessly integrates with other Adobe Suite applications and some third-party tools, bridging the gap between prototype and final output.

Is Adobe XD Discontinued?

Contrary to speculation on social media, Adobe has not discontinued Adobe XD. While it’s no longer available as a single application for new buyers, it will continue supporting existing customers. You must purchase the Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps subscription to access Adobe XD as a new customer.

What to Look for in an Adobe XD Alternative?

If you’re an avid Adobe XD user, then you’ll want a design tool that’s comparable or better. Here’s a breakdown of essential aspects:

  • User-Friendly UI: Design tools should simplify, not complicate. An intuitive interface speeds up the design process, reduces learning curves, and increases efficiency.
  • Prototyping Capabilities:
    • Real-time Previews: Witness design changes as they happen.
    • Interactive Prototyping: Add life to prototypes with interactive elements, microinteractions, and animations.
    • Responsiveness: Your tool must allow you to create multiple viewports for designs with minimal effort.
  • Design Systems: A must-have feature in modern digital product design. Guage a design system feature by its ability to bridge the gap between designers and engineers.
  • Collaboration Features:
    • Commenting: Offer insights directly on designs.
    • Sharing: Distribute prototypes for feedback.
    • Real-time Collaboration: An integrated chat feature allows design teams to collaborate without leaving the workspace.
  • Design Handoff: A seamless transition curtails back-and-forths between design and development teams. Look for tools that generate accurate specs, assets, and code snippets.
  • Platform Integration: Integration capabilities mean less juggling between applications, promoting a unified workflow.
  • Cost-effectiveness: A stellar design tool won’t drain budgets. Opt for solutions that offer robust features without a hefty price tag, ensuring value for every dollar spent.

What’s an Alternative to Adobe XD?

While vector-based tools like Adobe XD, Figma, and InVision have dominated the design scene for years, there’s a notable shift towards code-based platforms like UXPin. 

With UXPin’s Merge technology, designers can go beyond basic prototypes to advanced code-based replicas that look and feel like the final product. Some advantages of using Merge and code-based design platforms include:

  • Realistic Interactive Prototypes: Code-based tools like UXPin mirror the final product, allowing designers to get high-quality insights from testing.
  • Dynamic Elements: Unlike static elements in vector-based tools, UXPin has live code UI components with states, styling, logic, and real data.
  • Seamless Handoff: Designers and developers speak the same language based on code via Merge, creating a smoother workflow with seamless handoff and fewer revisions.
  • Superior Performance: Merge components have complex interactions and animations without lag or stutter, accurately replicating a final product experience.
  • Desktop and Web Applications: Designers can use UXPin’s desktop application offline (Windows and MacOS) or web app with a comparable user experience in both environments.
  • All Features Built-in: UXPin is a full-stack design tool with everything designers need from concept to final delivery, eliminating the need for plugins, extensions, and other third-party apps and subscriptions.

How is UXPin Used for Prototyping?

Merge creates a drag-and-drop prototyping environment in UXPin–like Logo blocks for designers. Every component has styling, interactivity, content, and other properties programmed into it from the design system’s repository, ready to start prototyping.

The design system team can include foundational UI elements to complete screen templates so designers can build prototypes faster. Any API components with connections are also available for designers to use in UXPin.

The design system team uses React props (or Args for the Storybook Integration) to give designers access to component properties, like text styles, sizing, colors, interactivity, and more.

Designers grab a component from UXPin’s Design System Libraries and adjust its properties via the Properties Panel. They can also switch to JSX mode to view and make changes in code.

Testing in UXPin with Merge

These fully interactive prototypes increase prototyping scope, allowing designers to build and test complex interfaces and user flows that usually require technical input from devs.

Designers can test prototypes in the browser using Preview and Share or UXPin Mirror for native iOS and Android app testing. They can send stakeholders a link to view the prototype and share feedback by annotating using UXPin’s Comments.

“Our stakeholders are able to provide feedback pretty quickly using UXPin. We can send them a link to play with the prototype in their own time, and UXPin allows them to provide comments directly on the prototypes. UXPin’s Comments functionality is great because we can follow along and mark comments as resolved once we address them.” Erica Rider, Product, UX, and DesignOps thought leader.

How is UXPin Used for the Design Handoff?

Design handoffs with Adobe UX and other vector-based design tools are notoriously challenging, often fraught with friction and many calls with designers trying to explain mockups and prototypes to devs and developers trying to explain technical limitations to design teams.

UXPin’s Merge technology smooths the transition from design to development because every team and department works with the exact same component library, from the exact same repository. This single source of truth means design handoffs require less documentation and explanation.

Engineers simply import the component repository into their project, copy interfaces from UXPin, and apply the same component properties using props or Args.

How is UXPin Used for Design Systems?

UXPin offers a design system solution for every stage of maturity, from creating a design system to a fully integrated UI library using Merge technology where designers and engineers use the same components.

Merge enables organizations to sync a UI library from a repository to UXPin’s design editor so designers use the same design system components in the design process as devs use to develop the final product.

Any changes to the repository automatically push to UXPin and notify teams of the latest release. UXPin’s Version Control allows designers to decide when they switch to the new release, and they can revert to earlier versions whenever they want. 

This code-based approach to design systems gives organizations a real single source of truth, where every team uses the same UI library, and powerful Merge automation keeps everyone in sync with a single release–no need to update code and design separately.

How is UXPin Used for Collaboration?

UXPin’s Comments are perfect for modern digital product design where teams work asynchronously. Slack and Jira integrations keep cross-functional teams in sync and constantly updated.

Comments functions like a chat app within UXPin. Team members can assign comments and mark them as resolved once actioned. Email notifications keep everyone updated. Designers can invite stakeholders to collaborate in UXPin, even if they don’t have an account, reducing the need to purchase extra seats.

Why UXPin Merge Beats the Best Adobe XD Alternatives

Where do Zeplin, Proto.io, Marvel, Figma, and other Adobe XD alternatives get wrong? These graphic design, prototyping, and editing tools focus on optimizing the designer workflow and UI design, neglecting other vital stakeholders and interactivity prototyping.

UXPin and Merge technology benefit the end-to-end digital product development process, including designers, product managers, engineers, DesignOps, and DevOps, by facilitating a single source of truth for cross-functional teams.

While there are many Adobe XD alternatives, UXPin is the only platform that solves many product development challenges by bridging the gap between design and development.

Are you still working with image-based tools with multiple platforms to achieve code-like results?

Switch to UXPin and instantly sync design and development with a single full-stack product design solution. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

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Top 10 Design Handoff Tools to Try in 2024 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/design-handoff-tools/ Fri, 17 Nov 2023 12:19:59 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=34700 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

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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.

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.

team collaboration talk communication

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.

settings

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.

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What Is MUI and What Do You Need to Know About It? https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/what-is-mui/ Wed, 08 Nov 2023 17:03:15 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=32966 One of the questions organizations ask themselves at the start of a new project is, “do we adopt a component library or start from scratch?” There are pros and cons to weigh, and it depends on the project’s scope and priorities.  One of the most popular component libraries is MUI – a comprehensive React UI

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MUI 5

One of the questions organizations ask themselves at the start of a new project is, “do we adopt a component library or start from scratch?” There are pros and cons to weigh, and it depends on the project’s scope and priorities. 

One of the most popular component libraries is MUI – a comprehensive React UI library modelled at first on Google’s Material Design UI. 

We’re going to take a look at MUI, why you’d want to use it, what makes it different from other component libraries, and how you can get started designing your next project.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to design in code? UXPin Merge is a revolutionary technology that allows teams to create fully functioning layouts without design skills. Find out more about Merge.

Create beautiful layouts without designers

Take UI components directly from Git repo, Storybook, or through NPM and design production-ready prototypes.

What is MUI?

MUI is a massive library of UI components designers and developers can use to build React applications. The open-source project follows Google’s guidelines for creating components, giving you a customizable library of foundational and advanced UI elements.

MUI also sells a collection of React templates and tools, giving you ready-made user interfaces to tweak for your project. 

Why Would You Use a Component Library Like MUI?

Designers often use UI kits to build new products or feature add-ons for existing projects. These libraries allow designers to drag and drop the components they need to design interfaces quickly. 

Let’s explore 7 reasons why you would want to use the MUI component library.

1. Faster Time-to-Market

In today’s highly competitive tech landscape, time-to-market is a metric that organizations always seek to optimize. A component library gives designers and developers a massive headstart with thoroughly tested UI elements ready to go.

Designers can drag and drop elements to build user interfaces and customize components to meet product and branding requirements. Design teams can spend more time designing great customer experiences rather than getting bogged down building and testing UI components from scratch–a process that increases time-to-market significantly!

Usability testing is much faster because designers can prototype, test, and iterate quickly. If a user interface isn’t working during testing, they can make changes on the fly, drawing from a massive library, to get instant feedback from participants and stakeholders.

When it comes to the design handoff, engineers can install the component library and copy/paste changes from prototypes and style guides to develop the product without starting from scratch.

2. A Single Source of Truth

One of the biggest design system governance challenges is maintaining a single source of truth. It’s not uncommon for product teams, UX designers, and developers to have out-of-sync design systems–resulting in errors, rework, and massive headaches and challenges for DesignOps.

Using MUI’s component library can significantly reduce these challenges while creating a single source of truth between design and development. Designers and engineers will still have separate design systems (image-based for designers and code for engineers), but MUI gives them the same starting blocks.

When using Merge with UXPin’s code-based editor, designers and engineers use the same design system components synced via a single repository. Any updates to the repo sync back to UXPin, notifying designers of the changes. You can connect Merge using Git for React component libraries or Storybook for other popular technologies.

3. Design Consistency

Consistency is vital for user experience, building trust, and brand loyalty. Using the same UI components allows designers to increase consistency while minimizing errors and rework.

4. Scalability

Scalability is another vital product design factor. If you’re building a design system from scratch, designers must design, prototype, and test new components before scaling the product.

With MUI’s comprehensive UI library, designers can search for the components they need to prototype and scale right away. Engineers can copy/paste the identical React components from MUI and customize them to the designer’s specifications.

MUI X includes a library of advanced React components teams can use to scale complex products even faster, including data grids, date pickers, charts, pagination, filtering, and more.

5. Easy Maintenance

A component library like MUI comes with detailed documentation for installing, using, updating, and customizing components. Designers and engineers can use this framework to maintain the organization’s design system, making it easier to establish governance systems and protocols.

MUI also provides how-to guides for migrating from one version to the next. So, organizations can take advantage of the latest UI styles, technologies, and trends whenever MUI releases an update.

6. Accessibility

Those experienced with setting up a design system will know the time and money it takes to ensure every component passes accessibility standards. MUI’s designers have taken great care in designing components to meet WCAD 2.0 accessibility guidelines – reducing the work for researchers and designers.

It’s important to note that even when you design interfaces using accessible components, you must still test navigation and user flows to ensure the product as a whole meets accessibility standards.

7. Skills Empowerment

MUI’s open-source component UI library empowers startups and young entrepreneurs to build new products–especially in developing nations where they don’t have the same access to education, mentoring, and skills transfer.

The library is also incredibly beneficial for charities, non-profits, NGOs, and similar organizations who want to develop products and tools but don’t have the budget to invest in a design system. 

Anyone can leverage the skills of MUI’s talented designers and developers using the same component library used by Fortune 500 companies to develop sophisticated digital products and compete in a global market.

What Makes MUI Stand Apart From Other Component Libraries?

Google’s Material Design UI is arguably one of the best and most comprehensive design libraries in the world. By building on top of Material Design, MUI delivers a React component library to match.

The ability to easily customize MUI using its Theming feature and the libraries’ excellent documentation make it accessible to build products for multinational corporations or a single developer with a product idea.

Because MUI is so widely used, there is a massive global community of designers, researchers, and developers to reach out to for guidance and support. Added to the fact that React is one of the most popular front-end frameworks, makes MUI an attractive component library.

MUI – Interesting Facts and Figures

Here are some interesting MUI facts and figures:

Note: MUI’s stats continue to climb. These facts were accurate as of Jan 2022.

  • MUI started in 2014 as Material UI but decided to change its name to differentiate itself from Google. Many people assumed Material UI was a Google product.
  • MUI has over 2,200 open-source contributors.
  • There are over 2,3 million NPM downloads of MUI per week.
  • Over 73,700 stars on GitHub.
  • Of the 1,488 respondents to MUI’s 2020 survey, 35% of developers worked in an organization with less than five people.
  • In the survey, 27% of developers use MUI for enterprise applications, while 20% use the library for admin dashboards.

UXPin’s MUI 5 Kit

Using UXPin Merge’s MUI integration, you can leverage the power of prototyping with UI React components.

MUI helps you create designs with fully functioning code components. With a single source of truth, designers, developers, product teams, and others can collaborate more effectively with fewer errors and friction.

Higher fidelity means better usability testing with meaningful feedback from participants and stakeholders. The result? A better overall user experience and increased business value.

Find out more about UXPin’s MUI kit and how you can sign up to request access to this revolutionary code-based design technology: MUI library in UXPin: Design Faster.

Syncing a Component Library With UXPin Merge

With UXPin Merge, you can build fully functioning high-fidelity prototypes with an open-source component library. With complex UI components like menus, forms, tabs, data tables, date pickers, accordions, and more, you can build beautiful and functional layouts in minutes. Check out Merge.

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User Retention – 7 Design Tips to Improve it https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/user-retention/ Wed, 08 Nov 2023 14:38:43 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=51085 Today’s digital product users have simply decided that they don’t have the attention span–or the time–to wade through poorly designed apps. Luckily, since designers study users and their behavior, they can help with improving user retention through the right design practices.  In this article, we propose a solution to the customer retention issues that plague

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Design Tips to Improve Your Apps User Retention

Today’s digital product users have simply decided that they don’t have the attention span–or the time–to wade through poorly designed apps. Luckily, since designers study users and their behavior, they can help with improving user retention through the right design practices. 

In this article, we propose a solution to the customer retention issues that plague user interfaces. The goal is to engage app visitors so that they feel compelled to return. Done properly, casual users stay engaged. Loyalty prospers, followers are born, and an app becomes a daily staple. 

Key takeaways:

  • User retention is a behavioral pattern of users who keep coming back to the site, app or other digital product.
  • It’s measured as a percentage that reflects total number of users at the start of a period divided by number of active users at the end of the period.
  • What helps you make design decisions for improving user retention is behavioral science but also usability, customer service, and more.

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

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What is User Retention?

User retention is when a casual digital browser is transformed into a power user who returns to consume more of what your app or website offers. These users follow this pattern of product or service consumption, staying for longer periods to benefit from the app or website. 

More accurately, teams track this metric as a percentage. By tracking this rate, you can help your team focus on improving user retention. You see trends in motion, which lets you quickly spot and address any downturns in user engagement. Following a user retention strategy lets your team meet their objectives and keep the return user statistics in your favour.

How Can Designers Measure User Retention? 

By using something as simple as a user survey or more complex analytics tools, developers determine repeat visits. They can also generate ballpark figures by selecting a timeframe and dividing the total number of users recorded at the start by the number of active users at the end of that period.

Here’s a general formula for tracking user retention:

Total number of users at the start of a period / number of active users at the end of the period = user retention rate (%)

With the figure in hand, product teams can discover what resonates with app traffic. Say that there’s a sudden drop in user returns. After speaking to a few users, your team learns that a UI element doesn’t work or is confusing and causes user frustration. The design team can then work on a fix that would remove the blocker in the user journey

Product teams also commonly review churn rates – more on this later – and other analytics, but it’s the user retention figure that provides the greatest understanding of in-app behavior.

All of this analysis and user querying result in a more personalized experience. In the end, the app doesn’t overwhelm or confuse with information overload or navigation-slowing pages.

How to tell if user retention is low?

Let’s introduce a predictability baseline. Fact: the average customer retention rate after 30 days of app usage is typically 5.6% of users. Designers might use this statistic as a very rough benchmark when rolling out their creations.

That said, when setting their user retention objectives, they should always prioritize their industry-standard rates. You can establish what a ‘good’, ‘average’, or ‘poor’ retention rate means to you after considering several factors, like what your product does, who is the target user, and how much it costs. 

So much for theory – now let’s look at some factors that can help keep users coming back.

7 Design Tips on Improving User Retention

Before thinking about your app’s improving retention rate, it’s essential to understand the basics of behavioral science. The Hooked Model, created by Nir Niyal, will be used to illustrate this concept:

  • The trigger – humans gravitate towards familiar screen anchors. Links, clickable icons or images, emails; these are all habit-forming triggers. They prompt users to take familiar actions. They’ve been “hooked” by a trigger. An emotional component is activated when triggers work as they’re designed to.
  • Action – this is a key part of the action/reward cycle that drives human interactions. If the action is to be viewed as “good,” a rewarding response is expected.
  • Variable rewards – we become excited when unforeseen incentives are on the line. Your customers can’t help themselves; they want to click through to another part of your app when they’re tempted by a hidden image or, say, the promise of a discount code.
  • User investment – interest rises. Your users want to interact with your app, to leave feedback or fill out a form. This final part of the four-phase hooked model equals customer investment and a healthy future for burgeoning users.

Although human behavior lies at the core of UX design practices, the ‘human factor’ can be unpredictable at times, and belongs in another realm altogether. It is crucial that this emotional element is understood.

Understand who your loyal customers are

Retained users are potential brand advocates. They’re already satisfied with your app and have the power to draw in more customers. Consider the following:

  • Track churn rate, which is defined as the percentage of users who have stopped using the app over a predetermined amount of time. If user investment is dropping, you need to find out why.
  • Know your ideal customer profile but match expectations against real-world results. Using analytics tools and app retention figures, how often do visitors use your app? 
  • What’s the habit-forming trigger in your app?
  • Can those triggers be recreated on command?

To learn more about the psychology behind habit forming in design, give our dedicated piece a read.

Once you’ve determined the level of user retention you need for your app or website, you can then focus on refining your user experience (UX). 

Reward those users who use your product regularly

These incentives aren’t always monetary. In fact, they could be anything, including:

  • Points (e.g., used to reward returning users of the ‘Health’ app in Apple devices)
  • Badges (e.g., Facebook groups, where the most active members of the community are given special badges for top contributors)
  • Discounts (e.g., eCommerce stores that often display discount codes in their app, site, social accounts, or deliver them to customers via email)
  • VIP status (e.g., language learning app Duolingo puts a heavy emphasis not only on gamifying the studying experience, but also offers VIP status to those who return to the app daily)
  • Free upgrades (e.g., hotels offering free room upgrades for booking directly through their site or app)
  • Compliments (e.g. a free ebook for the first 50 users who log into the app on a given day).

Rewards inspire feelings of achievement. You feel like you’ve accomplished something, so you return for more. Customer retention rates increase as users react positively to this sense of accomplishment.

The Stepler app represents a fine example of the reward principle. Points are won every time a user walks, and earn bonus points every time they log into the app. Always on the mind of the fitness enthusiast, because they’re hooked up to a wearable fitness device, the app is accessed regularly.

In this case, the rewards program aligns with the user’s activity goals to build closer ties to advertisers and brands.   

Improve usability

Usability is a term that describes the degree to which an individual can use an app, website, or other product to achieve a specific end goal – conveniently and enjoyably. If you spot that a user struggles with completing a process due to a usability glitch, then you need to decide how you can resolve the issue.

To get started, you need to understand if the design meets your users’ needs. If it doesn’t, what’s lacking? A good way to gather answers is by gathering feedback from customers.

Make sure your onboarding is good

Just like when reading a book or meeting someone for the first time, first impressions are everything.

Make sure your onboarding process is smooth and streamlined. First-time visitors to your app should experience smooth sailing through the tasks. 

Unfortunately, customers tend to remember problems, whether they’re due to site navigation or some app slowdown incident. Avoid such bad memories by conducting exhaustive dummy-run app tests to iron out the wrinkles. Pair the above steps with a well-designed in-app onboarding flow.

Put a customer feedback loop in place

Feedback is offered to customers as a means of gathering insights and actionable suggestions. To ensure you retain your hard-won customer base, you need a process for obtaining customer feedback

Not to be skipped when consolidating customer insights, feedback loops play a crucial role in collecting and analyzing user reviews and surveys.

There are several methods to gather customer feedback:

  • Run a survey like Net Promoter Score®
  • Request that users participate in focus groups and provide feedback sessions.
  • Combining all of the above results, the data is analyzed for discernible trends in user behavior.

Use the right trigger

There are a number of tools available for the discerning app designer. From a design point of view, the initial trigger must be functional and aesthetically attractive. Function, of course, is more important than app attractiveness. Both work together to draw in users, though.

A dynamic design is yet another piece of the puzzle that is the human experience. By incorporating interactive elements and visually appealing graphics, users are more likely to engage with the app. Animations and scaling graphics, lines, and color changes – these dynamic elements all serve to engage the eye. Audio cues work just as well as an attention-grabbing device.

Share new feature updates with relevant users 

You can use the same design techniques to separate new features and updates from the presence of regular app content. A different font color or a flashing banner directing the attention of a user’s eye causes the static of the familiar to fade while fresh new features stand out.

Kommunicate announces a new feature through a convenient tooltip: It’s a great way to share information without overwhelming the screen with attention-stealing detail.    

Conclusion

Tracking user retention is a great way to verify if your app meets user needs. As soon as you notice it going down, you should start to investigate the reasons behind it. You can do it by running a survey or speaking directly to your target audience. 

By using a tool like UXPin you can quickly test new features before you proceed into full launch. This way you will ensure a seamless user experience by keeping your designs easy to navigate around, and clutter-free. Try UXPin today.

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7 Constraints in Design and How to Overcome Them https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/constraints-in-design/ Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:15:09 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=38700 Whether you work in an early-stage startup or a multinational enterprise, design constraints limit or influence design projects and the desired output. Seasoned designers understand that true creativity often emerges when we confront and master the constraints that shape our work. In this blog post, we delve into the art of design constraints, a topic close

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constraints in design

Whether you work in an early-stage startup or a multinational enterprise, design constraints limit or influence design projects and the desired output. Seasoned designers understand that true creativity often emerges when we confront and master the constraints that shape our work. In this blog post, we delve into the art of design constraints, a topic close to the hearts of senior designers.

Key takeaways:

  • Design constraints are restrictions that influence the creative and technical decisions made during the design process.
  • The first step is acknowledging these limitations and that they constrain UX designers from delivering great design outcomes.
  • Understanding and managing design constraints will minimize adverse effects or eliminate issues altogether.

Eliminate prototyping constraints, bridge the gap between designers and engineers, and deliver exceptional user experiences with UXPin Merge. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

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What are Design Constraints?

Design constraints are limitations or restrictions in the design process imposed by internal and external factors. These constraints impact the final product, so it’s critical that everyone in the organization is aware of them and considers these limitations before every project.

Common types of design constraints include:

  • Technical constraints: how a product’s tech stack and engineering team limit design
  • Financial constraints: departmental and project budgets
  • Legal and regulatory constraints: laws design teams must follow
  • Organizational constraints: culture, structure, policies, bureaucracy
  • Self-imposed constraints: each designer’s workflow and creative decision-making
  • Talent constraints: designer skills and experience and professional shortcomings
  • Project-specific constraints: limitations relating to the project, including time, budget, available team members, etc.

We’ll explore these in greater detail and discuss how team members and stakeholders address design constraints.

Technical constraints

Technical constraints significantly impact design projects because they dictate how far designers can push creative and innovative boundaries.

code developer design 1

Some examples include:

  • Device and operating system limitations: iOS and Android constraints, screen sizes, processing power, etc.
  • Accessibility constraints: how voice control and screen readers impact design decisions.
  • Performance constraints: the impact of user bandwidth/Internet connectivity, product servers, and tech stacks.
  • Integrations and APIs: limitations from external services and API requirements.
  • Tech stack constraints: how front-end and back-end tech impact the design process.

Financial constraints

Financial constraints impact many areas of the design process, including human resources, tools, user research, project scope, and technology. While many see financial constraints as a roadblock, they often drive creative thinking and design innovation through bootstrapping and workarounds.

Some ways financial constraints impact the design process include:

  • Limiting the scope of each discipline (research, wireframing, prototyping, interviews, testing, etc.)
  • Limits the number of iterations and testing rounds
  • Specifies what tools designers use
  • Determines the size and skill level of the design team

Legal constraints impact content and user data the most regarding UX projects. These laws change depending on the country, so designers rely on advice from legal counsel and stakeholders.

Some examples of how legal constraints impact design include:

  • Privacy laws: dictate what data designers collect, how they collect it, the legal notices they give users, and how they get permission–notably, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
  • Accessibility laws: what designers must do legally to make user interfaces accessible for users with various impairments– for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the United States.
  • Intellectual property laws: copyright for original works, including text, images, video, etc. Additionally, designers must consider whether they infringe on competitor/brand IP, trademarks, and other legal protections.
  • Industry-specific regulations: some industries, like financial and healthcare, have laws about privacy and security that significantly impact design–for example, login and authentication procedures.

Organizational constraints

Organizational constraints describe limitations imposed on Design by other parts of the company. These limitations often relate to the organization’s values, culture, company vision, and competing interests from other departments.

Some examples of organizational constraints include:

  • Time constraints: deadlines set by stakeholders can impact how designers research, prototype, and test design ideas.
  • Brand guidelines: an organization’s brand influences stylistic and messaging decisions.
  • Marketing and business goals: designers often have to balance user needs with organizational goals, which can limit design choices.
  • Design system constraints: available components, design principles, style guides, guidelines, and design system governance impact how designers create products.
  • Organizational silos: poor communication and collaboration lead to silos that hamper progress. These silos often lead to duplicate work, delays, design drift, inconsistencies, and other friction.
  • Design’s value: how the organization perceives the UX department can impact resource allocation and buy-in, limiting what designers can do.

Self-imposed constraints

Self-imposed constraints come from the designers, relating to the choices and options during the design process, like which design tool they use, the time it takes to complete tasks, and whether they use the product’s design system.

Talent constraints

Talent constraints relate to the skills and specialists available to the design team. It’s important to know every designer’s skill set and expertise so that managers can assign people who complement one another. Understanding talent constraints enables managers to source the right people and when to hire specialist contractors for specific design projects.

Project-specific constraints

Project constraints create design problems that otherwise don’t exist or are rare to an organization. For example, designers might have to complete a project in a shorter timeframe than they’re used to, resulting in adapting workflows or switching tools to accomplish the desired outcome.

How to Overcome Design Constraints

In many organizations, overcoming constraints is a DesignOps function. The DesignOps team must reduce these limitations and roadblocks to maximize the department’s output and organizational value.

designops efficiency arrow

This problem-based framework will help overcome design constraints starting with your organization’s biggest challenges. A problem-based approach will allow you to solve a specific issue and its related constraints, thus increasing the impact.

  1. Define the problem: what challenge are you trying to solve? This could be reducing time-to-market or increasing designer productivity.
  2. Identify the constraints: list the constraints related to this problem, i.e., budget, resources, time, technical, etc.
  3. Prioritize the constraints: determine which limitations are most consequential and prioritize accordingly.
  4. Brainstorm solutions: meet with appropriate experts, team members, and stakeholders to brainstorm solutions. Create a list of possibilities.
  5. Evaluate the solutions: consider the pros and cons of each idea and determine which has the highest feasibility with the most significant potential impact.
  6. Choose a solution: select the solution you believe will deliver the best results and put plans in place to implement it.
  7. Test and iterate: create KPIs to measure your solution’s effectiveness and tweak them over time to optimize the results. Don’t be afraid to abandon poor-performing ideas and iterate on new ones.

Define the problem: efficacy vs. efficiency

In a webinar with UXPin, DesignOps expert Patrizia Bertini outlined how practitioners must frame problems to measure results from solutions. Patrizia argues that it’s essential to recognize the difference between efficacy and efficiency because you evaluate these differently.

Efficacy uses qualitative metrics, including:

  • Empathy and ongoing user engagement
  • Ideation and experimentation cycle times
  • Composition of teams’ skills (skill matrix)
  • Design skills’ distribution
  • Perceived value of design by cross-functional partners
  • Designer satisfaction and retention

Efficiency is measurable and quantifiable using numbers, percentages, and ratios:

  • Tools’ ROI (cost/engagement/adoption)
  • Testing and prototyping lead time (time)
  • Number and type of quality reviews
  • Team productivity (resources utilization)
  • End-to-end delivery time (time)

Reducing Constraints With UXPin Merge

Traditional design workflows and image-based tools present many constraints for designers–most notably, prototyping fidelity and functionality which have many adverse effects, including:

  • Limited user testing scope
  • Inability to spot usability issues during the design process
  • Fewer problem-solving opportunties
  • Limited stakeholder comprehension impacting buy-in
  • Less ability to identify business opportunities
  • Poor designer/developer collaboration and challenging design handoffs

UXPin Merge solves these issues and many more by syncing your product’s component library to UXPin’s design editor, so designers use the same UI elements during the design process as engineers use to develop the final product.

Merge components are fully interactive and function in UXPin exactly as they do in the repository and final product. This interactivity provides design teams with a component-driven workflow that increases project scope and enables significantly faster testing and iterations.

Merge breaks down silos and operational constraints because designers and engineers speak the same language. Design handoffs with Merge are seamless and frictionless, requiring less documentation and explanation because engineers already have the same component library. UXPin renders JSX, so engineers simply copy/paste to apply these to the component’s props.

Merge also significantly reduces testing constraints. Usability testing participants and stakeholders can interact with prototypes like they would the final product, producing meaningful, actionable results to iterate and improve outcomes.

“Our stakeholders are able to provide feedback pretty quickly using UXPin Merge. We can send them a link to play with the prototype in their own time and UXPin allows them to provide comments directly on the prototypes. UXPin’s Comments functionality is great because we can follow along and mark comments as resolved once we address them.” – Erica Rider, UX Lead EPX at PayPal.

Eliminate prototyping limitations with a code-based design solution from UXPin Merge. Iterate faster to deliver high-quality projects, even under the tightest time constraints. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

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Double Diamond Design Process – The Best Framework for a Successful Product Design https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/double-diamond-design-process/ Thu, 02 Nov 2023 13:27:23 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=36554 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 Deliver better products to your users with the world’s most advanced prototyping tool. Sign up for a

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double diamond design process

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.

Deliver better products to your users with the world’s most advanced prototyping tool. Sign up for a free trial to explore interactive prototyping with UXPin.

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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.

idea design brainstorm 1

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

process brainstorm ideas

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:

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.
team collaboration talk communication

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.

testing observing user behavior

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.

code design developer

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 collaboration comment mobile design

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.

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Breaking Down Silos to Improve Digital Product Development https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/breaking-silos/ Wed, 25 Oct 2023 09:39:21 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=24234 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

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Understanding DesignOps and Its Role in Design Teams copy

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

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

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

image 1

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:

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.

 

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UX Design Frameworks – What Are The Most Useful Ones? https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/design-frameworks/ Mon, 09 Oct 2023 16:08:17 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=35821 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

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design frameworks

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.

Build advanced prototypes

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

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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.

lo fi pencil

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:

9 Examples of UX Design Frameworks

process brainstorm ideas

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: 

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: 

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:

BASIC Framework

team collaboration talk communciation

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: 

End-to-End Product Design With UXPin

collaboration team prototyping

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.

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How to Become a Product Designer https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/how-to-become-product-designer/ Wed, 04 Oct 2023 09:18:16 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=50427 Are you navigating the journey to becoming a product designer? This guide reveals the product design essentials you’ll need to master, from skills and qualifications to networking and career progression. Discover how to align business goals with user needs, craft compelling products, and grow in the ever-evolving product design landscape. Key takeaways: Stand out from

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how to become a product designer

Are you navigating the journey to becoming a product designer? This guide reveals the product design essentials you’ll need to master, from skills and qualifications to networking and career progression. Discover how to align business goals with user needs, craft compelling products, and grow in the ever-evolving product design landscape.

Key takeaways:

  1. Mastering a mix of hard and soft skills, from wireframing to effective communication, is crucial for a successful career in product design.
  2. Formal education in design or computer science can provide a strong foundation, but alternative paths like online courses and self-study are also viable.
  3. Networking through industry events and communities and finding a mentor can fast-track your professional growth.
  4. Career progression in product design often moves from junior roles to specialized or managerial positions, with each stage demanding different levels of expertise.
  5. A well-crafted resume and interactive portfolio can make you stand out in job applications, so focus on tailoring your experience and showcasing quantifiable achievements.

Stand out from the crowd with interactive prototypes using the world’s most advanced product design tool. Sign up for a free trial to explore UXPin’s features and further your design skillset.

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What do Product Designers do?

A product designer strategizes, conceptualizes, and delivers solutions that solve user problems. They align business goals with user needs, navigating the product lifecycle from market research to final execution.

Product designers map user flows, create wireframes and craft high-fidelity prototypes. Beyond visuals, they often work with cross-functional teams, including developers, UX designers, and product managers, to bring a product from idea to market.

Is product design the same as a UX designer?

Unlike UX designers, who focus mainly on the usability and functionality of a product, product designers own the entire design process. This ownership goes beyond user experience to include user interface design and often front-end development.

Where UX designers focus on the user experience, product designers look broader on the entire customer experience. They must understand how customers enter and exit the customer lifecycle to optimize usability and profitability.

What is the role of a Product Designer?

These core responsibilities reflect the full-spectrum ownership that a product designer has over the design process:

  • Market Research: Identifies user needs and market gaps to inform design strategy.
  • Wireframing: Creates basic layout structures to guide the project’s visual and content elements.
  • Prototyping: Develops high-fidelity prototypes to visualize the end product and conduct usability tests.
  • User Testing: Executes user interviews, usability tests, and surveys to gather insights for design iteration.
  • Design Handoff: Coordinates with developers, supplying all visual assets and design specifications for coding.
  • Quality Assurance: Reviews implemented designs in the development environment to ensure they meet design specifications.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Works with product managers, UX designers, and developers to align goals and deliver a unified user experience.
  • Documentation: Creates and updates design specifications and libraries, ensuring team members implement designs consistently.
  • Performance Metrics: Monitors KPIs like user engagement and conversion rates to measure the design’s impact.

What Skills Do You Need to Be a Product Designer?

Hard Skills

  • Sketching & Wireframing: Mastery of sketching techniques to visualize design ideas rapidly.
  • Prototyping Tools: Proficiency in design tools (UXPin, Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, etc.) for high-fidelity prototyping.
  • Coding: Basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript helps create interactive prototypes and enhances communication with developers.
  • Design Systems: Understand how to build and maintain a scalable design system.
  • User Research: Able to conduct user interviews, surveys, and usability tests.
  • Data Analysis: Skills in interpreting analytics data to make informed design decisions.
  • Responsive Design: Expertise designing user interfaces that adapt to various screen sizes.
  • Visual Design: Command over UI design elements like typography, color theory, and grid systems.

Soft Skills

  • Communication: Clear articulation of design choices and the ability to persuade stakeholders.
  • Problem-Solving: Exceptional analytical skills to identify problems and conceive practical solutions.
  • Collaboration: Works seamlessly in cross-functional teams and understands the value of collective input.
  • Time Management: Balances multiple projects and deadlines without sacrificing quality.
  • Empathy: Tuned into user needs, motivations, and pain points for user-centric design.
  • Adaptability: Open to change and quick to adopt new tools or processes as needed.
  • Attention to Detail: Ensures no design element is overlooked, contributing to a polished end product.

What Qualifications do I need to Become a Product Designer?

success done pencil

There are many pathways to becoming a product designer. You can go the formal education route and get a degree or use online resources and courses to educate yourself.

Formal education

  • Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Graphic Design: Provides a strong foundation in design principles and visual communication.
  • Bachelor’s Degree in Interaction Design: Focuses on designing interactive digital products.
  • Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Design: For those looking to specialize further and gain a competitive edge.
  • Bachelor’s in Computer Science: Gives you a foundational understanding of programming and development, which can make you more effective in designing digital products.

Online design courses and workshops

  • Coursera: Offers courses from universities and colleges on product design.
  • Udemy: Specializes in shorter, practical courses on specific design tools or techniques.
  • General Assembly: Provides intensive bootcamps focused on UX and product design.
  • Interaction Design Foundation: Membership-based platform for more academic courses.
  • IDEO: A leading design thinking organization with various product and design-related courses.

Self-study

Here are some books to help sharpen your product design skillset:

What is the Career Progression of a Product Designer?

designops efficiency person

What is a typical product design career path?

  • Junior Product Designer: Generally, a starting point for those fresh out of school or with less than two years of experience. Focuses mainly on executing design tasks under supervision.
  • Mid-Level Product Designer: With around 3-5 years of experience, mid-level designers take on more complex projects and may begin to specialize.
  • Senior Product Designer: After 5-8 years in the field, expect to lead design projects, mentor junior staff, and often have a say in strategic decisions.
  • Lead Product Designer: Requires at least 8-10 years of experience. Leads large-scale projects and often oversees a design team.

What are the possible product design specializations?

  • UX Specialist: Delves deep into user research and experience design. Requires a strong grasp of analytics and user behavior.
  • UI Specialist: Focuses on the visual elements of a product, including color schemes, typography, and overall aesthetics. A background in graphic design can be beneficial.
  • Front-End Development: Some product designers specialize in the technical aspects, including writing code. Requires proficient skills in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Modern product development includes front-end framework skills like React, Vue, Angular, etc.
  • Interaction Designer: Specializes in creating engaging interfaces with well-thought-out behaviors. Requires a keen understanding of human psychology and behavior.

What are some product design leadership and management roles?

  • Design Manager: Manages a team of designers, oversees projects and reports to higher management. Often requires a blend of design skills and managerial expertise.
  • Director of Design: Responsible for setting and executing the design strategy for the entire organization. Often part of the executive team.
  • VP of Product Design: One of the top-level executives focused on design. Requires extensive experience and a proven track record in leadership and various product design roles.
  • Consultant/Advisor: With years of expertise, some product designers work as consultants for companies or startups, helping shape their product design strategy.

How to Build a Network and Find a Mentor as a Product Designer

Networking opportunities

  • Industry Conferences and Meetups: Attend design-focused events to meet industry professionals and gather insights. Choose conferences that align with your interests and career goals for maximum impact.
  • Online Forums and Groups: Join specialized online communities on professional platforms like LinkedIn or industry-specific Slack channels. Engage in meaningful discussions to gain knowledge and make connections.

Finding a product design mentor

A mentor offers industry insights, practical advice, and invaluable feedback you won’t find in textbooks. They accelerate your growth by guiding you through real-world challenges.

Search within your existing network, alumni associations, or LinkedIn. ADPList is another helpful resource for finding mentors. Don’t hesitate to reach out with a well-crafted message that shows your respect for their work and clearly outlines what you seek from the mentorship.

How to Land Product Design Jobs

testing observing user behavior 1

We borrowed this product designer resume strategy from Dribbble:

  1. Review the job description to identify gaps: Tailoring your resume to meet the job description’s requirements will help you stand out. You may identify specific skills or experience you have but haven’t included in your resume template.
  2. Choose a format (chronological or functional resume format): Recruiters favor a chronological resume to display career growth. If you’re targeting entry-level positions, focus on education and skills using a functional layout.
  3. Don’t be boring–show off your design skills: The standard PDF or Word doc isn’t sufficient to stand out as a product designer. Many product designers use a professional web-based portfolio to showcase their skills and experience. 
  4. Use metrics: showcase projects where you’ve led or significantly contributed to the design process. Use quantifiable metrics to demonstrate impact.

How to Stand Out With Interactive Prototypes from UXPin

Stand out from the crowd and show off your product design skills with interactive prototypes from UXPin. Most product designers choose popular image-based tools like Figma or Sketch, but these platforms lack the features and functionality to go beyond basic prototyping.

UXPin is a code-based design tool with features to build fully interactive prototypes that look and feel like the final product. You can include links to your interactive prototypes with your resume to impress recruiters and stand out. 

Get a step ahead and enhance your product design skills with UXPin’s sophisticated tools and features. Sign up for a free trial to build your first interactive prototype.

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8 Fullproof Methods of Collecting In-App Feedback [+Tools] https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/in-app-feedback/ Mon, 28 Aug 2023 10:14:44 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=49728 In-app feedback is a user review or rating of their experience with an app that’s collected while the user performs a task in the app. Designers or product managers place a widget or a pop-up in the app to learn what a user thinks and feels about the app. It helps to streamline app UX

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in app feedback min

In-app feedback is a user review or rating of their experience with an app that’s collected while the user performs a task in the app. Designers or product managers place a widget or a pop-up in the app to learn what a user thinks and feels about the app. It helps to streamline app UX and prevent user churn.

In this article, we will discuss best practices, tools, and techniques for collecting in-app feedback. Let’s start.

Key takeaways:

  • In-app feedback refers to user feedback collected from real users in the exacvt moment they’re using an app.
  • It helps designers stay close with users, get immediate feedback on a working app, and improve its experience.
  • In-app feedback techniques include surveys, questionnaires, widgets, screenshot and annotations tools, bug reports, and user reviews.
  • To collect user feedback, remember to keep it non-invasive, quick, and compelling.

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What is an In-App Feedback?

In-app feedback is a user opinion collected within an application that sheds light on user experiences, preferences, and potential pain points. Unlike external surveys, social media, or app ratings, this feedback captures real-time reactions and user insights, giving product teams a contextual understanding of how people interact with specific app features. 

Organizations leverage in-app feedback to find opportunities for improving UX, ensuring their solutions align seamlessly with user expectations and enhance the overall customer experience.

Why Does In-App Feedback Matter?

Prioritizing in-app feedback means valuing genuine user experiences over assumptions and ensuring product managers implement changes based on user needs. These user-centric improvements increase customer satisfaction leading to increased retention while reducing churn.

Reason 1: Staying in touch with users

In-app feedback provides an unfiltered channel into the user’s thoughts and feelings. This first-party data is invaluable as it allows product teams to capture app users’ sentiments directly where interactions occur, fostering a clearer understanding of user satisfaction and areas of friction.

Reason 2: Fast insights

Real-time in-app feedback offers immediacy other collection methods can’t. Users can instantly communicate issues, delights, or confusion, allowing product teams to address concerns without delay, ensuring an agile response to user needs.

Reason 3: Real-time understanding of users

Contextual feedback is highly valuable for UX research and understanding the user experience “in the moment.” We humans tend to forget. So interviewing someone a few days or weeks after their experience may differ from when it’s actually happening.

In-product feedback gives teams a contextual perspective on how users navigate, interact, and react to specific features, shedding light on potential improvements and innovations.

In-App Feedback Tools and Techniques

In-app surveys and questionnaires

  • Best time to use: After major interactions or task completions.
  • Tools: Typeform.

In-app surveys and questionnaires let you pose targeted questions to users as they navigate, extracting specific insights. For example, after a user completes a new feature or flow, a quick survey can assess their experience.

Pros:

  • Direct insights about specific app features or processes
  • Structured data that are easy to quantify and analyze

Cons:

  • Risk of interrupting user experience if not timed correctly
  • Overusing feedback surveys can lead to fatigue

Feedback widgets and buttons

These embedded tools within your app interface offer users a quick way to provide feedback, including net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT). For example, post-onboarding, a thumbs up/down button can gauge whether users feel confident about using the product.

Pros:

  • Simplifies the feedback process for users
  • Can lead to higher response rates

Cons:

  • Limited depth of insights due to simplicity
  • Can clutter the interface if not integrated seamlessly

Screenshot and annotation tools

These tools allow users to capture specific app screens and highlight issues or areas of interest, offering visual context. For example, a user encountering a display glitch can screenshot the error and instantly report it.

Pros:

  • Provides visual context for more accurate issue identification
  • Empowers users to pinpoint exact problems

Cons:

  • Might have compatibility or stability issues
  • Needs user proficiency for effective utilization

Session recordings

  • Best time to use: Continuous monitoring, especially during new releases.
  • Tools: FullStory.

Recording user sessions captures real-time interactions, providing a step-by-step view of a customer journey. This data is valuable when diagnosing unexpected user drop-offs.

Pros:

  • Offers a holistic view of user interactions
  • Helps identify unintuitive app flows

Cons:

  • Privacy concerns if not handled with transparency
  • Can demand significant storage and analysis time

Heatmaps

  • Best time to use: When analyzing user interaction patterns with UI elements.
  • Tools: HotJar, Microsoft Clarity

Heatmaps visualize where users tap, swipe, or linger on your app screens, indicating areas of interest or confusion. For example, a hotspot might reveal an unintentional focal point.

Pros:

  • Offers a visual representation of user activity
  • Highlights design elements that draw attention

Cons:

  • May not provide the ‘why’ behind observed patterns
  • Needs sufficient data points for accuracy

Chatbots and AI-driven feedback collection

  • Best time to use: Post interactions or during help/support queries.
  • Tools: Built-in in your chatbot app like Intercom or LiveChat.

Product teams can leverage AI chatbots to gather feedback by conversationally interacting with users. 

For example, post-interaction, a chatbot might ask, “Was this solution helpful?”

In time, these AI chatbots will get more advanced and notice patterns where users struggle. For example, “I noticed you spent a long time completing the form; was everything ok?”

Pros:

  • Enables real-time, interactive feedback collection
  • AI can adapt to user responses for deeper insights

Cons:

  • Can feel impersonal or robotic
  • Requires sophisticated setup and maintenance

Bug reports

  • Best time to use: Continuous monitoring, especially during new releases.
  • Tools: Instabug.

In-app bug reporting tools allow users to immediately report issues they encounter, streamlining the feedback-to-fix journey. If an app crashes, a prompt might appear asking for feedback.

Pros:

  • Facilitates quick identification of technical problems
  • Direct channel from problem discovery to report

Cons:

  • Relies on the user’s willingness to provide feedback post-disruption
  • Can lead to redundant reports if many users face the same issue

Customer support emails

  • Best Time to Use: Immediately after technical issues or crashes.
  • Tools: Intercom or Helpscout.

Channels like feedback forms, in-app messaging, and customer support allow product teams to learn about users and their pain points. Beyond troubleshooting, these mobile app feedback channels enable users to voice concerns, provide suggestions, or seek clarity on app functionalities.

Pros:

  • Real-time feedback allows users can share their thoughts or report issues instantly
  • Direct interaction assures users that there’s a team ready to assist and value their input, building trust
  • Detailed conversations dive deeper into user challenges and perspectives

Cons:

  • Users want immediate feedback. Delays in support responses can lead to user dissatisfaction
  • Maintaining a responsive customer support system demands a dedicated team and other valuable resources
  • Customer support representatives must manage expectations. Unresolved issues can lead to unfavorable user reviews or public complaints

How to Encourage Users to Give In-App Feedback

React quickly

Position feedback prompts where they’re most relevant, ensuring they resonate with users’ in-app experiences. Avoid disrupting users during crucial tasks to increase the likelihood of participation.

For example, after completing a checkout process, a brief survey asking about the experience feels timely and relevant, maximizing the chance of user engagement. Conversely, asking the shopper while entering their payment details is poor timing, adversely impacts the user experience, and may increase abandoned carts.

Offer incentives or rewards

Users are more inclined to provide feedback if they see a tangible benefit. Product teams can offer rewards or incentives to acknowledge the value of the user’s time and insights. 

For example, offering in-game currency or power-ups in exchange for feedback on a game’s new level or feature. This incentive entices players and ensures more comprehensive feedback.

Craft compelling Call-to-Action

A well-crafted call-to-action (CTA) motivates users without overwhelming them. Keep CTAs clear, concise, and direct, emphasizing the ease and benefit of providing feedback.

For example, instead of a generic “Give Feedback” button, use “Help Us Improve in 30 Seconds!” This CTA offers a clear timeframe, making users more likely to engage. Content designers can help you find the best CTA for your case.

Best Practices for In-App Feedback Collection

Respect users’ time

When collecting feedback, value the user’s time. Ensure that prompts, questions, and surveys are clear, concise, and easy to navigate. A user who encounters a straightforward and brief survey is more likely to complete it, ensuring you get the insights you need without frustrating them.

Be transparent with users

Clearly communicate the purpose of collecting feedback and how the organization uses this data. Users are more inclined to share insights when they know their data is secure and won’t be misused.

For example, a simple statement, “We value your privacy. We use your feedback to make app improvements and never share this information with third parties,” builds trust.

Test your approach often

Feedback tools aren’t a set-and-forget; they require ongoing refinement. Regularly test these tools to ensure they function correctly and resonate with users. A continuous iteration of analyzing, modifying, and retesting ensures your feedback mechanisms remain effective and user-friendly.

Prioritize gathering feedback

Evaluate user responses based on relevance, frequency, and potential impact on user experience. Designers must also consider the product roadmap and objectives when prioritizing what to tackle first.

Addressing the most pressing issues first ensures you tackle users’ most significant pain points and enhance the overall user experience. 

Tools and techniques to understand feedback

Closing the feedback loop: informing users of changes

After acting on feedback, inform respondents about the changes made. This follow-up shows appreciation for their input and reinforces trust in your commitment to improvement–they know your messaging about improving the app is sincere, and they’re more likely to give feedback again.

For example, when releasing an app update, highlight “Improvements made based on your feedback!” in the release notes. This simple acknowledgment fosters a stronger relationship between users and product teams.

Design Solutions to In-App Feedback Easier With UXPin

UXPin’s advanced features allow product teams to build prototypes that accurately replicate the final product experience. They can use customer feedback to simulate problems or usability issues and develop effective solutions. Designers can preview prototypes in the browser or via UXPin Mirror (available for iOS and Android) for mobile app testing. 

Some of UXPin’s advanced features you won’t find in traditional image-based design tools:

  • States: 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: create complex components and advanced functionality–no code required!
  • Conditional Interactions: create if-then and if-else conditions based on user interactions to design dynamic prototypes with multiple outcomes to accurately replicate the final product experience.

UXPin’s IFTTT integration allows design teams to connect APIs and simulate real-world product experiences, workflows, and use cases–like sending a notification email or adding an event to a user’s calendar.

Use these and many other features to build your first fully interactive prototype with UXPin. Sign up for a free trial.

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UI Design vs. UI Development – What’s the Difference? https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/ui-design-vs-ui-development/ Wed, 23 Aug 2023 14:54:21 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=35574 There are many software and web development roles and responsibilities–from initial concept to design and delivery, QA, and lifecycle management. UI design and UI development are two crucial roles that impact how users engage and interact with a user interface. This article compares the practice of UI design vs. UI development, the people behind these

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There are many software and web development roles and responsibilities–from initial concept to design and delivery, QA, and lifecycle management. UI design and UI development are two crucial roles that impact how users engage and interact with a user interface.

This article compares the practice of UI design vs. UI development, the people behind these roles, and how they work together to deliver digital products.

Key takeaways:

  • UI design is the process of designing user interface of a product while UI development is the process of programming this design.
  • UI design and UI development appear on opposite ends of the software development process.
  • UI designers and UI developers work together to create products that are feasible, desirable, and viable.

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What is UI Design?

color id brand design

UI design (User Interface Design) is the process of designing user interface elements, layouts, and interactions–everything users see and interact with. These elements include images, animations, sliders, text fields, buttons, etc. Like user experience design, UI design decisions are based on user needs and testing.

UI Designer Skills & Responsibilities

UI designers are responsible for the UI design process. Their role includes:

  • Product aesthetics: branding, visual design
  • Research: design research, user analysis
  • Testing: UI prototyping (high-fidelity prototyping)
  • Design: wireframes, mockups, interaction design, animations, viewport layouts (responsive design)

UI Designer Qualities & Skillset

  • Visually creative
  • Web design
  • Graphic design
  • Design principles and design thinking
  • Interested in visual design
  • User journeys and personas
  • User research
  • Typography
  • Balances form with function
  • Looks at user interaction and behavior
  • Task orientated

UI Design Process

UI designers follow the same design thinking process as other UX professionals but complete different activities within the framework:

  • Empathize: focuses on the user’s environment, movements, and actions
  • Define: focuses on each step users need to take to achieve their goals
  • Ideate: looks at the elements and components users will need to navigate a product
  • Prototype: designs mockups and interactivity for high-fidelity prototypes
  • Test: tests how users interact with the product and ask practical questions

Further reading: UX vs. UI Design – The Differences You Need to Know.

What Software does a UI Designer Use?

UI designers generally use the same tools and software as other UX designers. These tools allow them to design, prototype, and test user interfaces.

The goal for any UI designer is to create high-fidelity prototypes that look and function like the final product. Code-based design tools like UXPin have revolutionized how UI designers prototype and test digital products.

Some of UXPin’s advanced prototyping features include:

  • States: Create multiple states for a single component with separate properties for interactions and system changes.
  • Conditional Interactions: Create dynamic user experiences with Javascript-like “if-then” and “if-else” rules that respond to user and system actions.
  • Variables: Store user inputs and take actions based on that data–like displaying a customized welcome message from the user’s name input.
  • Expressions: Write Javascript-like functions that perform complex tasks, like form validation, computational formatting, and more.

Discover these and more advanced UXPin features with a free 14-day trial–no payment details necessary!

What is UI Development?

design and development collaboration process product communication 1

UI development is the process of programming client-facing interfaces. Like UI design, the UI development process includes writing code for images, animations, sliders, text fields, buttons, etc.

UI Developer Skills & Responsibilities

Depending on the product and org structure, the UI development role might fall on a front-end developer, UX engineer, or full-stack engineer. Their responsibilities include (these will vary depending on the engineering team’s structure):

  • UI component development
  • UI maintenance
  • Styling architecture
  • Implementation
  • Technical feasibility
  • Backlog management
  • Performance
  • Query architecture
  • Search engine optimization

Front-End Development vs. Back-End Development

Engineers divide programming into two separate disciplines, front-end, and back-end development.

  • Front-end development: Focuses on developing “client-facing” interfaces using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
  • Back-end development: Write server-side code to connect front-end interfaces to databases, APIs, authentication, etc. Some programming languages include Java, Ruby, Python, and Javascript, to name a few.

Further reading: Front-End vs. Back-End: What’s the Difference?

What Software does a UI Developer Use?

Like any engineer, UI developers use an integrated development environment (IDE) to examine and write code. Modern IDEs feature various extensions to interface with engineering tools like Git, package managers, repositories, APIs, etc.

Further reading: The 7 Essential Tools for Frontend Web Development.

UI Design vs. UI Development

code design developer

With UI design and UI development defined, it’s clear to see these disciplines appear on opposite ends of the software development process. UI design happens during the design process, while UI development occurs during the engineering process. 

While these are separate disciplines, UI designers and UI engineers must work together to deliver a successful final product.

It’s important to note that not every organization has a UI designer and UI engineer role. Here are some positions that might fulfill these UI roles and responsibilities:

  • UI design: UX engineer, visual designer, graphic designer
  • UI development: Front-end developer, UX engineer/UX developer, full-stack engineer

How UI Designers and UI Developers Work Together

Here is a typical workflow demonstrating how a UI designer and UI developer would collaborate on a project:

  1. UI designers start a design project with various forms of UX research to understand users, competition, the market, product, etc. They use user-centered design processes to understand the problem from a user’s point of view.
  2. UI designers will meet with UI developers early in the design process to discuss technical limitations, design handoff procedures, and documentation requirements.
  3. UI designers work with other UX designers to design, prototype, and test user interfaces, layouts, and components. In some instances, the UI developer might collaborate with the design team to build basic code prototypes to test complex UI components.
  4. Once the design process is complete, UI designers prepare prototypes and documentation for the design handoff.
  5. UI designers and UI developers might meet to discuss designs and ensure engineers understand everything correctly during the design handoff process. 
  6. UI developers work with the rest of the engineering team to convert designs into functioning code.
  7. UI designers work with the design and product teams to complete the QA (quality assurance) process to ensure the final release meets design specifications.

The Importance of UI designer-UI developer collaboration

Modern software development relies on exceptional UI design and development. 

Designers ensure the product meets users’ needs and thoroughly test user interfaces and UI components to ensure they meet usability and accessibility standards. Without this prototyping and testing phase, usability issues impact the product, resulting in a poor user experience resulting in avoidable costs on multiple fronts–customer service, rework, losing customers, etc.

UI developers also play a crucial role in delivering successful software releases. They must ensure the final UI meets design specs and test code for bugs and performance. They’re also responsible for managing code, including updates to packages, APIs, security, etc., to ensure the product maintains its integrity and consistency over time.

To achieve this, designers and engineers must collaborate throughout the software development process–which can be challenging in large organizations where silos and poor communication are common.

UI designers and UI developers often work with DesignOps and DevOps to help bridge the gap between these disciplines to improve operational processes and collaboration.

Better Designer-Developer Collaboration With UXPin Merge

team collaboration talk communication

The Drift Challenge

One of the challenges designers and engineers face is that they speak different languages. 

  • Designers = image-based static mockups and prototypes
  • Engineers = code, browsers, operating systems, databases, etc.

Without in-depth knowledge and experience of one another’s disciplines, it’s hard for designers and programmers to understand the other’s limitations, constraints, and other challenges. Bridging that gap is crucial for organizations to deliver products successfully, on time, and on budget.

The Code-Based Solution

UXPin Merge has revolutionized the traditional UX workflow with a code-based design solution allowing orgs to sync a component library from a repository to UXPin’s editor, so designers build prototypes using fully functioning UI elements and components.

Merge components retain exactly the same properties as those in the repository, including interactivity, so designers can simply drag and drop to build UIs. Engineers can also set various props (for React or Args for Storybook) to allow designers to customize components in JSX or via UXPin’s Properties Panel. Any changes to these props render JSX, which engineers can copy/paste to begin development.

collaboration team prototyping

This Merge-powered workflow enhances collaboration and understanding between UI designers and UI developers because they’re speaking the same language with the same constraints–a truly single source of truth for your org’s component library.

UXPin has also recently announced the upcoming release of Merge Component Manager–a tool that reduces developer involvement in importing and managing coded UI components. Less reliance on engineers means designers can get up and running with Merge much faster.

“It used to take us two to three months just to do the design. Now, with UXPin Merge, teams can design, test, and deliver products in the same timeframe. Faster time to market is one of the most significant changes we’ve experienced using Merge.” Erica Rider, UX Lead EPX @ PayPal

Discover how UXPin’s Merge technology can revolutionize your design processes. Get access to UXPin Merge.

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Product Designer vs. UX Designer – A Comparative Analysis https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/product-designer-vs-ux-designer-a-comparative-analysis/ Wed, 23 Aug 2023 14:31:33 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=18800 Two digital product design roles that often confuse people are product designer vs. UX designer. Essentially, both of these roles focus on product development, and both use the design thinking process for problem-solving. So, what’s the difference between a product designer and a UX designer? Which position are you better suited for? And does your

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product designer vs ux designer

Two digital product design roles that often confuse people are product designer vs. UX designer. Essentially, both of these roles focus on product development, and both use the design thinking process for problem-solving.

So, what’s the difference between a product designer and a UX designer? Which position are you better suited for? And does your company need to fulfill both roles?

Key takeaways:

  • UX designer is responsible for building a user experience of a digital product while product designer is tasked with creating and scaling UX and UI design of a product.
  • UX design is a process of creating product’s user experience while product design is a process of creating product’s design which includes other design areas, like user interface and design systems.
  • A lot of tasks of a UX designer and product designer overlap. They are both following a user-centered design process and create prototypes at work. Product design, tough, may involve running workshops, doing usability test, and testing the product’s UX after its release.

UXPin is a design tool built to enhance collaboration between UX and product teams. UX designers and product designers can use UXPin to comment, assign tasks, and communicate throughout the design process. Sign up for a free trial.

Build advanced prototypes

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

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Who is a UX Designer?

Product designer

UX designers focus on solving usability issues and ensuring products follow a logical flow. They are heavily involved in early user and market research to identify and understand user problems and develop design solutions to fix them. If it’s a new product or feature, a UX designer is responsible for turning a concept into a working prototype, including designing UI elements and components.

User experience designers study cognitive psychology and how this impacts design and interaction to make digital products more enjoyable for customers while identifying business value opportunities. Sometimes UX designers are also tasked with designing user interface (UI design) which examines how customers interact with individual elements and components.

UX Designer Job Description & Responsibilities

UX Designer Skill Set

Average UX Designer Salary in the United States

According to Glassdoor, in 2021, UX designers earn an average of $95,944 per annum in the United States.

UX Designer

Who is a Product Designer?

Product designers generally work with existing digital products. They perform many of the same tasks as UX designers but focus more on developing an existing product, designing new features, and maintenance.

Product designers also work closely with sales and marketing teams to find business value opportunities through competitor, market, and user research. They play a significant role in ensuring a digital product stays relevant and competitive, evolving with market trends and customer demands.

Rather than designing new elements and components, product designers usually build user interfaces using an existing design system using a drag-and-drop style design tool. A general understanding of HTML, CSS, and JS may come in handy in the job of a product designer.

PayPal’s product team uses UXPin Merge to build product interfaces. By syncing UXPin’s design editor to a company repo, product designers use fully functioning code components to design new products and features.

PayPal’s product designers now use the power of Merge technology to build one-page, fully functioning prototypes in less than 10 minutes! That’s eight times faster than an experienced UX designer using a popular vector-based design tool! Learn more about UXPin Merge and how you can sign up to request access for your company.

Product Designer Job Description & Responsibilities

  • Product management
  • Regular user, market, competitor research
  • Using research to identify business opportunities that align with user needs
  • Ensure products stay relevant and up-to-date
  • Define and manage product roadmaps
  • Create and execute product strategies
  • Ensure product design and development meets budget constraints
  • Identify ways the product can increase market share, revenue, and attract new users
  • Understand the design and development process and the relevant constraints for product design
  • Working with sales and marketing teams to 
  • User experience design, visual design
  • Presenting ideas and specifications to UX designers, developers, and other stakeholders
  • Collaborating with UX designers to design customer experiences
  • Usability testing
  • Designing prototypes—mostly high-fidelity

Product Designer Skill Set

  • Product design
  • Problem-solving
  • Project management
  • The ability to empathize
  • Public speaking—for interviews and presentations
  • General understanding of HTML, CSS, Javascript
  • Creative and critical thinking
  • Long-term planning and strategy
  • Technically proficient
  • Business acumen
  • Data science
  • Research

Average Product Designer Salary in the United States

According to Glassdoor, in 2021, product designers earn an average of $105,448 per annum in the United States.

Learn how to become a product designer in our separate guide.

Product Design vs UX Design

There are a lot more similarities than there are differences between UX and product designers.

The most significant difference between UX designers and product designers is their design roles rather than any specific tasks in a product lifecycle—development, introduction, growth, maturity, saturation, decline.

UX designers develop products and features before entering the market (during a product lifecycle development stage). In contrast, product designers manage, refine and evolve the product for the remainder of its lifespan.

UX designers often return to a project when the design system needs updating or when product designers have usability issues they’re struggling to fix.

Design Approach

  • Both designers apply the design thinking process with a human-centered approach. They design products based on users’ needs.
  • People often mistakenly assume that UX designers focus on the user and product designers focus on business needs. While each might lean in those directions, UX and product designers always consider both the user and business during research and design.
  • UX and product designers often work in cross-functional teams, and therefore must have good communication skills.

Research

  • UX designers and product designers conduct similar research, but UX dives deeper into users and behavior, whereas product designers lean towards market and competitor analysis.
  • UX designers drive early research and user testing before a product’s release.
  • Product designers conduct tests on existing products when implementing new features, solving user issues, or looking for business opportunities.

Tools

  • UX designers primarily use prototyping and testing tools.
  • In contrast, product designers are generalists and often work with various tools for design, data analysis, design systems, and more.

Prototyping

  • UX designers create a range of prototypes throughout the design process, including paper and digital.
  • Product designers are less likely to use paper or other low-fidelity prototypes and mostly build high-fidelity prototypes utilizing the product’s design system.

Testing

  • UX designers conduct usability testing before a product or feature launch to meet user experience requirements.
  • Product designers test existing products to identify usability issues and business opportunities. They also test new products and interfaces they design.

Summary

While there is a lot of overlap between the two design roles, product designers and UX designers both offer significant value to an organization. UX designers complete a product’s initial design work before handing the baton to product designers—who essentially become the product’s caretakers.

During the early stages of product design, UX designers must focus heavily on users and their needs to find design solutions. These solutions must align with the organization’s vision and business goals.

Product designers also focus on users, but they generally inherit a product where UX designers have identified and fixed most usability issues. So, the product designers focus more on business value and keeping the product attractive and relevant.

You could argue that product designers are generalists (design, marketing, data analysis, coding, user behavior) while UX designers are user experience specialists.

Design Collaboration With UXPin

UXPin enhances design collaboration between UX and product teams with features like built-in documentation, design systems, comments (including tagging and assigning), and Preview and Share for prototypes.

Merge is another powerful feature that bridges the gap between design and development, making it easier for non-designers (like product teams) to build fully functioning high-fidelity prototypes.

By syncing the design editor with code components from a repository, UXPin Merge allows the entire organization to work with the same design system components, thus providing a single source of truth

Any changes engineers make to the repository updates the design system for the entire organization. DesignOps no longer has to worry about updating individual departmental design libraries and systems because everyone uses the same version!

Find out more about UXPin Merge and how you can sync the design editor with your preferred technology through a Git or Storybook integration.

Getting Started With UXPin

Ready to find out how code-based design can improve prototyping and testing for UX designers and product designers?

Four powerful UXPin features to enhance prototype fidelity and functionality:

  • Design different States and properties for any element or component based on user and canvas actions.
  • Use Variables to capture and store user data, and update elements based on that information.
  • Set Conditional interactions or rules that trigger secondary interactions or animations.
  • Expressions let you create Javascript-like functions for your prototypes—like updating shopping carts or validating user inputs.

Try UXPin with your team today! Sign up for a free trial to improve designer collaboration and enhance prototypes with code-based technology from UXPin.

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What is Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility? [+ Design Review Template] https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/design-review-template-balancing-desirability-viability-feasibility/ Wed, 23 Aug 2023 09:48:06 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=15119 See how to use a simple Sketch template to improve the focus of your design reviews.

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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.

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.”

heart love like good

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.

user bad good review satisfaction opinion

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.

settings

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. 

mobile screens

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.

testing observing user behavior

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.

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Can User Reviews Help You Design Better UI? https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/user-reviews-in-design-process/ Tue, 22 Aug 2023 13:46:59 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=36566 User reviews and feedback are essential for product evolution and growth. Organizations can use this feedback to fix product issues and improve the user experience. Teams may also identify new opportunities for growth and revenue. This article reveals how design teams can use customer feedback to solve problems and improve products. We also provide an

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user reviews

User reviews and feedback are essential for product evolution and growth. Organizations can use this feedback to fix product issues and improve the user experience. Teams may also identify new opportunities for growth and revenue.

This article reveals how design teams can use customer feedback to solve problems and improve products. We also provide an example of how a business went from no customers to a billion-dollar unicorn in less than a decade simply by talking to users.

Enhance your product’s user experience and get meaningful feedback with advanced prototyping from UXPin. Sign up for a free trial to start designing amazing experiences customers want to share!

Build advanced prototypes

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

Try UXPin

Why are User Reviews Important?

Product analytics are essential for identifying design issues and successes, but they don’t tell you why. This quantitative data is crucial in analyzing users but doesn’t tell you what they think or feel.

You might generate lots of leads or enjoy high conversion rates, but if your customers are unhappy with the user experience, it’ll be hard to retain them–jumping ship to the first competitor with a better offer!

User reviews and feedback help design teams understand customer sentiment and identify issues (or successes) that analytics can’t tell you.

Case Study – Coinbase’s User Review Success Story

In a podcast aired in July 2022, Coinbase Founder and CEO Brian Armstrong talked about how he used customer feedback to change the then startup’s business model and add functionality to buy Bitcoin through the app.

“In Y-Combinator, they often tell you, ‘talk to your customers, prove your product,’ try to find product/market fit.” On a call with one customer who signed up but never used Coinbase, Brain learned that people who didn’t have Bitcoin had no use for the product. At the time, buying Bitcoin was a challenge, so people didn’t know how to add crypto to their Coinbase Wallet.

Brain asked his customer, “If I put a buy Bitcoin button in there [the app], would you have used it?” The customer answered, “Yeah, maybe.”

After adding a buy Bitcoin button to the Wallet, Coinbase experienced tremendous growth and is now a multi-billion dollar company employing 5,000+ employees globally. The catalyst for this success?–Brain talking to his customers to understand their needs and feelings about the product.

Before chatting to his users, Brain had no paying customers, and Coinbase generated no income. He doubted his product and whether he should continue. Had he relied on analytics to tell him his product didn’t work, Coinbase would not exist!

Engaging with customers and taking action on user reviews and feedback is essential for delivering products and features people want.

Where Can You Find User Reviews?

There are many ways product teams can collect customer feedback. Here are some of the most popular methods:

  1. Product or website widgets
  2. Support tickets and chats
  3. Asking customers questions
  4. Questionnaires
  5. Social media (reviews, hashtags, etc.)
  6. App Stores and Review Websites
  7. Forums & Communities

1. Product or Website Widgets

Several tools allow you to place widgets on your website or application to collect customer feedback. A great example is Hotjar’s Feedback widget which lets users rate their experience and comment on specific UI elements or content.

search observe user centered

These feedback tools offer widgets to gather feedback for multiple UX metrics, including:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely are people to recommend your product on a scale of 1-10.
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Yes or no questions that indicate whether customers are happy with a product or feature.
  • Customer Effort Score (CES): Asking customers how difficult it is to complete tasks–typically on a scale of 1-10.
  • System Usability Scale (SUS): A 10-question questionnaire that provides UX designers with a digital product’s overall usability score.

2. Support Tickets and Chats

Tracking support tickets and chats are excellent feedback sources for identifying trends–for example, customers can’t find a specific feature or don’t know how to complete a task.

UX designers can use this feedback to test further and pinpoint the issue for fixing. UX benchmarking is crucial for these fixes because it tells the organization if the redesign solves the problem–i.e., reducing support tickets.

3. Asking Customers Questions

As we saw in the Coinbase example, asking customers questions is essential for user experience and growth. Asking customers why can help understand what needs or expectations your product doesn’t fulfill.

team collaboration talk communication ideas messsages

For example, asking customers why they’re closing their account or downgrading their plan could help improve the product. You can add these customers to a mailing list and try to win them back when you release features they were missing.

4. Questionnaires

Questionnaires are excellent resources for learning what customers like or dislike. UX designers must look beyond UX research and gather insights from other departments, like sales, marketing, customer support, etc., to understand the customer experience at every touchpoint.

5. Social Media

Social media is a fantastic place to find user reviews, understand brand sentiment, and engage with customers. Beyond user ratings, social media managers can use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to search for branded-related keywords, hashtags, and posts and find out what customers say about the product.

Social media is also an excellent resource for researching customers’ opinions about competitors to identify opportunities and avoid failures.

6. App Stores and Online Reviews

Your product’s app store and review sites (Trustpilot, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.) provide feedback from real end-users. You to filter by star-rating and keywords to drill into specific problems or customer sentiment.

Team members can also provide a customer support email address in replies to engage with users and get more details about their experience.

7. Forums & Communities

Industry or product forums and communities are excellent for identifying problems and opportunities. Users often visit these platforms to ask questions or seek help.

Creating a community forum for your brand will allow you to engage with customers and prioritize feature releases through upvoting. Customers can also use the platform to report bugs or request new features.

How User Reviews Help You Become Better?

User reviews are only helpful if your team uses them to take action. These are some ways customer reviews can guide UX:

  • User-centered design: Reviews help UX designers see products from a user’s perspective and help them empathize better.
  • Analyze performance: Organizations can monitor reviews to gauge performance. For example, if negative reviews stop after a feature release, it’s a good sign the new design fixed the problem.
  • Optimize user experience: Feedback and reviews help designers make tweaks and adjustments to optimize a product’s user experience–thus retaining customers and attracting new ones.
  • UX benchmarking: Organizations can use product and competitor reviews to set UX benchmarks and product goals.
  • Reduce churn: Monitoring user reviews and feedback enables design teams to identify and respond to issues before they result in lost business.
  • Increase referrals: Customer referrals are excellent, low-cost leads. Improving NPS and CSAT scores increases the likelihood of customers sharing your product.

Negative vs. Positive Reviews What to Use?

Teams must pay equal attention to negative and positive reviews, here’s why:

  • Negative reviews: Tell you why customers are unhappy and how to fix it
  • Positive reviews: Tell you why customers love your product and brand

Analyzing these reviews can also help prioritize features and fixes. For example, if you have overwhelming negative reviews for a specific feature, it’s probably best to focus on fixing that before releasing something new!

Teams can also analyze competitors’ negative and positive reviews to improve features and avoid making similar mistakes.

Top 8 User Review Tools

Here are several popular user review and feedback tools:

  1. Hotjar: Feedback and surveys
  2. Lucky Orange: Live chat, form analytics, surveys
  3. Crazy Egg: Website/product optimization, including surveys and error tracking
  4. FullStory: UX optimization with “frustration signals” and journey mapping
  5. VWO: Advanced user tracking and A/B testing templates
  6. Survicate: Customer surveys with multiple integrations
  7. CustomerGauge: User and account level enterprise feedback tool
  8. SurveySparrow: Enterprise omnichannel experience management with surveys, NPS software, chatbots, and assessments

User Experience Optimization With UXPin

Once you identify issues or opportunities, testing ideas and hypotheses are essential for finding the right solution. With UXPin, design teams can build advanced prototypes that accurately replicate a final product experience.

They can use these prototypes to improve user testing and get meaningful feedback from stakeholders. People can use and engage with UXPin prototypes as they would with a code prototype, eliminating the need to “imagine” what a feature is supposed to do.

collaboration team prototyping

Designers then can create dynamic experiences with functioning user signup flows, eCommerce checkouts, password validation, and other experiences impossible to replicate with traditional image-based design tools.

Designers can build prototypes based on user feedback to test UIs and pinpoint issues. They can also create prototypes of competitor products to understand how they compare and identify opportunities for improvement.

Optimize UX workflows and enhance your product’s user experience with a code-based design solution from UXPin. Sign up for a free trial to improve prototyping and testing with UXPin–the world’s most advanced design tool.

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Storybook-UXPin: Review of Merge Integration https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/review-uxpin-storybook-integration/ Thu, 17 Aug 2023 14:34:03 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=31326 I decided to share my impressions on UXPin Merge Storybook integration and write about how it influenced the designer-developer collaboration in our team.  Merge is a part of UXPin – that’s technology providing two main integrations with developers’ tools (Git and Storybook). It allows you to quickly prototype using ready UI code components that are

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I decided to share my impressions on UXPin Merge Storybook integration and write about how it influenced the designer-developer collaboration in our team. 

Merge is a part of UXPin – that’s technology providing two main integrations with developers’ tools (Git and Storybook). It allows you to quickly prototype using ready UI code components that are React-based for Git integration, or any framework-based for Storybook integration. I tested the Merge integration with Storybook. 


The review was written by Roy S. Kim, the CEO, and Jacobo Moreno Quiroga – Front end engineer & Digital Content Designer from Fixel Inc., the Japanese UX/UI design consulting company specializing in Design Systems.


Design with interactive Storybook components in UXPin. Build products 10x faster and bridge the gap between designers and developers. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

UXPin Merge and Storybook integration 

I have both an engineering and design background, and I work on a daily basis on finding solutions to processes inside an application and then writing them in code. The designer part comes in handy when I need to consider and improve the user’s perspective.

This involves more than defining visual aesthetics, it requires considering how the application interface can be subtle enough for someone to not notice it so that they can focus on what they are trying to achieve in the app. 

I usually struggle with the back and forths between iterations of coding that aim to improve user experience. 

Those kinds of improvements are not the same as fixing the product because something doesn’t work. It’s more of intuitive work when a user reports that something feels off. Even if you apply all the design and UX good practices, the user could still complain, and they would be 100% right. This is where a coded Design System or an organized UI component library can help. If you have tested and polished the components approved for your Design System, then you can treat them as ready building blocks for new applications without spending too much time thinking or adjusting them. 

UXPin with Merge technology allows you to import all your Design System components stored in Git or Storybook to the design editor so that you can prototype with them right away. Thanks to this designers can use actual coded elements to speed up the prototyping. UXPin Merge’s motto is “The single source of truth” because what you see in the prototype is combining design with actual working code that developers use as well. 

UXPin – designing to coding 

Let’s start with just UXPin. Essentially, UXPin is a UI/UX design tool similar to Sketch, AdobeXD, or Figma. It’s similar to other competitors so you can get used to it very quickly. You can start with wireframing and end with advanced prototyping in this single tool. 

In most of the similar tools, there is a big difference between what the designer creates in the design tool and what happens in the dev environment, where the real working product is coded. Features like the inspect tab in Figma enable you to see roughly what the CSS behind a certain object would look like. However, this is not always an accurate depiction between what is designed and what is coded. 

Designers and developers essentially come from two different worlds when it comes to the tools used in their daily work. Trying to find a common language between them can lead to way too many meetings and back-and-forths. This might be the very issue that UXPin Merge aims to solve, by having “The single source of truth” which the whole team can treat as the ultimate place of the right components and documentation. 

The UXPin Merge approach 

Merge is UXPin’s technology. Essentially, what Merge does is that it brings coded Design Systems stored in Git repositories or Storybooks to UXPin. Hence, a designer can use real components in their mock-ups and prototypes.

These components are already coded in the repository, and the designer can access its different versions inside UXPin as needed. This way, the integrity of each component is never compromised. It minimizes possibilities for a designer to make mistakes and use elements that aren’t in line with the company’s standards. 

The components from your repository are stored in UXPin library 

Once you have a Design System and repositories ready to go, you won’t be really modifying them often as their purpose is to store and unify all the versions of the possible elements to speed up the product development process and create governance.

Using UXPin Merge and the imported components, controls the design process as elements are predefined. The changes can be made without a problem but it must be done by developers, so that the chances for casual mistakes are pretty low. 

Once imported, you can have a component with all its variations. In this case you can change the Type, Size, Disabled, Label, Click properties of a Button which are defined in the props of the React Component. 

These limitations actually simplify the work of a designer. They can use fully interactive and prepared elements to focus on the most crucial part – user experience. Sure; color, padding, fonts, and other visual elements are important parts of the experience, but choosing every single little detail can slow down the process.

If all of that is already sorted out in the Design System and repositories, building prototypes with real code components gets easier and faster. Also, it helps keep the consistency even if the components get updated in code as the imported UI is in sync with the components stored in devs’ libraries. No need to worry that elements will be outdated and designers will have to redesign the projects. 

Connecting Storybook 

One of the UXPin Merge integrations I got to see was Storybook. Storybook serves as a sort of developers’ Design Systems to store all the coded UI. It is used by many companies, and it’s very flexible framework-wise as it provides support for around 15 of them.

Now, for teams that are not supported by developers,  setting up a Storybook project and placing all the components there may be a struggle. However, once it’s ready, it neatly holds and displays all the components that are in the Design System. 

UXPin Merge aims to bring what is stored and defined in Storybook to UXPin so that components made in whichever framework can be used for prototyping. The integration part is very simple; grab the URL of a published Storybook project to import the components to the UXPin library for designing. I tested it and it seemed to work perfectly with React components – all the elements behaved in the design editor just as they should. 

Thoughts for the future 

The design process including UXPin Merge in it can be visualized like this: 

UXPin Merge plays a big part in Step B since it provides production-ready UI-coded components that you can use to iterate faster when creating prototypes. With a defined Design System or a component repository, you really shouldn’t worry about Step A because you most probably already have the organized components. Still, there is a possibility that you need to adjust something within the coded components, especially if you are in the middle of creating your own Design System. 

With Step C, which is the build-up step of the application, the developers look at the Merge prototype to see how code components are put together, as well as what code corresponds to which part of the design. However, they won’t just copy and paste the whole code to build the product instantly – they will still need to adjust it so that the prototype becomes a product.  

UXPin Merge seems to be a great solution for rapid prototyping and keeping the consistency thanks to making the most of Design Systems. However, it appears that certain steps are still to be covered. 

To some extent, the work of designers is limited as they mostly can use pre-prepared components, however, it saves time and prototyping with code components brings the world of design and development together. 

Want to try out the integration? Sign up for a 14-day trial!

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These Storybook Examples Will Inspire Your Component Library https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/storybook-examples/ Thu, 17 Aug 2023 13:59:26 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=31296 Now that UXPin has a Storybook integration that breaks down design-dev inconsistencies and makes it easier than ever to manage your UI components library, you might want to take some time to look at Storybook examples. Plenty of world-renowned websites use Storybook. Look at some of the best Storybook examples that you can use as

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Browse these Storybook examples min

Now that UXPin has a Storybook integration that breaks down design-dev inconsistencies and makes it easier than ever to manage your UI components library, you might want to take some time to look at Storybook examples.

Plenty of world-renowned websites use Storybook. Look at some of the best Storybook examples that you can use as inspiration for developing your digital products.

Key players:

  • BBC
  • The Guardian
  • IBM

Take UI components directly from Storybook and import them to UXPin. Design interactive and visually stunning layouts without extensive design skills. Discover UXPin Merge.

Create beautiful layouts without designers

Take UI components directly from Git repo, Storybook, or through NPM and design production-ready prototypes.

BBC iPlayer Web

BBC Storybook example

BBC iPlayer Web switched to Storybook when it needed more custom components. Preview their Storybook here: BBC iPlayer Storybook.

A growing number of movie and television show producers now have streaming platforms that let people watch specific content when they like. BBC iPlayer Web makes it incredibly easy for viewers to find specific types of content by title, category, or topic.

When the streaming service started, it built its back end with Node.js. It didn’t take long, though, before the development team decided to make the migration to React. React components were an obvious improvement as the platform grew.

Around 2019, though, the team realized that its approach didn’t work as well as expected. The UX professionals and developers didn’t have a common language that helped them work toward goals. They also found it difficult to locate the components they needed to add content and update the website’s appearance.

Ultimately, the BBC iPlayer Web team realized that they were spending way too much time maintaining their component library.

Storybook became a significant tool that helped them address these problems.

BBC iPlayer Web has a public design system, so you can look at it to learn a few tricks and find inspiration when you feel stuck on a project.

The design system includes everything from iconography to navigation.

Spend some time browsing BBC iPlayer’s Storybook example. Then, visit the website. You will immediately see how the designers and developers combined components to create a tool that works exceptionally well for viewers.

bbc storybook example 2 min

Related reading: Top 8 Design System Examples

The Guardian

guardian storybook

The Guardian publishes a tremendous number of articles daily. It’s often one of the first news outlets to report on breaking news. It also has frequent articles about sports, culture, and lifestyle topics. Considering that The Guardian covers events all over the world, it needs a fast, reliable way to turn written text into published web pages.

guardian storybook examples min

The Guardian Storybook components library (access the Guardian Storybook here) streamlines the design and publication process. Building the design system, however, must have taken quite a bit of time because it includes every component that the well-designed website could possibly need. It even features slightly different versions of designs. For example, the CaptionBlockComponent Story includes:

  • with defaults
  • PhotoEssay using html
  • when padded
  • with width limited
  • with credit
  • when overlayed

No matter what type of caption block the designers want to include, they just have to search the component library, choose the correct option, and add text for the specific story.

The design team even created multiple donut graphs to fit unique circumstances.

guardian storybook donut graphs min

Of course, The Guardian also maintains designs that help readers identify what type of content they’re reading.

A Review headline doesn’t look the same as a Photo Essay headline.

accessibile headlines with storybook min

Again, it took a lot of effort to build this Storybook design system. Now that The Guardian editors and publishers have it, though, they can quickly publish coherent content that keeps readers informed without misdirecting them.

Here’s a great video about The Guardian’s Storybook component library.

IBM‘s Carbon Design System in Storybook

ibm storybook example of component library

Carbon, the design system used by IBM, primarily gets used to build digital products with specific functions, such as adding files to a project, submitting reports, and tracking an activity’s progress. IBM uses Carbon for internal and external products, so you might recognize some of the components in the Storybook UI design system.

This Storybook example contains countless components. You’ll find everything from tabs to pagination. The company just wants to make sure that it has functional tools that share an aesthetic.

The components in Carbon’s design system also tend to have extensive Stories that let coders make subtle changes when necessary.

Even the Basic Checkbox component has 184 lines of JavaScript code in its Story.

carbon checkbox examples of storybook min
example of storybook story min

A significant advantage of using Storybook is that designers and developers can see how components respond to interactions.

Three interactions with the select button:

interactions storybook min

The designer or developer can see all of these interactions result from within the same environment. They don’t need to export it to a prototyping app or add it to a designing app. The interactions happen right there to save time and meet expectations.

UXPin Merge and Storybook make product development easier than ever

Find more Storybook examples by visiting Storybook’s page. Companies like Audi, Lonely Planet, Wix, and Salesforce Lightning have public design systems you can explore.

Once you integrate these tools, you can use your Storybook components to build and test interactive prototypes. Since both tools take a code-based approach, your designers and developers can work together to create your products more efficiently than ever.

Storybook isn’t the only tool you need to build successful digital products quickly. UXPin Merge’s Storybook integration lets you import your components within one minute. It doesn’t even require any technical knowledge, especially when you maintain a public Storybook design system. Discover UXPin Merge.

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Prototype vs Final Product — A 5-Point Comparison https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/prototype-vs-final-product/ Wed, 16 Aug 2023 12:09:42 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=49371 Designers create prototypes to perfect product’s look and feel, validate their design choices, and find areas for improvements. The final product is an implemented design that gets released into the market. Both prototypes and final products are essential elements of product design process. Let’s explore the differences between them. Key takeaways: Design interactive prototypes that

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prototype vs final product min

Designers create prototypes to perfect product’s look and feel, validate their design choices, and find areas for improvements. The final product is an implemented design that gets released into the market. Both prototypes and final products are essential elements of product design process. Let’s explore the differences between them.

Key takeaways:

  • A prototype is an artifact of product design process and it is a representation of an end product; designers use it to test their solutions, learn what users and stakeholders think of the product, and show developers what they need to build.
  • The final product is a product that’s fully marketable. It has a backend and a frontend design, and it is fully usable by end users; developers build final product on the basis of product design that was created and tested by product designers.
  • There are six differences between a prototype and final product; they differ in terms of resource and reasons you need to create them, flexibility, lifecycle, and a level of functionality.

Design interactive prototypes that are easy to implement by devs. Release products faster and beat your competition. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

What is a Prototype?

A prototype is a tangible or interactive representation of a design concept.

It simulates the final product, enabling designers and stakeholders to test functionalities, validate design decisions, and gather feedback.

Unlike the polished final product, a prototype is often incomplete, only focusing on core features or a single user flow, allowing quick iterations and changes based on insights and user interactions.

There are several types of prototypes designers utilize at different stages of the design process:

  • Paper prototypes – simple wireframes that are drawn on paper or a whiteboard; they are the best for testing user flow or visualizing information architecture.
  • Working prototypes – prototypes that handle data, respond to user actions, but they aren’t ready real products–they are still work in progress.
  • Functional prototype – prototypes that mimic the final product’s look and feel, but they lack the backend code to be end products.
  • Interactive prototype – prototypes that have microinteractions added to them, such as click, scroll, move, etc.

What is a Final Product?

The final product is an app or a website that’s launched to the market. Often referred to as an end-product or finished product, it is derived from the last iteration of a prototype.

It represents the outcome of numerous design iterations, user feedback, and rigorous testing from the product design process.

Equipped with all intended features and optimized for end-user experience, this product is ready for launch and consumption by its target audience.

5 Key Differences Between a Prototype and Final Product

Difference #1: Intended purpose

Prototype:

  • Offers a tangible or even interactive representation of an idea
  • Serves as a tool for testing and gathering feedback
  • Facilitates communication between stakeholders, designers, and developers
  • Enables designers to identify and fix design or usability issues before full-scale development
  • Explores a new product’s viability before committing resources to development

Final product:

  • Delivers a complete, functional solution to end-users
  • Represents the realization of design decisions, feedback, and refinements from the product design process
  • Aims to achieve business goals, such as increased user engagement or sales
  • Provides an optimized experience tailored for the target user group

Difference #2: Flexibility to adjustments

Prototype:

  • Designed for rapid changes and iterations
  • Feedback loops are shorter, making it easier to pivot or modify design elements
  • Mistakes or design flaws are expected and addressed in real-time
  • Emphasizes exploration and testing of multiple design solutions

Final product:

  • Changes are more deliberate and often require extensive testing and validation
  • Iterations based on user feedback, analytics, bugs, or development updates
  • Adjustments can have implications on the broader system or related features
  • Flexibility exists but within the constraints of the established product framework

Difference #3: Resources needed to create

Prototype:

  • Typically requires fewer resources and investment
  • Focuses on utilizing readily available tools and components for quick mockups
  • Design tools make changes and adjustments less costly and more efficient
  • Allows for cost-effective experimentation without fully committing

Final product:

  • Demands a more substantial investment in both time and money
  • Utilizes high-quality components, coding, and resources for longevity and scalability
  • Any modifications or fixes can result in increased expenses
  • The expected long-term returns and product stability justifies initial high costs

Difference #4: Lifecycle of prototype vs final product

Prototype:

  • Short-lived, serving as a temporary model for testing and validation during a specific project
  • Likely to undergo frequent changes and might be discarded once the project is released
  • Not built for long-term use or for withstanding real-world challenges

Final product:

  • Designed for long-term utility and operation
  • Built for real-world usage, including protection against security vulnerabilities and other programming challenges
  • Receives periodic updates and maintenance but retains its core product functionality
  • Expected to fulfill its role until a new iteration replaces it–i.e., months or years

Difference #5: Level of functionality

Prototype:

  • Primarily showcases key features to stakeholders or users
  • May lack full functionality; often contains placeholder or dummy content
  • Mimics visual or interactive user interface, helping in feedback collection
  • Focuses on testing specific elements or user flows and may exclude many UIs and features

Final product:

  • Fully functional with all intended features integrated
  • Undergoes rigorous quality assurance to ensure feature reliability
  • Tailored for end-user experience, ensuring every feature aligns with user needs
  • Polished interface, seamless navigation, and optimized performance

Why Do You Need Prototypes Before Creating Final Products?

Prototypes play a crucial role in steering a product toward success. They act as a blueprint, guiding teams to craft products that resonate with users, meet business objectives, and stand out in the market. 

Here’s how:

  • Risk Mitigation: Prototypes allow teams to test product ideas before committing significant resources, helping avoid costly mistakes.
  • User-Centered Design: Early user testing with prototypes uncovers users’ needs, ensuring the final product meets their expectations.
  • Feedback Loop: Prototypes foster iterative feedback, allowing designers to continually refine and perfect the product.
  • Stakeholder Alignment: They serve as tangible representations of the product vision, ensuring everyone, from developers to investors, shares a unified understanding.
  • Efficiency in Development: Developers get a clearer picture, reducing back-and-forth and ensuring efficient code.

How to Go from Prototype to Final Product

This step-by-step workflow demonstrates how product development teams go from research to prototype and final product.

Step 1: Understanding the problem

  • Identify a problem or need in the market
  • Conduct early-stage market research to gauge demand and potential user interest

Step 2: User research

  • Conduct surveys, interviews, and observations to gather user insights
  • Understand user needs, pain points, and desires

Step 3: Ideation

  • Brainstorm potential solutions and features
  • Sketch or wireframe initial ideas

Step 4: Designing the prototype

  • Create a low-fidelity prototype based on research and ideation
  • Use a professional UX design tool like UXPin to create low-fidelity interactive wireframes to iterate and improve ideas
  • Convert low-fidelity designs to high-fidelity working prototypes
  • Share prototypes with key stakeholders, incorporate feedback, and improve before user testing

Step 5: User testing with prototype

  • Recruit participants that represent your end users for user testing
  • Have them interact with the prototype while team members observe their actions, ask questions, and gather insights
  • Analyze feedback and identify areas of improvement

Step 6: Iterative design

  • Use insights to make data-driven adjustments to the prototype
  • Some problems will require you to return to step one and ideate on new solutions
  • Shift to a high-fidelity prototype as you refine the design

Step 7: Technical Feasibility

  • Consult with engineers throughout the design process 
  • Ensure that the design is technically achievable and resource-efficient

Step 8: Design handoff

Step 9: Development and release

  • Engineers use handoff documentation to guide the development process
  • Interactive prototypes help devs understand interactions, animations, and transitions
  • Devs publish the changes to various platforms–web, native app stores, etc.

Step 10: Quality assurance (QA) testing

  • Test the final product for bugs, glitches, or inconsistencies
  • Design teams conduct a UX audit to ensure the final product meets design specs and doesn’t introduce usability issues
  • Teams ensure the final product looks and functions as intended

Building Interactive Prototypes With UXPin

UXPin allows designers to build prototypes that accurately represent the final product experience. Unlike traditional design tools that generate vector graphics, UXPin renders HTML, CSS, and Javascript behind the scenes, giving designers more fidelity and interactivity.

UXPin also has its propriety technology, UXPin Merge, for designing with fully functional React components.

Image-based vs. code-based design tools

Image-based design tools create images or visual representations of how a code component will look. While these mockups are aesthetically pleasing, the lack of fidelity means designers can’t test most basic user interactionsnever mind complex interactivity.

Code-based design tools like UXPin offer more fidelity and functionality because components like form elements are interactive. When you drag a text input from UXPin’s Forms onto the canvas, it’s ready for users to enter data. Designers can use Variables to capture that information and use it elsewhere in the prototype, creating dynamic user experiences image-based tools can’t.

Conditional Interactions and Expressions

Take prototypes to another level with UXPin’s Conditional Interactions and Expressions. Conditional Interactions allow you to create if-then and if-else conditions for user and system actions, while Expressions increase prototyping complexity with form validation, computational components, and other Javascript-like functions.

Better results with UXPin Merge

Create dynamic, immersive prototypes indistinguishable from the final product. These sophisticated prototypes enhance testing scope giving you accurate data and insights to iterate and refine designs before development. Use UXPin Merge, a technology for designing prototypes with reusable components that can be shared with developers. Discover UXPin Merge.

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Product Design Ultimate Guide – Designing Digital Products https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/product-design-ultimate-guide/ Mon, 07 Aug 2023 12:44:16 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=49114 Ever wondered why some digital products feel intuitive, while others leave you lost and frustrated? The key is effective digital product design. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll demystify the process of designing digital products, emphasizing the importance of user experience, prototyping, and iterative development. We’ll also highlight common pitfalls to avoid in product design. Key

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Product design pillar page 1 min

Ever wondered why some digital products feel intuitive, while others leave you lost and frustrated? The key is effective digital product design.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll demystify the process of designing digital products, emphasizing the importance of user experience, prototyping, and iterative development. We’ll also highlight common pitfalls to avoid in product design.

Key takeaways:

  • Product design is a process of creating an interactive interface of a digital product that aligns with user needs, business requirements, and technical constraints.
  • Product designers are people in charge of creating the design of a product. To do this job, they can get a degree, attend courses and/or read books about product design.
  • Product design has 5 distinctive steps, but it’s not a linear process; product designers may go back to certain steps if they uncover new insights.
  • One of the step is prototyping – creating an interactive mockup of a product that shows behaviors and user journey prior to building the product in code.
  • Successful product design puts emphasis on UX writing, manages errors, keep users in the center, and takes iterations seriously. An example of successful product design is Apple.

Our goal is to provide a definitive resource for anyone passionate about creating digital products that truly enhance people’s lives.

Design products 10x faster with our revolutionary Merge technology. Drag and drop interactive components to build a fully functional prototype that behaves like an end-product and follows your design system. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

What is Product Design?

Designing digital products is all about creating a solution that addresses a particular need or problem that people have. To do this, designers should follow this product design process:

  • Learn about target users – who are they? How do they behave? What do they like and dislike?
  • Identify challenges that users face.
  • Brainstorm potential solutions to these challenges.
  • Figure out how your product might fit into the audiences’ lives.
  • Test your design, gathering feedback from people who might end up using it. 

To gain a deeper understanding of product design and discover the steps involved, read our dedicated article: What is Product Design? 

Product Designer vs UX Designer

Product designers and UX designers both have important roles in the development of a digital product, but while they share some common interests they’re quite separate functions. 

A UX designer is mainly focused on how the product feels to the user. In the early stages of a design project, they study users’ behavior and try to understand their needs and motivations

A UX designer’s goal is to create a seamless and intuitive user journey, so they think carefully about how each step flows into the next. They want to ensure the user can accomplish their goals in the easiest way possible. They even incorporate principles of cognitive psychology into their designs to make digital products more usable. 

On the other hand, a product designer has a broader role that includes not only the user experience but also the business goals and technical constraints.

They are involved in all aspects of product development, from the initial idea to the final implementation. They look at the bigger picture, thinking about how all the pieces fit together to create a coherent whole. This includes how the product looks (user interface), how it works (interaction design), and how it fits into the larger market.

In short, while UX designers focus on the user’s journey and experience, product designers consider the entire product from a holistic perspective, including the business and technical aspects. They both aim to create products that users love, but their approach and focus areas are slightly different.

To learn more, read our comparative piece on the specificity of a UX designer’s and product designer’s work. if you are interested in a role of product designer, check out how to become a product designer.

How to Design a Product

Here are five steps you can take to ensure usability is at the heart of your digital product design process.

Step 1: Empathize with your users

This is arguably the most important step in product design. Understanding your users goes beyond knowing their demographics; it’s about empathizing with them. This means finding out about their needs, habits, frustrations, and desires as these all relate to your product. 

To do this, conduct interviews, surveys, or observe users in their natural environment. The more you know about your users, the better equipped you are to design a product that fits seamlessly into their lives.

Step 2: Identify the problem

Once you understand your users, the next step is to identify the problems they face, which your product could help solve. 

This is where you convert the insights you gained from empathizing with your users into a clear problem statement that captures the main issues your users are experiencing. 

While the statement needs to be clear and specific enough to provide guidance, it shouldn’t be overly prescriptive – it’s essential to allow room for flexibility and creative thought. 

Step 3: Ideation

This product design step is all about brainstorming as many ideas as possible. No idea is too wild or too mundane. Let your creativity flow, and try to think of every possible way to solve the problem you identified. 

Tools like mind maps, sketches, or storyboards can help visualize these ideas. And don’t worry about practicality or feasibility – the goal is quantity, not quality. The more ideas you have, the more raw material you have for the next step.

Step 4: Prototyping

Now it’s time to turn some of those ideas into tangible, testable, mini-versions of your product – also known as prototypes

Start with paper prototypes such as rough sketches. These let you quickly see how your product might work without investing too much time or resources. 

Once you’re satisfied with the basic function, you can progress to high-fidelity prototypes. These are more detailed and interactive, and they give a better representation of the final product.

Step 5: Testing

The final step is where you’ll see if your product actually solves the problem it was designed for. 

Give your prototypes to actual users, watch them interact with your product, and listen to their feedback. 

Remember, this step is about learning and improving, not about proving that you’re right. Don’t be discouraged if there are issues; instead, see them as opportunities to refine your product.

Check out our “How to Design a Product in 5 Steps” article to learn more about this topic.

Best Tips on Product UX Design

These pointers should help to enhance the user experience of your product.

Don’t ignore UX writing

UX writing creates clear, useful text for digital products. It helps to reduce confusion and enhance navigation. Here are five essential UX writing tips:

  1. Keep copy short and simple: the aim is to convey the necessary information in as few words as possible.
  2. Prioritize accessibility: make sure your text is easy to understand for all users – avoid jargon or colloquialisms. 
  3. Use visuals and formatting for clarity: If images can explain your ideas better than words, use them instead. Also, break up large chunks of copy into shorter and more scannable lists. 
  4. Use an active voice: it makes your writing easier to understand. 
  5. Play it straight: try not to be too clever or humorous.

Test your designs – always

It’s essential to always test your designs. This ensures your product not only looks good but performs well and meets user expectations. 

You can use a variety of testing methods. Gather feedback from users representing your target audience, use online platforms to gain access to lots of remote users, or conduct in-person panels for detailed insights. 

Early testing catches issues when they’re still easy and cost-effective to fix. Just as importantly, it helps you stay laser-focused on delivering an excellent user experience, ultimately leading to a product that users will appreciate and love.

Regularly observe user behavior

As a designer, it can be tempting to assume users will intuitively understand your product. To avoid making this mistake, observe their behavior consistently. Monitoring users’ interactions can uncover unexpected behaviors or misunderstandings, which act as a reality check.

Tests don’t have to be extensive. You can run sessions with as few as 5 users to spot 75% of issues. But ultimately, testing will improve your product’s intuitiveness and user-friendliness.

Deal with user errors

Product design involves two key steps in addressing user errors:

  • Helping users when they make a mistake.
  • Analyzing these errors to fine-tune the user experience – For instance, if a user misses a required field when completing a form, a clear error message should guide them. But if many users can’t recover from a given mistake, the design needs revisiting.

Remember, users have varying tech skills and devices, so a minor hiccup for one might be a major obstacle for another. The designer’s role is to minimize these barriers, ensuring a seamless experience for everyone.

Introduce changes gradually

When you have several changes or improvements to make to a product, it’s best not to introduce them all at the same time. 

This is because if you make too many alterations at once, it can be hard to determine which changes are successful and which ones may need further tweaking.

To put it another way, if you adjust just one or two things, you can observe whether these changes fix the issues they were intended to resolve and if users understand and find them beneficial. This approach gives you a clear picture of each change’s effectiveness.

We’re discussing more tips on product UX design in our dedicated article. Give it a read: Best Tips on Product UX Design.

Best Tips on Prototyping for Product Design

A prototype is a simple model of your product that shows its basic functions and can help turn your product ideas into reality. Here are some tips to make the most of this important design stage.

Decide what to show with your prototype 

Before you start designing your prototype, follow these important steps:

1. Agree on what features your prototype needs to have.

2. Get a clear understanding of what the key stakeholders expect to see from your prototype. 

3. Discuss the product features with developers and identify any potential technical issues.

4. Think about whether the prototype can realistically be made into a full product and if it could be a real business opportunity.

Gathering this information upfront can give clarity to your prototype designs, saving time and resources. 

Turn to rapid collaborative prototyping if you’re under time pressure 

If you’re working to tight deadlines, rapid prototyping can help you get to the testing stage much quicker. 

The idea is to create a workable model of the product in as little as a day. While the resulting prototypes are usually simpler and less polished, the emphasis is very much on iterative design – the cycle of building, testing, refining, and repeating. 

It helps if team members work together using a digital whiteboard and a collaborative product design tool like UXPin with its Merge technology, which lets you prototype with reusable components. This makes it easier to bounce ideas off each other and come up with a workable design much quicker. Discover UXPin Merge.

Select your fidelity

When deciding how detailed and close to the final version your prototype should be – a characteristic known as ‘fidelity‘ – you need to consider who you’re showing the prototype to and what stage of the design process you’re at.

Low-fidelity prototypes, like simple sketches or basic wireframes, are sufficient for an internal design team review. They’re usually enough to help your colleagues visualize ideas and spark discussion.

High-fidelity prototypes are more polished – how they look and behave is closer to the final product. These are more suitable for gathering feedback from your target users.

Mid-level fidelity prototypes can be shown to stakeholders or team members who are neither part of your design team, nor target users. The level of detail these prototypes contain is somewhere between low and high fidelity. 

Test your prototypes with actual users

Testing functional designs with your colleagues can be helpful, but there’s a real chance they might miss issues that actual users would face.

That’s why it’s essential to test your prototypes with the people who’ll end up using the finished product. 

As we mentioned in the previous section, before testing, you need to decide whether you’re using a basic, low-fidelity prototype or one that’s more detailed and closer to the final product. This decision influences what kind of feedback you’re looking for and what you want to learn from the test.

It’s also helpful to identify your end users’ personas and the scenarios in which they might use your product. This helps you understand the context of use and plan your tests accordingly.

You can test in person, which allows for more detailed feedback as you can observe users’ reactions and ask questions. Or you can use online platforms that allow you to reach a larger number of potential users.

To learn 5 more prototype product design tips, check out this article: Prototype Product Design – 9 Tips.

Best Examples of Digital Product Design 

Apple

Apple stands out as a shining example of a company that designs with diverse user needs at heart, constantly refining its products for increased accessibility and usability.

  • For people who have vision problems, Apple provides features like voiceover, zoom, and Braille support. These help users understand what’s on the screen or in the environment around them.
  • Subtitles are made available for those with hearing impairments, covering everything from videos to conversations. Apple also produces bespoke devices aimed at helping these users hear better.
  • Apple has features like voice navigation and devices that can be controlled with eye movements to help individuals with limited mobility. This means users can navigate their devices without touching them.
  • Cognitive challenges are met with thoughtful designs that help filter out distracting background noise and visuals.
Image source: Apple

Discord

The communication platform Discord was initially designed to make it easy for gamers to interact. It’s since expanded and now allows users to discuss a range of topics, helped by a design that’s simple enough to use without distraction, while also offering enough depth to cater to specific user needs. Features include:

  • The ability to join or create ‘servers’ or chat rooms. These can be large, public groups, or smaller, private ones.
  • The creation of ‘channels’ within servers. This helps keep discussions on different topics separate and organized.
  • Direct messaging and ‘pinging’ (notifying) individual users for quick, private communication.
  • Users can choose to communicate via voice or text.
  • The customizable user interface allows you to personalize text, emojis, usernames, and icons to reflect your preferences.

TikTok

The hugely popular social media app has revolutionized the user experience with its unique design. 

This includes a full-screen feed for immersive viewing, clear interactive features, an endless stream of short, personalized content, and features that support diverse user needs. 

These design elements, combined with added accessibility options like auto-captions and photosensitivity warnings, have made TikTok a globally popular and user-friendly app. And its success underlines the importance of thoughtful product design.

We’ve only discussed 3 out of 5 best product design examples, you can find the remaining ones here. 

Reasons for Bad Product Design with Examples

Aggressive popups

Popups that appear immediately on a website can be a big turn-off for users. Before they’ve even had a chance to explore what’s on offer, they’re being asked to sign up for a newsletter or download something, which can be disruptive and off-putting.

It’s important to remember that people visit your site seeking answers, often with limited time and attention. Being bombarded with popups can quickly ruin their experience and lead them to seek alternatives. 

Of course, that’s not to say all pop-ups are bad – just that timing is crucial. It’s better to let users engage with your content first before trying to persuade them to sign up for additional services or promotions.

An overly complex navigation

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a popular platform that provides a wide range of cloud computing services, but it’s really difficult to navigate.

When you click on their products tab, you’re hit with a ton of choices which can feel overwhelming, especially on a mobile where you have to keep scrolling. This can frustrate users, making it hard to find what they need. 

Even though AWS’s design is aesthetically pleasing, the tricky navigation could be improved to enhance the user experience. This would stop visitors from leaving the site in a huff because they can’t find what they’re looking for.

Source: AWS

Stigmatizing certain user groups

Product design can unintentionally stigmatize certain user groups, particularly older people. 

Take walking canes for example. Once upon a time, these were carefully crafted to look like fashionable accessories – as well as being sturdy and functional. But today, devices for seniors often look unattractive, signifying frailty. This can discourage people from using them.  

Large-button phones for visually impaired people feel similarly outdated. Rather than designing ‘special’ products like these that make particular groups feel ostracized, we should make all products more inclusive, allowing for customizations like adjustable font sizes. That way, everyone will feel comfortable using them. 

We share more bad product design examples in a dedicated article: Bad Product Design

Product Design Degrees that Help you Land a Job

There are three main avenues that lead to a career in design, including product and UX design roles:

Bachelor’s Degree at a University

Studying for a design degree at a university can give you an advantage over others in this competitive field. 

Universities offer comprehensive courses on all sorts of specialisms, including color, typography, layout, and idea communication. They also foster skills in giving and receiving feedback, which are highly valued in the professional world. 

You could also consider degrees in programming as they allow you to understand the technical constraints that could influence product design.

One of the main benefits of a design degree is that it can potentially lead to higher pay.

But it’s worth saying that to get on a course you’ll need to have built a solid portfolio of work. Other potential obstacles include the fact that design degrees are expensive and take a long time to complete – often between two to four years.

Do-it-yourself

Self-learning can be a viable and flexible route – as long as you have plenty of discipline! 

Books like Don Norman’s ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ provide essential insights into human-centered design. But product design is complex, and involves more than just reading; learning from industry experts through mentorship, internships, or online courses can be invaluable. 

Networking is also key. Be sure to maintain connections with classmates and industry contacts, as they might prove helpful in the future.

Some helpful resources include:

Bootcamp Courses

Design bootcamps offer a fast-tracked learning experience in your chosen field. 

These programs can be undertaken in-person, online, or through blended learning, and some even offer scholarships or deferred payment options. 

Whether you’re a recent graduate or a professional seeking a career shift, bootcamp courses can effectively introduce you to the field and bridge knowledge gaps.

Here are some courses you can look into:

For more detailed guidance on product design careers, read our article on product design programs.

Top Books about Product Design

These four titles are essential reading for anyone interested in the field of product design.

‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ by Nir Eyal

Eyal’s book offers valuable insights into creating products that attract and retain users, focusing on his four-step Hook Model used in many successful products.

‘Lean Startup’ by Eric Ries

Ries’ guide to creating value-driven products is a must-read for designers, teaching them to rapidly prototype, test, and iterate designs for optimal alignment with business strategy and user needs.

‘Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services’ by Jon Yablonski

Yablonski’s book stresses the role of human psychology in UX design, offering a practical guide on applying psychological principles to build intuitive products, illustrated with examples from popular apps.

‘Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products That Create Customer Value and Business’ by Teresa Torres

Torres’s book highlights the importance of ongoing innovation in design to ensure that products and services remain relevant and valuable to users.

Read detailed review of those books and others here: Product Design Books that Will Push Your Skills Forward.

Master the Art of Designing Digital Products

Designing digital products balances functionality, aesthetics, and user needs, making it a diverse and complex field. 

In today’s digital era, the importance of designing intuitive, engaging products can’t be overstated. As a designer, every detail of your work could impact someone’s life. 

Hopefully, this guide has given you plenty of insight into digital product design, empowering you to create digital products that aren’t just useful and nice to look at, but lead to truly enriching experiences. 

Use UXPin with its Merge technology to build a realistic and clickable prototype of your product. UXPin Merge allows you to use a single source of truth for designers and devs, so it makes product design collaborative from the start. Release products faster with Merge. Discover UXPin Merge.

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12 Design Collaboration Tools for Fast and Organized Work https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/design-collaboration-tool/ Wed, 26 Jul 2023 11:52:57 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=37862 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,

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Best Design Collaboration Tools for In House Product Teams

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.

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:

logo uxpin merge

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.

uxpin design system components states icons 1

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

logo 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 design collaboration tool

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

google workspace is another design collaboration tool

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

project management tool notion is also design collaboration tool

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

jira is not your typical design collaboration tool

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

Trello is a simple kanban design collaboration tool

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.

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Product Design Degrees That Will Help You Land A Job https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/product-design-degrees/ Wed, 26 Jul 2023 09:23:33 +0000 https://www.uxpin.com/studio/?p=48832 Choosing the right degree for your dream job can be a daunting task. The average cost of a four-year degree program that’s earned while living on campus is $26,000 to $223,000. Regardless of what university you choose and the price you pay, these costs make finding a job after graduation from a state university is

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Product Design Degrees

Choosing the right degree for your dream job can be a daunting task. The average cost of a four-year degree program that’s earned while living on campus is $26,000 to $223,000. Regardless of what university you choose and the price you pay, these costs make finding a job after graduation from a state university is crucial. 

So, what are the best product design degrees for landing your dream job?

To help you navigate the world of product design degrees, we have broken down the important steps required to enter this industry. There are plenty of unique paths for reaching your goal of working in product design. These product design programs are intended to inspire your journey and help you conceptualize how to effectively chase your design dreams.

Build advanced prototypes with interactive inputs, conditional logic, and real data using an end-to-end design tool – UXPin. Try UXPin for free today.

Build advanced prototypes

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

Try UXPin

Do you Need a Product Design Degree to Land a Design Job?

Product design is a field that is heavily reliant on hands-on skills and lived experience. A bachelor’s degree is a direct way to learn foundational skills in product design, but it isn’t a strict requirement. A mentor, internship, or full-time job can teach you design basics and it can be an effective alternative to an art and design degree.

Overall, there are three common paths for learning the skills required to land a job in product design or opening your own design studio:

  • bachelor’s degree
  • self-taught
  • bootcamps.

What Product Design Roles Can You Choose from?

responsive screens prototyping

The product design industry is very diverse. There are a multitude of positions and titles to consider as you work your way into this field. Knowing exactly where you would like to work and what title you would like to have is not a requirement for choosing a product design program, but it can be helpful.

Some of the most common roles in product design have been listed below for you to explore. The summaries of these roles are intended to help you gain a better concept of what design jobs exist and what skills they require. If one stands out to you, dive deeper and ensure whatever path you choose teaches the skills needed for that position.  

UX designer

The UX in this title stands for user experience, and this design role is as broad as it sounds. UX designers are commonly in charge of everything from collecting data on how user-friendly an application is to implementing methods to improve the user experience.

Individuals in this position are a representative of the users of an application. It is up to the UX designer to make the customer experience as positive as possible, so a wide skill set is beneficial. Research, organizing information, and prototyping are just a few of the skills commonly required to succeed in this role. 

UI designer

While a UX designer focuses on information flow and data regarding user interactions, UI designers fall more into the digital design category. UI stands for user interface, this is the visual display of an application including accessibility and intuitive design. It is up to UI designers to create a cohesive platform where all screen layouts work together and individually.

Individuals in this position influence the end-users’ interactions and interpretations of an application through design factors like color schemes, interactive elements, and how content is laid out.

To create a successful interface, a UI designer must be able to collaborate, build mockups, and have a strong understanding of UI design elements

UX UI Designer

Larger companies with an adequate budget tend to have UX and UI designers who collaborate on projects. However, smaller companies have a tendency to combine these roles due to their relationship. A UX/UI designer takes on the responsibilities of both positions, fulfilling a majority of the roles in a product design team.

Upholding this dual title requires a combined set of skills, with some interesting additions. Project management, the ability to refine or learn new skills, and the ability to work alone are also useful in this position.

UX Researcher 

UX designers rely on research specific to their product and target audience to make improvements, but where does all of that information come from? Well-staffed teams often have a member devoted to facilitating and organizing the results of user research.

A UX researcher’s studies can produce measurable data, as well as interpretive data. Thriving in this role requires a good understanding of research methods, data interpretation, and collaboration with the rest of your product development team. 

UX Writer

While user experience normally focuses on functional designs, it is not void of words. A UX writer is responsible for all of the guiding text present in an application. Their goal is to add writing that compliments the functionality of a design

Information Architect

Much like an architect designs sound structures, an information architect creates strong information paths. Good information architecture ensures easy user navigation, reduces errors, and helps end-user achieve their goals.

Product Designer

The title of product designer can cross into UX designer territory in companies where one individual is expected to perform a broad array of tasks. In situations where product designers and UX designers are both present, the product designer takes on more of a management-like role.

Product designers assist with product design, but they also help the team stay on target with product goals. Having a broad understanding of UX skills as well as experience in design leadership is crucial for this role. 

13 Skills to Break into Product Design

design system atomic library components

Here are some of the abilities and skills that are essential for anyone working in product design:

  1. Interaction – This is a foundational social skill regarding communication. Your ability to interact with colleagues in a productive and concise way can impact product design quality.
  2. UI Design – Even if you aren’t striving for the specific title of UI designer, it is crucial to have an understanding of UI design. The user interface drives the user experience, so understanding how to interact with and improve UI design is a foundational skill for all roles. 
  3. Facilitation – Facilitation is a leadership skill that includes the ability to guide, manage, and prepare a team for success. This skill can apply to a whole project or to smaller goals within a project. Regardless, facilitation is a powerful tool for teamwork in design.
  4. Collaboration – A successful product design is the result of work from multiple individuals. Without the ability to collaborate with team members, it would not be possible for intricate designs to be created with efficiency and effectiveness. 
  5. UX Design – A background in UX design is important when it comes to customizing applications to the product at hand as well as the target users. UX design includes many specialties, but having a foundational understanding offers you an opportunity to grow into various related roles. 
  6. High Work Standards – High-quality products are the result of high work standards. Having high work standards shows an ability to critically review and pursue improvement. This is a skill that benefits every project. 
  7. Efficiency Efficiency is an effort to generate maximum production with minimum waste. In the world of product design, this can refer to how you converse with colleagues and the methods used to complete projects. 
  8. Decision MakingDecision making is so much more than decisiveness and confidence. Skillful decision making requires resources and often involves collaboration with teammates. 
  9. User Research / User Testing – Regardless of your specialty or position in a design team, user research is going to play a part in your decisions and actions. Individuals with an understanding of user research will be most effective at interpreting its implications and influencing areas of improvement. 
  10. Customer and User Focus – You may never personally interact with users, but they are the focus of your design. Maintaining a customer and user focus inspires impactful improvements.
  11. Storytelling – The ability to convey the user’s story is incredibly useful in the designer’s day-to-day work. Among others, it supports you in your interactions with fellow design team members, and helps you make the product vision and users’ goals and challenges seem relatable to stakeholders.
  12. Business acumen – also known as business savviness, this trait characterizes designers who quickly understand changes in the product’s business circumstances and know how to best address them through design iterations.
  13. Project management – there are a lot of tasks that a product designer will have to handle. Good project management skills are necessary to ensure work is completed on time and to a high standard. 

3 Routes to Landing a Role in Product Design

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Bachelor’s Degree in Product Design

With a four-year time investment and tuition costs, getting a bachelor of fine arts (BFA) requires high time and financial input in most cases. However, this is also the most traditional route and may be a requirement for product design positions, especially in larger corporations.

Product design students gain understanding the foundational aspects of product design. Your coursework will include design history, visual arts basics (like color theory, typography, etc.) and aspects of computer-aided design.

Earning a product design major has some added benefits. This form of education exposes you to regular collaboration with peers so you can practice the communication and teamwork skills that will be required in a job setting.   

Self-taught

With the right amount of drive and self-discipline, it is possible to teach yourself the basics of product design. How long this takes and how much you learn is completely up to you, so setting expectations and using good sources are important.

Earning a position with a self-taught background may require you to display your skills at interviews, as there is no degree or previous job history to back up your skills. You will also have to find unique ways to practice critical thinking and collaboration skills that are required for most design roles.

“Collaboration in product design isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. As a Product Designer, you’re at the intersection of various roles – from Product Managers and Engineers, to Data Analysts and Stakeholders. Each brings unique insights and perspectives to the table. Embracing and harmonizing these diverse viewpoints forms the core of effective collaboration and leads to innovative, user-focused designs. After all, every pixel in a design is often the result of multiple minds at work.” – Florian Bölter, Senior Product Designer & founder of Open Doors, a curated job board and community for junior designers.

Here are some helpful resources to guide your journey in the right direction if you decide to teach yourself.

Bootcamps

Bootcamps are an investment that is typically less expensive and faster than an undergraduate program or master’s degree. These programs help you explore design and decide if it’s the right career path for you, as they teach technical skills that are useful and align with job requirements in the product design industry. 

The problem-specific design courses (such as human-centered design methodology) can be a great refresher if you have some education in design, and they can help you refine your knowledge on specific topics.

Here are a few helpful courses to consider:

Finding your Future in Product Design

The product design industry is constantly changing and growing. Product design degrees are becoming more common in universities, but there are multiple ways to acquire the necessary skills and a place in product development. 

Whether you choose the traditional route, teach yourself or attend bootcamps, there are plenty of UX roles to specialize in and many skills to learn. The beauty of the product design industry is that there is no one way to succeed.

Focus on all of the problem-solving skills and design skills you are working on without worrying about the added pressure of understanding the ins-and-outs of product development.

Leverage the best tools to move your career forward. Try UXPin, an end-to-end design tool for prototyping, design handoff, and design systems. All you need for creating a life-like representation of product is there. Try UXPin for free today.

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