A UX Architect is a person responsible for the structure of the product and user flow. She or he works on the verge of UX design and engineering. This role has emerged as the UX space is continually growing and evolving, with new UX roles and departments popping up from time to time.

We’ll explore what a UX architect does, and the roles and responsibilities for UX designers and UX architects differ and overlap. At the end of this article, we provide a brief overview of how UXPin can help UX teams collaborate effectively.

Key takeaways:

• UX architect is a hybrid role that sits in between design and engineering.
• UX architects build information architecture, create wireframes, and take care of technical feasibility of the project.
• They differ from UX designer in that they have engineering skills and they prioritize clear information architecture.

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Who is a UX Architect?

A user experience architect is essentially a UX specialist with a high-level view of a product or design. UX architects are concerned with the structure and flow based on in-depth user and market research.

To achieve this, UX architects will often work closely with research teams or even conduct research themselves. This research guides UX architects to make informed decisions about how a user will use the product and organize the information architecture accordingly.

What Does a UX Architect Do?

Here’s a brief outline of a UX architect’s responsibilities:

• Ensure the product fulfills the user’s needs
• Makes sure information is organized and easily accessible
• Fixes usability and accessibility problems

Organizing Content

Rather than creating content and assets, a UX architect organizes and arranges content to best serve the user. This organization falls into three categories:

• Content inventory—a list of all the product’s digital content.
• Content grouping—a logical structure for organizing the product’s content, defining the relationships between different pieces of information and how they all connect.
• Content audit—a regular review of the product’s content to determine what needs updating and if new content is required.

UX architects must organize the content on each page and determine where to add titles, subheadings, links, and navigation to help users find what they’re looking for.

Hierarchy, Sitemaps, and Navigation

Information architecture arranges a product or website’s hierarchy, sitemaps, and navigation. These crucial elements determine how easy and accessible an app or website is to use.

• Sitemap – all of the app or website pages.
• Hierarchy – how to arrange a page’s content in order of importance.
• Navigation – how a user moves through an app or website.

Internal Wireframing & Low-Fidelity Prototyping

UX architects create wireframes and low-fidelity prototypes for internal UX teams to use as an architectural reference for designing a product or website. 

UX teams will only use these mockups for design purposes and usually won’t use them for usability studies or sharing amongst stakeholders.

Who is a UX Designer?

A UX designer is a broad term encompassing design and research roles. But in the context of a UX designer vs. a UX architect, the designer is responsible for designing user interfaces. Ultimately, a UX designer makes a product usable.

A UX designer will take a UX architect’s wireframes, prototypes, and architectural instructions and turn them into a high-fidelity prototype that resembles the end-product the most out of every design deliverable. UX designers also work with UX researchers as well as content designers to determine which fonts, colors, buttons, and other design elements to use.

Persona Development

UX designers are responsible for early research and creating user personas. Larger organizations might have a dedicated UX researcher or team, but they still fulfill a UX design role.

User personas tell UX designers about the user’s demographic information, motivations, desires, potential responses, and more to design user interfaces that accommodate these user needs.

Wireframes, Mockups, and Prototypes

UX designers create wireframes and mockups for the product’s pages and flows with initial user research and the UX architect’s information architecture.

UX designers also look at the UX architect’s sitemap to link the pages and navigation to make working low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes.

Research teams will use these high-fidelity prototypes for usability studies to learn how users interact with the final product.

User Testing

Where companies don’t have a dedicated research team, UX designers conduct the necessary usability studies. This crucial part of UX design provides UX designers with valuable feedback on how users will interact with the final product.

With the results from usability studies, UX designers tweak their designs to improve the user experience.

The Main Differences of UX Architect and UX Designer

The most significant difference between a UX architect and a UX designer is that the UX architect looks at the bigger picture while the UX designer focuses on the details.

The UX architect focuses on navigation and user flows while the UX designer creates the user interfaces and interactions for each screen or page.

While both UX architects and UX designers review research, the UX architect considers what features and content the user needs. In contrast, the UX designer wants to know how the user will interact with these elements.

We can summarize the roles of a UX architect vs. a UX designer as follows:

• UX architect – who are the users, and what do they need?
• UX designer – who are the users, and how do we meet their needs?

How UX Architects & UX Designers Work Together

It’s important to note that a UX designer performs the UX architect’s responsibilities in many companies, especially small businesses. 

Where these roles are split, the UX designer is often referred to as a UI designer (user interface designer) because they focus on the interfaces and interactions. 

A UX architect is a UX specialist in information architecture rather than focusing on design.

UX architects and UX designers work closely on content. The UX designer focuses on the content’s details while the UX architect decides how to structure the content. To get this right, designers and architects must work closely together.

A Typical UX Architect & UX Designer Workflow

The following workflow is a broad overview to show the separation of responsibilities between a UX architect and a UX designer. 

1. A project will start with a UX architect analyzing market and user research to determine what the project needs and how to structure the content—similar to an architect designing a physical structure.
2. The UX architect puts together a blueprint (wireframes & prototypes) for the UX designer to start the build process.
3. The UX designer analyzes user research and the UX architect’s blueprints to start designing each user interface.
4. The UX designer will create wireframes, mockups, and high-fidelity prototypes for stakeholders and usability studies.
5. During usability tests – the UX architect wants to know how the user accesses content and navigates through the product. The UX designer wants to see how the user interacts with the elements and content on each screen.
6. Once a product is live – the UX architect’s job is to ensure accurate and up-to-date content. They will also look at accessibility issues and recommend updates accordingly. The UX designer will take the UX architect’s recommendations and analyze interaction data to optimize each screen to best serve the user.

Does Your Company Need a UX Architect & a UX Designer?

With each team focusing on different design aspects, separating the UX/UI designer and UX architect roles can improve the quality and efficiency of a product or website.

There might not be enough work for a dedicated UX architect for smaller projects and cash-strapped startups. It’s important to note that UX designers are capable of fulfilling a UX architect’s role.

As projects scale, information architecture becomes complex and time-consuming to manage. In situations like this, a UX architect is critical to a project’s success.

While agencies generally work in small teams, they often work on multiple apps and websites for clients. Having a UX architect can help to streamline productivity by handing UX designers all the information they need to start building immediately—effectively creating a tech production line.

Businesses should ask a series of questions to determine if they need a UX architect:

• How much time do UX designers spend on building layouts and information architecture?
• Do these tasks create production delays?
• Do users often struggle with navigation issues in usability studies?
• What is the cost of a dedicated UX architect in relation to the benefits from an increase in quality and efficiency?
• Does your product frequently struggle with usability and accessibility issues?
• Is someone monitoring your product’s content? Do you regularly find out-of-date content or unused product features?

UXPin Increases Productivity for UX Teams

UXPin is a powerful design tool for UX teams to build better products collaboratively. UX architects can use UXPin to create layouts, wireframes, and lo-fi prototypes, with comments for guidance and context.

UX designers can use this information to design beautiful screens and interfaces with mockups to present to stakeholders and use for usability studies.

Get a free UXPin trial and see how this design tool can help your UX teams collaborate effectively to build better products for your customers. Try UXPin today.

The post UX Architect vs. UX Designer – What’s the Difference? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

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

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

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

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UXPin Merge

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

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

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

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

Zeplin

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

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

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

Marvel

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

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

Sympli

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

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

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

Avocode

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

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

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

InVision

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

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

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

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

Framer

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

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

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

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

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

Spectrr

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

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

Adobe XD

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

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

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

Figma

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

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

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

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

Why are Design Handoffs so Challenging?

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

Unrealistic Expectations

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

Poor Image-Based Tools for Rendering Code

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

Technical Constraints

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

Too Many Design Handoff Tools

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

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

Better Design Handoffs with UXPin Merge

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

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

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.

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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.

The post What Is MUI and What Do You Need to Know About It? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

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

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

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

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Why Do You Need to Break the Silo Mentality?

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

Here are 5 common problems created by silos:

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

6 Practical Tips to Break Down Silos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the top options include:

• Zoom, 
• BlueJeans,
• Google Meet

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

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

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

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

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

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

Create a design system that contains all approved assets

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

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

Share information between teams as you make progress

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

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

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

Eliminate organizational silos with UXPin Merge

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways:

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

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

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What is a Design Framework?

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

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

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

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

Why do we Need Design Frameworks?

 Some of the core benefits of design frameworks include:

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

9 Examples of UX Design Frameworks

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

User-Centered Design (UCD)

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

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

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

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

Design Thinking Process

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

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

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

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

Double Diamond

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

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

Stage One – Preparation:

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

Stage Two – Prototyping & Testing:

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

Hooked Model

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

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

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

 Further reading: 

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

Lean UX

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

There are three stages to the Lean UX framework:

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

Further reading: 

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

Agile UX

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

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

Further reading:

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

BASIC Framework

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

The BASIC acronym follows five principles:

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

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

Beauty:

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

Accessibility:

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

Simplicity:

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

Intuitiveness:

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

Consistency:

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

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

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

The UX Honeycomb

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

The UX Honeycomb’s seven principles include:

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

The Fogg Behavior Model

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

• Motivation
• Ability
• Trigger

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

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

Further reading: 

• Fogg Behavior Model
• Tiny Habits by B J Fogg

End-to-End Product Design With UXPin

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

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

Meaningful Testing Feedback

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

Streamlined Design Handoffs

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

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

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

Developing digital products from scratch requires a lot of resources. Multi-brand design systems enable organizations to build once, duplicate, and customize–saving thousands of design and development hours.

This centralized approach to design systems means organizations can share costs across different brands while providing a framework to enter markets with new products much faster.

Sync your component library with UXPin’s design editor using our revolutionary Merge technology to create a single source of truth across design and development. Visit our Merge page to learn more and request access.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

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What is a Multi-Brand Design System?

A multi-brand design system is a set of guidelines, assets, and rules that allows for the efficient and consistent user interfaces across multiple brands or sub-brands within a larger organization. Multi-brand DS ensures harmony and efficiency in the design process while allowing each brand to shine with its unique personality within the broader context.

How Does it Differ from a Standard Design System?

GroupUI used internal Volkswagen research to compare multi-brand vs. regular design systems, discovering that “multi-brand design systems share costs and enable real collaborative development.”

The results across four key metrics were staggering when comparing multi-brand vs. regular design systems:

• 25% cheaper and faster UI design work
• 30% increased development efficiency & efficacy
• 30% reduction in future managed costs
• 3-4 times faster to market

But for us, there’s one word that sets them apart–flexibility. Multi-brand design systems are optimized for flexibility, enabling product teams to leverage an existing component library to develop products for another brand.

Conversely, companies build mono-brand design systems around principles and constraints that limit flexibility. These limitations ensure designers deliver projects to high standards of quality and consistency.

Facilitating change through design tokens

Most multi-brand design systems use design tokens to facilitate global styling changes, for example, adapting colors, typography, corner radius, spacing, etc., to meet brand requirements simply by modifying the token’s property.

In this way, multi-brand design systems share a lot of parallels with themeable open-source component libraries–built to facilitate change. A multi-brand design system is essentially a template or toolkit with an adaptable codebase, design language, and brand guidelines.

Multi-Brand Design System Examples

1. Forge from Harry’s

Using design tokens is one aspect of a multi-brand design system. Organizations must also make the component library customizable. Personal care brand Harry’s used Brad Frost’s Atomic Design (or layering as they call it) approach to build its multi-brand component library, Forge.

Forge uses two layers:

• Base layer (or sub-components): “flexible base components that cannot be deconstructed further.” Product teams only change styling properties for these base components–possibly through design tokens.
• Complex layer (“second layer “): “multiple base components arranged in specific and opinionated ways.”

By structuring components in “layers,” Harry’s built a multi-brand component library that enabled product teams to keep brand-agnostic layers and swap brand-specific ones to customize user interfaces.

Forge’s layered-component structure also facilitates flexibility because individual brands can use sub-components like Lego blocks to build a design system for a new product.

“With the Forge, brands are free to combine sub-components to create solutions tailored to their users without requiring any changes to the component library.” – Mae Capozzi, Senior Software Engineer at Harry’s

Forge’s design system governance offers product managers four options for promoting new patterns:

• Existing Option A: Build custom components
• Existing Option B: Try to reuse components from the existing codebase
• New Option C: Assemble “new” components out of Forge base components
• New Option D: Use an out-of-the-box Forge component

2. Volkswagen’s GroupUI

Volkswagen’s GroupUI is a multi-brand design system serving some 15+ brands. At the time of recording a webinar with Into Design Systems in 2022, only several of Volkswagen’s brands had adopted GroupUI, including VW, Skoda, Audi, Porche, Man, Scania, and RIO.

Unlike a tech company, Volkswagen has many design layers, including real-world (tangible) products and digital products. 

“You have to bring two things together-the vertical harmonization of touchpoints within one brand. For example, the harmonization of in-car HMI, web applications, and apps, plus some internal VR/AR applications. And then the horizontal harmonization of technology.” – Thorsten Jankowski, User Experience Lead Group IT, Volkswagen AG.

Volkswagen has multiple touchpoint layers within each brand, including:

• Web technology
• Native applications
• AR & VR driver systems
• Automotive UIs

GroupUI focuses on web technology but must align with each brand’s vertical as much as possible to create a consistent user experience across every touchpoint.

For example, when a customer purchases a vehicle through a brand’s website, the user experience and UI must be consistent from website to email marketing and in-car user interfaces.

GroupUI’s Multi-Brand Design System Principles

To achieve this level of flexibility and customizability while maintaining a consistent brand experience across every vertical and touchpoint, GroupUI developed a set of “overarching principles:”

GroupUI’s over overarching principles help guide the group through three pillars that intersect toward a common goal:

• Flexibility
• Collaboration
• Transparency

Flexibility over rigidity: GroupUI is framework-agnostic, meaning brands can adopt a framework (React, Angular, Vue, etc.) that best serves their purpose and goals. To achieve this, GroupUI’s core component library uses Web Components, is token-based, and facilitates Snowflakes.

Global collaboration over stakeholder focus: GroupUI aims for “continuous evolution as a common goal” by putting the group’s needs ahead of a single brand or stakeholder. This generic strategy increases trust. GroupUI’s team works continuously on evangelism and distribution to promote generic over brand-specific implementation.

Transparency over complex documentation: GroupUI uses a centralized backlog for issues and design solutions. This centralization reduces silos vertically within each brand and horizontally across the entire group while facilitating an ecosystem for brands to learn and evolve together.

3 Tips for Building a Multi-Brand Design System

Tip #1: Use fewer tools to increase adoption

The first step to building a multi-brand design system is minimizing design tools! More tools mean the design system team must maintain multiple platforms.

When News UK built its multi-brand design system for The Times, The Sun, Virgin Radio, and The Sunday Times, to name a few, Nick Dorman, Head of Design Systems, found that using multiple tools resulted in a “disjointed solution.” Implementing simple changes would take days or weeks because the DS team had to update and verify changes across each platform systematically.

News UK chose an image-based design tool which helped unify Design but still meant they had to maintain two design systems:

• One for design – image-based UI kit
• One for development – component library

UXPin Merge is a far better design tool solution for multi-brand design systems. Merge syncs a component library hosted in a repository to UXPin’s design editor, so designers and engineers use the same UI elements. Any updates to the repo automatically sync to UXPin, notifying design teams of the changes–creating a single source of truth across design and development. 

Tip #2: Choose a framework-agnostic design system

As we learned from Volkswagen, a framework-agnostic design system allows brands to use a tech stack that best serves their needs. GroupUI supports Web Components/HTML, Angular, and React–the three frameworks used across Volkswagen’s brands. Brands can preview these components through a centralized Storybook, including guidelines and documentation.

Like Forge, GroupUI’s design system works in layers so teams can build components to meet their needs. A brand theme defines each component and nested component’s properties.

Designers can also benefit from a framework-agnostic design system with UXPin Merge. Merge’s Storybook integration enables design teams to sync any Storybook-compatible framework with UXPin’s design editor–eliminating the need for creating UI kits.

At design handoff, engineers install the framework’s package, apply the appropriate theme and copy component changes rendered by UXPin to complete front-end development.

Tip #3: Adopt atomic design methodology

Adopting an Atomic Design methodology is an excellent strategy to future-proof your multi-brand design system. Volkswagen, Harry’s, and News UK applied Atomic Design principles to build flexible, themeable design systems.

The idea is to create a base layer of core components or building blocks that never change. Engineers nest these core components inside a themed master component to apply brand-specific styling via design tokens.

This example from Volkswagen shows two tab patterns. One for Porsche, the other for Volkswagen. Notice how the tab patterns and nested components are identical; only the theme property changes for each brand.

Building components and patterns using this Atomic methodology make it easy to scale the multi-brand design system while providing each brand with a framework to scale individual design systems.

Build Your Multi-Brand Design System With UXPin Merge

Multi-brand design systems are complex beasts with lots for design system teams to consider. The design system team must find ways to simplify workflows, reduce tools, and minimize time-consuming tasks.

As we saw with News UK, using multiple tools creates a massive burden for design system teams updating and maintaining several platforms. 

UXPin Merge solves this design tool challenge by providing designers with a single design, prototyping, and testing solution. No plugins or extensions–everything design teams need is built-in.

Merge has the added benefit of syncing design and development to create a single source of truth across every brand–impossible to achieve with traditional image-based design tools.

With UXPin Patterns, design teams can combine building blocks from a multi-brand design system to promote new patterns for the component library. UXPin Patterns is also helpful for saving multiple component variants, so designers can save time during prototyping by dragging and dropping elements to find the right solution fast!

Sync design and development while unifying multiple brands through a single component-driven design solution. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post Multi-Brand Design System – How to Get Started appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reach a new level of prototyping

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What are Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility in Design?

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

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

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

Where Does this Methodology Originate?

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

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

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

Desirability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Viability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feasibility

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

Some feasibility factors include:

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

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

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

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

Using Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility in a Design Review

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

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

A UX Design Review Template

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hypotheses about the new design: 

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

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

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

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

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

As an industry, product design has become more interactive than ever before. Whether you’re creating apps, websites, or software, there’s an endless stream of new tools and workflows to help make your design decisions as comprehensive as possible. However, when there are design team members, project managers, and stakeholders who all want to be involved in the project at the same time, things can get messy pretty quickly.

Managing effective feedback process at all stages of the design workflow has become a bit of pain, to say the least.

Fortunately, there are a ton of design feedback tools that can help you gather, organize, and utilize constructive feedback and help keep everyone on the same page. That’s why we’ve compiled a collection of the best design feedback tools to help you find the right one for your specific needs.

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How to Pick the Best Design Feedback Tool? 

First off, how do you even know whether a design feedback tool is right for you?

Of course, you need an application that makes collaboration easy and doesn’t do more harm than good. The software and feedback features need to actually benefit your creative efforts, so bear these considerations in mind. This also means that – when choosing the right design collaboration tool – you should check whether it lets you comment on the design when making iterations, or leave feedback on actual, published apps and websites.

Here are a few criteria to search for:

1. interactivity
2. satisfying feature set
3. real-time user
4. collaborative

Your tool is interactive

Professional design feedback tools must be as interactive as possible. 

In the past, feedback would have been as simple as drawing lines and writing comments on a screenshot, or supplying a designer with a list of things to change, but this just isn’t good enough today.

It wastes so much time having to shift through messy lists of feedback, find what feature a client is referring to, or identify what the bug in question is. 

An interactive tool removes these issues and instead displays actionable feedback in the right places in an organized manner. Everything is clean, easy to follow, and intuitive.

There’s no point in getting a feedback tool that ends up causing more problems than improving productivity.

Offers increased functionality

Despite being a feedback tool, your chosen solution should always be far more capable than this baseline feature. 

The best tools grant access to other functions, such as being able to generate specs and documentation or even manage the entire design process.

For example, connecting with the prototyping process is essential yet often overlooked. 

If colleagues, project leaders, or UX testers provide great design feedback on a certain aspect of the project, you can incorporate it into your prototype, test again, gather more feedback, and then repeat the cycle.

This is a far more effective way to work and will speed up your design process as a whole. Productive design review should be an iterative process that helps to improve the quality of your designs, rather than something that just bogs you down.

Functions in real time

Nowadays, especially with the rise of remote and hybrid ways of working, your collaboration tools need to operate in real-time. This includes displaying design previews, adding comments and annotations, and even video and audio notes for highly-detailed responses.

Allows effortless communication

Communication is everything at all stages of the design process, including when it comes to organizing feedback.

Your design review tool should enable users to add all kinds of comments in any format (text, video, image, GIFs, etc) as well as @mention-specific team members. In order to avoid any confusion, it’s also important that everyone’s on the same page in terms of which tool you’re using and that everyone understands how to use it.

6 tools for collecting design feedback

Let’s now take a look at the design feedback tools that will make the design review more effective and interactive. 

1. Proofhub

Proofhub markets itself as a project management application orientated to the needs of designers. Clients or project managers can check in and provide feedback throughout the entire design workflow, annotating the project within the app using a clean overlay approach.

This means designers can eliminate previous issues, like having to search and find feedback in a massive email or Slack threads, access the feedback at any time, and work on a project in real-time.

While fast, effective, and easy to get set up and running, the interface can feel a little clunky and lacks customizability. However, if you can overlook this, it does get the job done.

Features

• Review all files in any kind of design project with a click
• Collaborate with all team members, clients, and managers in real-time
• All past file versions remain accessible simultaneously

2. Atarim

Atarim is used by over 5,000+ agencies worldwide, including companies like GoDaddy, Elementor, and WPEngine. If you’re looking for a design feedback tool specifically for website building, then it’s worth considering it.

It’s essentially a WordPress plugin that digital development and design teams can use to track changes across the websites they’re building. Atarim lets you add internal comments, collect feedback from clients, and then use the findings to improve the UX and UI. 

This design review app supports screenshots and comments, and can turn any text into a task that can be assigned to a relevant team member.

Atarim can be integrated into other collaboration tools like Trello and Asana, as well as other Kanban boards. While clearly feature-rich, this software can be a little confusing to newcomers, and the learning curve may take some time to climb.

Features

• Supports internal messages that keep conversations away from clients
• Give feedback on non-WordPress sites with a few clicks
• Turn comments on screenshots into assignable tasks

3. UXPin

UXPin allows you to catch positive and negative feedback before it becomes costly, that is during the prototyping phase. Non-designers as well as fellow designers can give approvals or leave their not-so-positive feedback before the prototype gets passed on to engineers.

It’s costly for any business to create entire apps, websites, and features, only to have them redesigned from the ground up once clients, stakeholders or product managers want changes made.

Instead, you can use UXPin to generate robust prototypes of individual design elements, acquire feedback, and then implement the changes until your design is given the green light. Next, prototypes can be shared with developers who will polish it off into the final app, making it effortless to bring the best of collaboration and teamwork to your design projects.

Features

• Create, run, and tweak prototypes in real-time
• Import Sketch or Figma designs in just a few clicks
• Create and share preview links to ensure your prototypes are accessible to everyone who needs access
• Animate between states to create one of the most advanced user testing experiences possible
• Use ground-breaking variable data storage to create the most life-like prototyping experience
• Hand over your designs to the engineering team with autogenerated specs and ready-made code.

4. BugHerd

Whatever you’re designing, you’re going to come across bugs and problems that need addressing. Keeping track of everything and being organized can be a challenge, to say the least. BugHerd addresses this pain point with its visual-heavy feedback tool.

The app is simple. Using a visual interface to display code, screenshots, websites, or whatever visuals you want, clients, stakeholders, and team members can place sticky-note-like comments to provide any kind of feedback, highlight issues, and more.

Features

• The entire service is hosted in the cloud
• All comments and feedback are easily accessible and searchable
• Mark annotations on images provide concise feedback

5. Nimbus Capture

Sometimes, you’re not going to want a high-end service but rather something simple, quick, and easy, and that’s where Nimbus Capture comes in. It’s a great tool for startups that provides a range of collaboration tools designed for improving feedback and collaboration efforts, the most notable of which is Nimbus Note.

While quick and easy, it’s important to realize that this design review tool can feel a little restrictive when compared to other tools that offer a more integrated service. The UI is a little dated (especially when using the free Chrome extension), and you don’t actually integrate your work into the app.

This means designers are going to be constantly switching back and forth between windows to make changes and review feedback, rather than just working with everything within a self-contained and accessible place.

Features

• A free Chrome browser extension
• Users can annotate screenshots using a variety of methods
• Automatically organize notes using a table of contents

6. Userback

Reviewing feedback takes time, and it’s time wasted if not handled properly. Userback aims to make things easy with its visual feedback tool. Used by companies like Couchbase, Udacity, and more, Userback works within any kind of project, be it web design, app design, and more, and it allows users, clients, and designers to annotate on the fly.

You can specifically mark areas of the screen with interactive comments, mention specific engineers, highlight bugs and potential issues in the code, and even provide client support in real-time.

The app can fully integrate into an extensive range of major services, including Slack, Trello, Asana, WordPress, ZenDesk, GitHub, and so on, and even supports video feedback.

While this is surely a feature-rich solution, Userback is designed for users to provide their feedback once the product has already been launched. It’s not the best choice if you want to do a design critique of wireframes or prototypes. This means that bugs and glitches are possibly already influencing the usability of your product, and the damage could have already been done to the overall user experience.

Features

• You can draw directly on the design
• Use video feedback to gather feedback from customers faster
• A feature request dashboard lets you look at all of the comments and track their status

Use UXPin to Collect Feedback on Prototypes

Great design feedback is an important part of the design process, no matter if it’s a positive feedback or negative, and there are a variety of tools available to help make it as smooth as possible. While some software is more comprehensive than other, each has its own unique set of features that can be tailored to fit your specific needs.

That being said, don’t forget that there’s no stage of feedback more important than prototyping. For this reason, make sure you’re using a tool that allows you to collect feedback early and often, so you can make revisions and create a better design, just like UXPin does. 

It can help make a more quality designs for apps and websites. At the end of the day, your apps will make or break depending on your UX design, and designers have the most important role in creating an experience that users will love.

UXPin is designed at its core with this goal in mind. Try it for free, and you’ll see that design work will never be the same again.

The post Best Design Feedback Tools – A List of 6 Tools appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

UXPin invited Ethnio to talk about how DesignOps and ResearchOps teams can collaborate to be more effective and create more impact. Ethnio outlines a strategy for using research democratization, tools, and automation to keep product, UX, and research teams in sync.

Ethnio demonstrates how organizations can:

• Recruit, schedule, and pay participants for global research studies using Ethnio
• Conduct high-quality usability testing with interactive UXPin prototypes using Merge technology

Streamline cross-functional collaboration and automate many DesignOps challenges with UXPin’s Merge technology. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

Introducing Ethnio

Ethnio is a UX research CRM designed to streamline research operations. The platform allows UX researchers to automate everything from participant recruitment to scheduling, quotas, and incentive payouts.

Ethnio’s flagship product, Intercepts, allows UX researchers to target and recruit participants from inside product ecosystems–web and native–so researchers can speak to real users who actually use their products.

In this article, Ethnio outlines how Operations teams can use tools and automation paired with an effective democratization practice to create better relationships and operational efficiencies. 

Using UX Research Democratization to Bridge the Gap

DesignOps and ResearchOps teams can leverage research democratization to enhance collaboration between departments. Democratization–paired with the right tools and automation–can help Ops teams create a greater impact for the organization while designing better product experiences.

“Research is a practice of rigorous curiosity, and the role of researchers in an organization is to help the people they work with make better decisions. At scale, this means building intentional, responsible, and sustainable systems of learning with and from the people you want to serve.” Behzod Sirjani, Research Advisor and Program Partner at Reforge.

What is UX research democratization?

UX research democratization is about “making research (collecting, storing, sharing, and accessing) accessible and possible for anyone within an organization, regardless of their role. It aims to break down traditional barriers and hierarchies, allowing cross-functional teams to contribute to and benefit from user insights.”

Improving collaboration and research insights

Democratization helps remove operational friction by allowing each team to see and understand the work of the other. It brings together researchers, designers, and product teams, improving communication, streamlining workflows, and developing high-quality research insights.

The result is a holistic design and research approach leveraging the organization’s collective intelligence. This democratization not only accelerates the design process but also improves the quality of the final product, ultimately delivering a more compelling and satisfying user experience while maximizing DesignOps and ResearchOps’ impact.

“When we talk about impact, we must ensure that we wear our business hats more than our researcher hats. It’s crucial to understand that from the business perspective, research is not just about running studies, but about providing value that the company can use to achieve its goals.” Carol Rossi, Expert Researcher, and Consultant.

So, how does utilizing research democratization, tools, and automation work in practice?

Recruit, Schedule, Test, & Pay Participants using Ethnio & UXPin

Let’s say you are an operations expert in design or research, and you want to support your designer in talking directly with some prospective customers as part of a sprint. 

Here’s the flow for reducing their time and effort to as little as possible and letting Ethnio do all the screening, scheduling, and paying participants for their time. 

On the design end, DesignOps can invite researchers to collaborate in UXPin, sharing feedback and insights on interactive prototypes.

This brief case study will demonstrate how Research Ops and DesignOps teams can collaborate effectively and efficiently using their respective tools.

Step 1: Add designers as facilitators to a study

Ethnio allows researchers to add stakeholders to participate in participant interviews or usability studies as observers, facilitators, or collaborators—even if they don’t have an Ethnio account. Creating these connections enables UXRs to automate communications for key stakeholders and participants.

Step 2: Invite DesignOps to connect the right tools

Keeping team members and stakeholders in sync with research initiatives is crucial for effective collaboration. Ethnio lets researchers connect their team’s meeting and scheduling tool stack, like Teams, Google Calendar, and Zoom, to automate communications and make it easy for team members to attend studies and interviews.

Step 3: Setup and collaborate on research quotas

Research quotas are vital for collecting data from representative user groups within your target audience. The industry standard is to use color-coded spreadsheets, which team members manage and update manually—one of the most time-consuming Research Ops tasks, especially when running multiple complex projects.

“A lot of our customers have struggled to manage multiple spreadsheets, Google Forms, and manually scheduling and paying participants. Ethnio helped automate and streamline this entire process.” Kyle Robertson, Product Specialist at Ethnio.

Ethnio simplifies quotas through automation and an intuitive UI to visualize an entire campaign. Researchers can also invite designers, product managers, and other stakeholders to review and approve, ensuring they recruit the right participants every time.

Connect Ethnio to Slack, and the platform will automatically ping team members and stakeholders to review the participants the instant they meet quota criteria. This simple automation streamlines quota selection in today’s async work environments.

Step 4: Scheduling

Scheduling is a challenge for UX researchers managing multiple simultaneous campaigns. Trying to sync participants with stakeholder availability can be complex and time-consuming. Automation is critical to increasing efficiency while ensuring the right team members and stakeholders are in the loop.

Ethnio can use fast mode to pick the best participants, automatically send calendar invites to participants and observers, and put each session on the facilitator’s calendar with their secure dynamic Zoom meeting.

Step 5: Running a usability study with UXPin

The day arrives to conduct the usability study. It’s time to bring UXRs into the design tool stack to share insights and collaborate.

Designers use UXPin with Merge technology to create an interactive prototype using the same component library engineers use during development.

This advanced prototype allows participants to interact with the user interface like they would the final product, providing accurate, meaningful insights for designers to iterate and improve.

DesignOps can invite UXRs and other stakeholders observing the session to collaborate and share feedback using UXPin’s Comments. Like Ethnio, collaborators don’t need a UXPin account to use Comments. They can annotate UIs and tag team members to discuss features and pain points. UXPin integrates with Slack to automate effective cross-functional collaboration.

“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, former UX Lead EPX at PayPal.

Step 6: Incorporating feedback

The design team can analyze user feedback to improve prototypes. Making changes is as easy as drag-and-drop with Merge components, meaning designers can iterate and test efficiently.

Once testing is complete, designers can hand off to devs for engineering and release. The development team already has the code, so it’s as easy as copying and pasting the production-ready JSX from UXPin to streamline development.

In the meantime, researchers are finalizing the study in Ethnio.

Step 7: Pay the participants

The study is over, and it’s time to pay participants. Many organizations use third-party applications to deliver payouts in cash or via gift cards. The problem with these apps is that they increase costs and expose participant data to third parties, creating legal complications for organizations.

Ethnio’s native Incentives allow UXRs to pay participants in any currency worldwide in seconds. Pay via bank transfer, electronic rewards (Amazon, PayPal, and gift cards), and dozens of other payment methods. Participants can also choose to donate their incentive to 40+ global charities.

Democratization in Action

The journey from research to final product development demands seamless collaboration and efficiency. Our use case with Ethnio and UXPin Merge demonstrates how democratized research practices can revolutionize this journey for greater operational impact and user experiences.

With Ethnio and UXPin Merge in operations’ tool stacks and an effective democratization practice, teams can optimize traditional UX and research processes to deliver better outcomes.

Enhance User Testing With Interactive Prototypes Using Merge Technology

UXPin’s code-to-design solution enables designers to bring code components from a repository into the design process, enhancing prototype fidelity and functionality–without writing a single line of code.

Merge components are exact replicas engineers use to develop the final product, complete with styling and interactive properties. This single source of truth means designers and engineers speak the same language and work within the same constraints. Design handoffs are smoother with minimal documentation and explanation because design and development teams pull components from the exact same repository.

Ready to see how code-to-design can revolutionize your design process and enhance cross-functional collaboration? Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

The post Shared Insights, Shared Vision – Democratization and its Impact on Operations appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

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

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

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

What Makes a Good Design Collaboration Tool?

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

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

UXPin Merge

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are three ways to use Merge:

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

This leads us to our next design collaboration tool…

Storybook

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

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

Miro

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

Mural

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

Google Jamboard

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

Slack

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

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

Google Chat & Spaces

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

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

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

Notion

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

Jira

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

Trello

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

Asana

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

ProofHub

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

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

Improve Cross-Team Collaboration with Merge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design thinking exercises are crucial in fostering creative problem-solving, collaboration, and innovation. These exercises engage participants in a structured and iterative problem-solving approach, enabling them to explore, understand, and address complex challenges effectively.

Key takeaways:

• Design thinking exercises are structured activities or methods used to encourage and facilitate collaboration.
• These exercises foster creativity providing structured but open-ended frameworks for problem-solving.
• The list of design thinking exercises is huge; in this article, we elaborate on 22 of them.

Streamline design operations and enhance designer-developer collaboration with UXPin Merge. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

What is the Purpose of Design Thinking Exercises?

The primary purpose of design thinking exercises is to cultivate empathy and a deep understanding of users’ needs and perspectives. By encouraging participants to step into users’ shoes through empathy mapping and user interviews, design thinking helps uncover valuable insights that inform the design process.

These design thinking workshops create a user-centered environment that encourages collaboration and creativity. These activities empower design teams to challenge assumptions, explore diverse perspectives, and approach problems from multiple angles.

Design Thinking Exercises for Empathy and User Research

These design thinking activities enable teams to gain empathy and a user-centric perspective during the research phase, informing the design process and ensuring solutions align with user needs.

• Empathy mapping: Create visual representations of user perspectives by capturing their thoughts, feelings, actions, and aspirations. This exercise helps teams develop a deeper understanding of users’ experiences.
• Persona development: Create fictional user personas representing different user segments based on research and insights. Personas humanize user data, making it easier for teams to empathize and design for specific user groups.
• Customer journey mapping: Visualize users’ end-to-end experience as they interact with a product or service. This exercise helps identify pain points, opportunities, and moments of delight throughout the user journey.

Ideation and Brainstorming Exercises

Ideation and brainstorming exercises are essential to the design thinking process, aiming to generate a range of ideas and possible solutions. Designers use these exercises to foster creativity, drive collaboration, and explore new possibilities.

SCAMPER

SCAMPER is an acronym that stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Reverse. This technique prompts designers to creatively explore different dimensions of a concept or problem, encouraging alternative perspectives and generating fresh ideas.

Brainstorming sessions

Brainstorming is a group activity that encourages free thinking and the rapid generation of ideas. Participants share their thoughts, build on each other’s suggestions, and explore various possibilities without judgment or criticism.

Crazy 8s

Crazy 8s is a fast-paced exercise that challenges participants to sketch eight ideas in eight minutes. This time-constrained activity encourages rapid ideation and pushes participants to think outside the box, resulting in diverse concepts.

Mind mapping and concept mapping

Mind mapping and concept mapping are visual techniques that help organize thoughts and ideas. By creating diagrams or visual frameworks, designers can explore connections, relationships, and associations between different concepts, stimulating further ideation.

Design studio workshops

Design studio workshops unite cross-functional team members to generate ideas and potential solutions collaboratively. Participants share their perspectives, expertise, and insights through structured exercises and facilitated discussions, resulting in more comprehensive and well-rounded concepts.

Worst possible idea

This exercise challenges participants to devise the worst possible ideas or solutions deliberately. By exploring extreme and unconventional concepts, designers can break free from conventional thinking and uncover unexpected insights or alternative paths.

5 Ws and H

The 5 Ws and H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How) is a questioning technique that prompts participants to analyze and explore different aspects of a design challenge. By systematically considering these elements, designers can uncover new perspectives, identify potential gaps, and generate innovative solutions.

Prototyping and Testing Exercises

These prototyping and testing exercises offer valuable opportunities for designers to gather feedback, iterate on ideas, and validate design concepts.

Paper prototyping

Paper prototyping is a low-fidelity technique where designers create rough sketches or wireframe mockups on paper. This exercise lets designers quickly iterate and gather feedback on a design concept’s overall layout, content, and flow.

Designers can use paper prototypes to simulate user interactions and test usability, compiling valuable insights before investing time and resources into digital prototypes.

Role-playing and simulation

Role-playing and simulation exercises involve participants acting out specific scenarios or user personas to understand user needs and behaviors better. By immersing themselves in the end user’s perspective, designers can empathize with their experiences, identify pain points, and uncover opportunities for improvement.

Wizard of Oz testing

Wizard of Oz testing is a technique where designers simulate the functionality of an interactive system while manually controlling it behind the scenes. This methodology allows designers to test user interactions and gather feedback without investing time and resources in developing a fully functional prototype.

By creating the illusion of an automated system, designers can observe user behavior, validate assumptions, and refine the design based on real-time feedback.

Collaborative Exercises for Teamwork and Co-creation

Collaborative prototyping

Collaborative prototyping involves creating prototypes to test and validate design concepts within a day. Team members work in parallel on a single digital whiteboard and then collaborate using a design tool to build a prototype. By the end of the day, the team has a basic prototype to start the iterative process of prototyping and testing.

Co-design sessions

Co-design sessions bring together multidisciplinary team members and stakeholders to actively participate in the design process. These collaborative exercises foster teamwork and co-creation by leveraging the diverse perspectives and expertise of the participants. 

By involving various stakeholders in the design process, co-design sessions facilitate shared understanding, generate innovative ideas, and ensure that the final design reflects the collective input and insights of the team.

Collaborative sketching

Collaborative sketching involves team members collectively sketching ideas and concepts on a shared surface or whiteboard. This exercise encourages open collaboration and rapid idea generation.

By visually expressing their thoughts, team members can communicate ideas more effectively, stimulate creativity, and spark discussions. Collaborative sketching promotes a sense of ownership while fostering teamwork.

Storyboarding and visual storytelling

Storyboarding and visual storytelling exercises help teams convey design ideas and concepts in a narrative format. This technique involves creating illustrations or images that depict user interactions, scenarios, or journeys.

Storyboarding allows teams to visualize the user experience and identify gaps or opportunities in the design. Teams can communicate complex ideas, align design directions, and create engaging user experiences.

Design charrettes

Design charrettes are intensive collaborative workshops where team members solve design challenges within a set timeframe. These super-efficient sessions encourage active participation, foster creativity, and promote collective problem-solving.

Design charrettes often involve brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and iterative design exercises. By engaging in focused and time-constrained collaborative activities, teams can generate ideas, explore design alternatives, and make significant progress in a short period.

Design Thinking Exercises for Reflection and Learning

Rose, Thorn, Bud

The Rose, Thorn, Bud exercise is a reflection activity that encourages participants to share positive aspects (roses), areas for improvement (thorns), and potential opportunities (buds) in a given project or experience.

Rose, Bud, Thorn helps teams identify strengths, address challenges, and explore new possibilities with a structured framework for reflection. The exercise enables team members to learn from past experiences and apply those insights to future iterations or projects.

Post-it voting

Post-it voting is a simple and effective technique to gather insights and prioritize ideas within a group. Participants write their ideas or suggestions on individual sticky notes and then vote on the most valuable or relevant ones. 

This exercise promotes active participation and empowers team members to have a voice in decision-making. Post-it voting helps teams identify popular ideas, build consensus, and focus efforts on the most impactful concepts.

Four Ls

The Four Ls exercise (Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed for) provides a structured framework for reflection and feedback gathering. Participants share what they liked, learned, lacked, and longed for in a project or experience. 

The Four Ls encourages constructive feedback, helps identify areas of improvement, and uncovers growth opportunities. The exercise promotes open dialogue and creates a safe space for team members to reflect on their collective experiences and identify ways to enhance future outcomes.

Retrospective exercises

Retrospective exercises are reflective activities conducted at the end of a project or iteration to evaluate the team’s performance and identify areas for improvement. 

These exercises include team discussions, storytelling, timeline mapping, or even gamified approaches like “sailboat retrospective” or “stop, start, continue.” 

Retrospectives foster a culture of continuous improvement by providing a dedicated space for teams to reflect on their successes, challenges, and lessons learned. These exercises enable teams to optimize processes, enhance collaboration, and evolve their practices.

Scale DesignOps With UXPin Merge

One of DesignOps’ biggest challenges is Merging design and development. These teams use different tools, speak different languages, and work with different constraints.

UXPin Merge aims to bridge that gap by bringing code components into the design process to create a Code-to-Design workflow. Designers and developers work with one component library from a single repository, creating a single source of truth across the organization.

This single source of truth eliminates many design system challenges, requiring fewer resources for product teams to scale and deliver products faster and with minimal errors or rework.

Scale your DesignOps–not your design team–with the world’s most advanced end-to-end design tool. Visit our Merge page to request access.

The post 22 Creative Design Thinking Exercises to Bring Your Team Closer Together appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

UX designers must collaborate effectively with various teams, departments, and stakeholders to align design with business goals, streamline processes, and create better products that meet user needs and expectations.

When UX designers become effective communicators and collaborators, they enhance their networking skills and contribute to creating exceptional user experiences–emphasizing the importance of UX within an organization.

Streamline and enhance cross-functional collaboration during the design phase of product development process. Create advanced prototypes with built-in interactivity, share them with your team, and execute design handoff without switching between tools. Visit our Merge page to learn more about this technology.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

Importance of Cross-Functional Collaboration for UX Designers

As product development becomes increasingly complex, UX designers must work closely with various teams within an organization to ensure a seamless, user-centric experience. Effective collaboration helps align the design with business goals, streamline processes, and create successful products that meet user needs and expectations.

Goals and benefits of effective collaboration within an organization:

• Accelerated product development: Collaborative teams can work more efficiently, reducing time to market and improving responsiveness to user demands.
• Enhanced innovation: Diverse perspectives from cross-functional collaboration foster creativity and lead to innovative solutions.
• Improved decision-making: Informed decisions can be made with input from multiple stakeholders, leading to better outcomes, fewer design problems, and preventing rework.
• Greater adaptability: Collaborative teams can more effectively respond to changes in user needs or market conditions, ensuring the product remains relevant and competitive.
• Higher employee engagement: Collaboration fosters a sense of ownership, camaraderie, and job satisfaction, resulting in increased productivity and reduced turnover.

How Organizational Structures Impact Cross-Functional Collaboration

Here are four typical UX team structures and how they impact cross-functional collaboration for designers:

• Centralized design team structure: Limited exposure to other teams may lead to silos, making it difficult for designers to understand each project or department’s unique requirements and constraints.
• Embedded design team structure: Designers may become too focused on their specific project or department, potentially losing sight of the organization’s larger design goals and consistency.
• Decentralized design team structure: With design teams dispersed throughout the organization, coordinating efforts and maintaining design consistency can be challenging, leading to potential misalignments and inconsistencies.
• Contractual design team structure: Contract designers may not have the same level of access to resources, knowledge, or communication channels within the organization, making it challenging to collaborate with internal teams and stakeholders effectively.

Who Do Designers Collaborate With?

To achieve optimal results and foster innovation, UX designers must collaborate with various organizational stakeholders. Understanding each role’s contribution to the product development process is essential for effective collaboration.

Key collaborators for UX designers include:

• Product Managers: Aligning design goals with product strategy, prioritization, and overall business objectives.
• Developers: Working closely to ensure design implementation is accurate and efficient while considering technical constraints and possibilities.
• Marketing Teams: Collaborating on user research, personas, and user journeys to enrich user data and create targeted, impactful marketing campaigns.
• Sales Teams: Gather valuable feedback and insights on customer needs, preferences, and pain points to inform design decisions.
• Customer Support Teams: Utilizing their direct contact with users to address issues and gather feedback that helps improve the product experience.
• Quality Assurance Teams: Ensuring the design meets usability, accessibility, and performance standards before the product launch.
• Executive Stakeholders: Communicating design goals, progress, and results to gain buy-in and support from organizational decision-makers.

The DesignOps Impact on Cross-Functional Collaboration

DesignOps (Design Operations) is a strategic approach to streamlining organizational design processes and workflows. It optimizes resources, tools, and communication among design teams, stakeholders, and other departments. By implementing DesignOps, organizations can foster a collaborative environment that supports creativity, innovation, and efficiency, ensuring that design teams can deliver high-quality, user-centric products.

How DesignOps fosters communication and teamwork

DesignOps plays a crucial role in promoting communication and teamwork by establishing clear channels for collaboration, setting expectations, and defining roles and responsibilities.

DesignOps aims to standardize processes, provide tools for effective collaboration, and align design goals with business objectives, bridging the gap between designers, developers, and stakeholders. This alignment enables cross-functional teams to work together seamlessly, leading to better decision-making, improved product quality, and increased innovation.

Implementing DesignOps to improve collaboration

To implement DesignOps effectively, organizations must first assess their current design processes, identify inefficiencies, and establish clear goals for collaboration.

Next, develop a plan that outlines the necessary tools, processes, and communication channels to support effective collaboration. This plan may include regular cross-functional meetings, design reviews, or workshops to foster teamwork and alignment.

Organizations should monitor the success of DesignOps implementation by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), such as project timelines, product quality, and employee satisfaction. By continuously refining and adjusting the DesignOps approach, organizations can create a collaborative culture that drives product success.

The Role of Design Systems in Cross-Functional Collaboration

How design systems streamline collaboration

Design systems streamline cross-functional collaboration by providing a centralized, comprehensive, consistent set of guidelines, components, and patterns. A shared design language enables designers, developers, and other team members to work cohesively and efficiently, eliminating miscommunication and reducing the need for repetitive tasks.

Design systems promote a consistent user experience across products and platforms and foster a unified brand identity. By leveraging a design system, teams can focus on brainstorming, innovation, and problem-solving, resulting in better outcomes and user experiences.

Establishing and maintaining a design system within an organization

It’s essential to involve cross-functional teams when building a design system. This collaborative approach ensures that the design system meets the needs of all stakeholders and aligns with business objectives. 

Start by documenting existing design components, patterns, and guidelines, then refine them through an iterative process, seeking input from designers, developers, and other team members. 

Once you implement a design system, it’s crucial to keep it up-to-date and relevant by continually evaluating its effectiveness, incorporating feedback, and adapting to the organization’s evolving needs. By prioritizing maintenance and regular updates, the design system will remain a valuable asset that supports cross-functional collaboration and drives product success.

Collaboration at Different Stages of the Design Process

Research and discovery phase

During the research and discovery phase, UX designers must collaborate closely with stakeholders and subject matter experts to gather critical information about the project.

This collaboration provides valuable insights into user needs, business requirements, and industry trends. Additionally, engaging with users and other teams helps designers identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and potential solutions. By fostering open communication and actively seeking diverse perspectives, designers can build a solid foundation for informed decision-making throughout the design process.

Design and prototyping phase

Effective collaboration between UX designers, developers, and other design teams is crucial for creating a cohesive and functional product in the design and prototyping phase.

By working together, teams can ensure that design concepts align with business goals and marketing strategies while addressing technical constraints and feasibility. Open communication channels, regular design reviews, and shared tools facilitate smooth collaboration, enabling teams to iterate on design ideas, address potential issues, and refine the overall user experience.

User testing and validation phase

The user testing and validation phase is critical for ensuring the final product meets user needs and expectations. Collaborating with users, testers, and product managers during this stage helps UX designers gather essential feedback and identify areas for improvement. 

By actively engaging with these stakeholders, designers can incorporate feedback into their prototypes, prioritize revisions, and make data-driven design decisions. This collaborative approach ultimately results in a more user-centric and successful product that aligns with user and business goals.

Design Handoffs and Smooth Collaboration

Importance of effective design handoffs

Effective design handoffs are crucial for ensuring a seamless transition from the design phase to the development phase. A well-executed handoff minimizes miscommunication, reduces project delays, and prevents unnecessary rework. By fostering a clear understanding of design specifications, UX designers and developers can work together more efficiently, resulting in a higher-quality product that meets user needs and aligns with business objectives.

Best practices for successful handoffs

To ensure successful design handoffs, designers and developers should adopt best practices that facilitate communication and collaboration. Utilizing tools and technology, such as design collaboration platforms and version control systems, can streamline the handoff process and reduce the likelihood of errors.

Additionally, clear documentation and guidelines for design specifications, including color palettes, typography, and responsive layouts, help developers understand and implement the intended design accurately. By following these best practices, teams can significantly improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the handoff process.

Building a strong designer-developer relationship

Cultivating a solid designer-developer relationship is essential for successful collaboration throughout the product development process. By fostering open communication, mutual respect, and empathy, designers, and developers can better understand each other’s perspectives, constraints, and goals.

Regular meetings, shared decision-making, and collaborative problem-solving help build trust and rapport between team members, leading to a more cohesive and successful product. By investing in these relationships, organizations can create an environment that encourages cross-functional collaboration and ultimately drives better user and business outcomes.

Tips for Effective Cross-functional Collaboration

• Build trust and rapport with team members: Participate in team-building activities and make an effort to understand each team member’s role, strengths, and challenges to foster a supportive environment.
• Encourage open communication and feedback: Establish regular meetings or touchpoints with team members to share updates, discuss challenges, and provide constructive feedback, fostering a culture of transparency and continuous improvement.
• Leverage collaboration tools and software: Utilize project management, communication, and design collaboration tools (e.g., Trello, Slack, UXPin Comments) to streamline workflows, improve communication, and ensure everyone can access relevant UX resources.
• Continuously improve collaboration skills: Attend workshops, webinars, or conferences focused on collaboration, communication, and teamwork to enhance your ability to work effectively with diverse teams and adapt to different working styles.
• Advocate for UX and users: Share user research findings, insights, and success stories with your team and stakeholders to raise awareness about the importance of user-centered design and demonstrate the value of UX in achieving business goals.

UXPin Merge – The Ultimate Collaboration Facilitator

UXPin Merge enhances designer/developer collaboration by bridging the gap between design and front-end development with a single source of truth for your product’s design system.

By bridging this gap, UXPin Merge facilitates better communication and collaboration because everyone “speaks the same language” and works within the same limitations and constraints defined by the design system and the product’s code.

Streamline your product development process and enhance team collaboration with a single source of truth from UXPin Merge. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

The post A Guide to Cross-Functional Collaboration for Designers appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Users should know where they are

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

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

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

Make user interfaces consistent and aesthetically pleasing

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

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

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

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

Reduce the need to read, wait or memorize

“If you make me read, I leave.”

“If you make me wait, I leave.”

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

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

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

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

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

Prevent errors and make actions reversible

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

Example:

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

Enable experienced users and accommodate new users 

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

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

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

Use these usability principles to improve product design

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

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

The following article is written by UXPin’s developer, Robert Kirkman, who shares how UXPin Merge makes the design handoff easier from both (a developer and designer) perspectives.

Once the prototypes are ready for production, the designer hands them off to developers. Such a process can be troublesome – the right tool stack being a part of that. There are quite a few design tools that help with design handoff, but what’s the difference between them when handing off prototypes to the developer?

One of the major differences between popular design tools is their approach to the final product of the designer’s work – the prototype of the product. Some of them render prototypes to vector graphics, while others to code. Let’s explore it.

With UXPin Merge, designers can build fully-functioning interactive prototypes with the exact components used in the final product. It syncs fully coded components from a GitHub repository or Storybook to UXPin’s editor. See how UXPin Merge can make you release coherent products. Request access to Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

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The Handoff Limitations of Vector-Based Design Tools

Here is a prototype that is going to be handed off from the designers to the developers. Let’s say that it is created in a vector-based design tool. It means that all the components are vector based while the interactions only mimic code.

Recreating UI components

Let’s focus on components first. Some of them might be new, which means that the developer has to build them from scratch. Others are existing components that this engineer may need to modify.

Developing interactions

When getting a prototype built in a vector-based design tool, the interactions might not even exist in the code, so the developer has to create them, or else, call for more designer-developer meetings to understand exactly what is needed and manage expectations.

Preparing design system

This is a system where designers and developers are creating the source of truth for a design system. They are the ones creating the documentation of the reusable master components, and how interactions should work.

Is such design handoff efficient?

This approach works but it might be a bit frustrating, time consuming and tedious. Not everyone will notice that it’s broken or feel an urge to fix it. They don’t have to do that. But, is this the best way to run things?

If you look at it from the perspective of what more can we do to make this better for both designers and developers, I think there is a lot we can discuss. This approach has issues based on where the source of truth is coming from, which is the vector-based documentation and what is handed off to the developers.

What Does Design Handoff Look Like with UXPin Merge?

We’ve taken this perspective of what we can do better during the developer handoff when we were creating UXPin Merge.

No longer are you designing with vector-based components and mimicked code interactions. You’re actually designing with live React components. You can copy and paste the components’ code into your application.

Imagine if the documentation was created by the designer and developer in tandem but the single source of truth for component design and interaction was the actual component code itself. Meaning when the designer is creating prototypes, they are using components that have already been coded, in a live production-like environment with real components.

The components have all the design tokens, interactions and editable properties already defined. Finally, when the prototype is made you can handoff the component code iself.

How Does Handoff with Merge Help Developers?

Imagine how much time is saved when you don’t have to imagine or have meetings with the designer to understand what components they’ve used or what interactions they’ve designed.

The developer handoff is simple, they give you a prototype, you copy and paste the JSX code, which includes the components, component properties and their coded interactions that already exist in the source code.

This is possible because the source of truth is the code itself, the source code.

The only component properties the designer can edit and how they can edit are specified in the source code by the developer, so no unexpected designs are handed your way.

If the designer wants a new interaction added, new properties or changes in the styling of something, they can explain to the developer, then change the source code. There’s no more guessing or wasted time in unnecessary meetings.

How Does It Help Designers?

This sounds great for developers but designers often feel that when they are given components with limited properties to design with, it’s limiting their creativity, right? I don’t believe so, so let me explain.

Imagine playing and designing cool spaceships or castles with your lego back in the day with your friends, or maybe now and alone. No judgement here – lego is cool at any age. You’re all given the same pre-built building blocks, how they connect to each other and how you can use them are already defined and yet each person can create an amazing spaceship, completely different from all the others.

Instead of focusing your creativity on making building blocks and then figuring out how to use them, you’re purely focusing on the latter. Imagine having to create the lego blocks first and figure out how they are meant to work, then build a spaceship.

That’s insane and yet that’s the current accepted state of designing prototypes.

Yeah, I understand designers have to create the components initially with both vector components but developers have a harder time with them. Whereas if you’re using code-based components, both parties only have to create it once, so we’re all happy.

It leaves designers more time to spend on other super cool tasks instead of continuously making adjustment meetings with developers.

Prototype Developer Handoff Using Merge

For the prototype shown earlier, let’s start with copying the JSX code from the MergeHeader component, created by the designers into our React application, exactly how the developer handoff will work.

As the source of truth is from the source code itself then you can just copy and paste, with a few adjustments such as adding data to objects and the component imports, then you’re ready to view your app in the browser.

Now, all that’s left to do is the same with the rest of the prototype… and VOILÀ! You have a fully working production React app, within minutes, exactly the same as the designer made.

So, in the end, which design process do you think is better?

Improve Design Handoff With UXPin Merge

UXPin Merge can help you improve a lot more than just the handoff process. Visit our Merge page to discover more benefits of designing in code and request access to start the integration process. Go to our documentation to read more about integrating Merge with your organization’s design system components.

The post Design Handoff: What it Looks Like with UXPin Merge appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

To deliver successful outcomes, design project management incorporates several key UX functions, including creative direction, UX design, DesignOps, and design leadership.

This article explores the design project management discipline, a manager’s skills, relevant tools, and the five stages from initiation to final delivery.

Achieve better results during the design process with high-quality, interactive prototypes using UXPin Merge. Learn what makes this technology stand out among other design tools. Visit our Merge page.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

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What is Design Project Management?

Design project management oversees the design process for digital product development projects, including resource allocation, task delegation, goal setting, stakeholder reporting, and other project-related functions.

Design project management functions similarly to traditional project management, but managers must understand design thinking, UX research, and user experience principles to implement effective plans and strategies.

5 Design Project Manager Skills

Here are five essential skills every design project manager must have.

UX Design

UX Design is one of the skills unique to design project managers vs. regular project managers. This knowledge helps define a realistic roadmap and project timelines, allocate resources effectively, and assign tasks to the right team members. These UX design skills also help design project managers communicate with stakeholders.

UX design skills can be acquired on a job or formally via UX design degrees.

Technical understanding

While design project managers don’t have to learn code, it’s important to have a foundational understanding of the product’s framework and technical limitations. Technical skills help when collaborating with engineering teams and stakeholders and articulating the impact of missed deadlines to designers.

Communication

Design project managers must be excellent communicators, capable of communicating and collaborating with team members at every level of the organization. They must facilitate design and cross-functional meetings, often bridging the gap between designer/engineer communications–further reiterating the importance of foundational UX and technical proficiency.

Collaboration can be facilitated with the right tools. Read about: Top Design Collaboration Tools.

Leadership

Leadership is a significant part of any project management role. Design project managers must often motivate and mentor project team members to complete challenging work to tight deadlines. They also play an essential role in conflict resolution within the project and, therefore, must be someone the team respects as an unbiased mediator.

Resource management

Design project managers are responsible for a project’s due dates, deliverables, budget, and team members. They must understand how to manage these resources and implement corrective actions with contingencies when things don’t go according to plan.

Design Project Management Frameworks and Methodologies

Design project management frameworks don’t differ too much from regular project management. Here are five common frameworks used for design projects.

Agile

Agile is an iterative project management methodology with shorter planning cycles, flexible to changes (market, product, tech, etc.), work-in-progress (WIP), and vaguely outlined project goals. This flexibility makes Agile popular for digital product development, where new technology and trends can influence the direction of a project.

Scrum

Scrum is an Agile framework that divides a complex project into digestible short-term goals or sprints. These sprints vary between 2-4 weeks, where teams iterate over a single problem to find the best solution.

Kanban

Kanban is a transparent framework that uses a kanban board with columns or sections to visualize a project and its tasks. Kanbans typically have three columns:

1. To-do
2. Doing (work in progress/WIP)
3. Done

Team members move tasks through these sections as they start and end each one. In some instances, the project manager may add additional columns–for example, “in review,” “QA,” “backlog,” etc.

Lean UX

Lean UX is a collaborative outcomes-based framework focused on conducting many experiments during the design process to solve a specific problem. Designers must deliver a solution that offers maximum value without “nice to have” features.

Waterfall

Waterfall is a sequential methodology with five static phases:

1. Requirements
2. Design
3. Implement
4. Control
5. Closure

The aim is to complete each phase before moving to the next. Waterfall is a rigid project management method with no room for error or iteration. PMs typically use waterfall when a project’s budget, requirements, and scope are clearly defined, reducing the need for flexibility.

Design Project Management Software

Design teams use project management software and various design tools to complete projects.

Project management tools

Project management software is vital to define tasks, manage workflows, and track progress in a centralized repository. Common project management apps used by creative teams include:

• Trello
• Asana
• Notion
• Wrike
• Monday.com

Whiteboarding & brainstorming

Designers use whiteboarding tools throughout the design process to collaborate and share ideas. Some popular examples include:

• Miro
• Mural
• Google Jamboard

User research and testing

Research and testing are vital for any design project. Designers use various tools to recruit, schedule, test/analyze, and pay participants. Some examples include:

• Ethnio
• User Interviews
• Userback
• Hotjar

Team communication

Communication is critical to keep team members connect with one another and the rest of the organization–especially in remote work environments. Some examples include:

• Slack
• Google Chat & Spaces
• Microsoft Teams

Design & Prototyping Tools

Design tools allow designers to create user flows, wireframes, mockups, and prototypes. Common design tools include:

• UXPin
• Figma
• Sketch
• Storybook

The Five Stages of Project Management

There are five stages of project management which design projects also follow:

1. Initiation
2. Planning
3. Execution
4. Monitoring
5. Closure

Project Initiation

Design leads and stakeholders review two documents to determine whether they will initiate a design project:

• Business case: outlines the benefits of a project, initiative, or strategy and why the company or department needs it.
• Feasibility study: defines the problem and whether the design project will solve it.

If the organization decides to proceed, they create a project initiation document (PID) which includes:

• The project’s scope and goals
• Constraints
• Budget
• Risk assessment
• Key stakeholders
• Controls and reporting
• Deadlines and delivery
• Design Brief

Project Planning

Following the PID and design brief, the design project manager and various stakeholders define the project’s roadmap, including scope, goals, tasks, schedule, and resources.

A typical design project plan will include:

• Available resources, including time, budget, and labor
• Roles and responsibilities
• Project milestones and objectives
• KPIs
• Reporting intervals
• Risks and contingencies
• Project tools and communication methods
• Project deliverables, file formats, and delivery method (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.)

Project Execution

A “kickoff” usually starts a project where the entire team and stakeholders gather to discuss the problem the project must solve and relevant deliverables. The design team begins working according to the project framework and assigned responsibilities.

Project Monitoring

Monitoring is the project manager’s primary responsibility and runs parallel to execution. The PM monitors KPIs, budgets, and tasks, ensuring the project stays on track while paying close attention to potential scope creep. PMs also meet with stakeholders for regular reporting and updates.

Project Closure

Project closure occurs when the design team is ready for the design handoff. In some cases, stakeholders might dissolve the project due to unforeseen circumstances.

Some examples of design project closure tasks include:

• Design handoff to engineers
• Completing quality assurance or UX audit
• Archiving UX deliverables for future reference
• Canceling any supplier contracts–i.e., software subscriptions, contractors, etc.
• Presenting the final budget and report to stakeholders
• Releasing team members

Improve Design Project Delivery with UXPin

Prototyping and testing are integral to every design project. Designers must iterate fast to deliver within timeframes while ensuring they solve the project’s core problem according to the design brief and users’ needs. Unfortunately, traditional image-based design tools lack the fidelity and functionality designers need to achieve this successfully.

UXPin Merge is a code-based design tool bridging the gap between designers and engineers. Designers can build fully functioning prototypes using interactive components pulled from a design system’s repository.

This component-driven prototyping methodology allows designers to iterate faster while scaling the design process. PayPal proved this concept on an enterprise level when the internal UX team switched to UXPin Merge in 2019. Now, PayPal’s product teams complete 90% of design projects 8X faster than experienced UX designers could previously with traditional design methods.

“UXPin Merge enables us to perform this “snap-together” type design. We provide product teams with components they can drag and drop to build user interfaces. Product teams create layouts with fixed margins and components, so everything looks and works as it should. Designers didn’t have to police anything or step in to design products.” – Erica Rider, UX Lead EPX at PayPal.

Better quality prototypes improve testing

With Merge’s fully functioning components, designers can build prototypes indistinguishable from the final product. These high-quality prototypes allow designers to get actionable results from user testing and meaningful feedback from stakeholders.

Smoother design handoffs

The transition from design to development is seamless with UXPin Merge because designers and engineers use the same component library from the same repository.

Front-end engineers install the design system’s package and copy prototype layouts from UXPin. UXPin Merge renders JSX for each component which devs can view in Spec Mode.

“With this new UXPin approach, we’re seeing a more collaborative, integrative design process. Rather than separating design, prototyping, and development, UXPin allows us to create an integrated flow where we engage engineering and product teams throughout the process. As a result, the product’s final quality has improved dramatically.” – Erica Rider, UX Lead EPX at PayPal.

Enhance your design project management with the world’s most advanced design tool. Visit our Merge page to find out how to get started with revolutionary technology.

The post Design Project Management 101 – Methods, Tools, and Necessary Skills appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Just completed the final iteration of your prototype? Great! Let’s send the design to the development team, so they can translate it to code. Here the question pops up: is design to code really the best direction you can hope for? Actually, there’s a second model of working: pushing code to design and working with coded UI components.

In this article, we will discuss design-to-code model and why design teams cannot eliminate inconsistencies and lack of collaboration without changing their tools. Luckily, with UXPin Merge, designers still enjoy an intuitive design tool’s user interface; all that changes is what’s behind the components that they use for prototyping.

Ready to experience code-to-design technology? Request access to UXPin Merge and obtain a single source of truth between design and development. Read more about UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

Design to Code 

Design to code describes a typical product development process. Designers use design and prototyping tools to design user interfaces and hand these off to developers to code.

Over the years, the design-to-code process has evolved, but there is still a big gap between design and development. Designers still create static vector user interfaces, which engineers must translate into code.

Due to the lack of fidelity and functionality, design teams must include documentation, annotations, and explanation about what designs and prototypes are supposed to do.

Many designers use GIFs and videos to demonstrate animations and transitions because their tools lack interactivity, which requires significant time and resources. It also fragments design files and documentation, confusing developers and stakeholders.

Read more about it in our article about image-based vs. code-based tools.

Benefits of design to code

The design-to-code process is comfortable for designers and engineers because it allows each party to work with familiar tools, workflows and using familiar vocabulary that’s comprehesive to them.

Design tools are built for ease of use and speed. Experienced designers can create a screen mockup really fast using an image-based design tool.

Limitations of design to code

Unfortunately, the limitations outweigh the benefits–which is why so many companies seek ways to improve and update their design processes.

Misalignment between design and development

Fidelity and functionality are massive limitations with current design-to-code workflows. Image-based prototypes don’t look or function like the end product. Even with documentation, annotations, and handover meetings explaining prototypes, designers still complain that engineers haven’t met their expectations. Conversely, engineers struggle to articulate technical limitations to designers, creating friction.

Design system challenges

Even with high-quality design systems, design to code creates challenges for handoffs, scalability, and maturity. The design system team must manage two design systems:

• UI kit for designers
• Component library for developers

Additionally, they must maintain documentation for both systems.

Describing this workflow as a single source of truth is a fallacy. As the German-based software development agency dotSource points out in this article, 

“Most design system releases require updating in at least three places:

1. The design system’s codebase (component library)
2. The design team’s UI kit (design tool)
3. The design system’s documentation

Instead of a “single source of truth” that gives “three single sources of truth” for every UI component–this seems counterintuitive and increases errors. If the design system’s update process and technologies don’t align, the team ends up with redundant work because a single change requires three updates.”

Duplicated work

When engineers get the final version of design, they need to translate it to code. Thus, their work takes much longer than it could if the team didn’t need to push design to code.

Code to Design

Code-to-design is a workflow pioneered by UXPin using Merge technology.

Designers still use a design tool with the same familiar UI and features, but the designs render production-ready code instead of vector graphics.

Many design tools try replicating this system with plugins and extensions, but the code is rarely usable for engineers. Merge is different because it syncs components from a design system’s repository to UXPin–engineers can use the code because they wrote it.

Designers use the same component library during the design process as engineers use for development.

Benefits of code to design

Single source of truth

Code to design solves many product development problems, but the most significant benefit is a true single source of truth–everyone uses the same component library from the same repository. Any changes to the repo automatically sync to UXPin, notifying design teams of the update.

Merge’s Version Control allows design teams to change to earlier releases and only update an existing project when they choose.

If devs are using UXPin’s Storybook Integration, they update documentation simultaneously with every release. This single source of truth solves many DesignOps challenges, allowing team members to focus on high-level tasks.

Another significant benefit of a code-to-design workflow is smoother design handoffs. Engineers import the component library’s package, add the components, and copy JSX code from UXPin to complete frontend development.

Component-driven prototyping

Merge components appear in UXPin with the same properties and interactivity as the repository. Each component’s Props (Args in Storybook) appear in UXPin’s Properties Panel, allowing designers to make changes according to the design system–i.e., colors, states, sizes, etc.

These ready-made UI elements facilitate rapid component-driven prototyping, where designers simply drag and drop components and patterns to build fully functioning prototypes.

Ultimate consistency with zero design drift

These ready-made components eliminate inconsistencies because everyone uses the same UI library with the same limitations and constraints.

Designers can only change elements via the properties available in UXPin’s Properties Panel. There are no overrides, thus eliminating the possibility for changes, resulting in no drift.

Better governance

These limitations improve governance and design system integrity. The design system team has absolute control over the repo; therefore, everyone must follow the correct procedures to promote new patterns and components.

Scalability and maturity

Merge facilitates the highest design system maturity stage with every team member using the same component library–no designing or developing from scratch to release products. Using this technology, organizations can achieve this level of maturity significantly quicker than following a design-to-code workflow.

With everyone using a single codebase, it’s easier to scale a design system following technological and market changes. Whenever the design system team adds new components, patterns, or templates to the repository, they’re immediately available for the entire product development team.

Enhanced testing

Better prototypes mean better testing. Designers can solve more issues and find better opportunities during the design process with prototypes that accurately represent the final product experience.

Usability participants and stakeholders can interact with these prototypes like they would the final product, resulting in meaningful feedback and actionable data-driven insights.

Limitations

Code to design requires a component library

Code to design can only work with a component library. You can use an open-source UI library if your organization doesn’t have a design system. For example, PayPal’s internal product development team uses a customized Microsoft Fluent UI design system.

Designers can also use Merge’s npm integration to import components from open-source libraries available on the npm registry. This method requires no technical skills. Instead, designers use the Merge Component Manager to import and manage UI elements.

Designers rely on engineers

Code-to-design requires designers and engineers to work closer together. Most organizations have a dedicated design system team, so this won’t be too different from standard governance procedures.

Less flexibility

A code-based design system is less flexible than a UI kit that designers can quickly assemble. Designers have limited or no possibility of changing or manipulating components once uploaded into the design tool. This inflexibility is necessary for design system governance and integrity, but some might argue that it restricts innovation and creativity.

UXPin functions like any other design tool, so designers can develop new ideas and patterns to present to team members. With UXPin Patterns, designers can combine existing design system elements or import open-source libraries to create new components, patterns, and templates.

With this in mind, code-to-design creates more opportunities for creativity and innovation because designers can leverage the best parts of open-source libraries to develop new patterns.

Companies Using Code to Design

Our diverse client base proves that code to design works for multinational enterprises, agencies delivering white-label software, and startups. Here are three great examples of code-to-design in practice.

PayPal

PayPal’s internal UX team revolutionized its product development process by switching to a code-to-design model. Since the switch in 2019, PayPal’s product teams deliver releases 8X faster with no design drift or inconsistencies. PayPal’s new product development process has improved cross-functional collaboration, with everyone taking responsibility for user experience.

Merge also improved PayPal’s prototyping and testing, with better feedback from test participants and 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 at PayPal.

TeamPassword

TeamPassword is a 5-person startup (as of Feb 2023) operating in the highly competitive password management market. The startup doesn’t have a UX team, requiring engineers to prototype and test new releases.

Before switching to Merge, TeamPassword’s engineers would develop each prototype–a time-consuming process for a company with limited resources. In 2022, TeamPassword changed to Merge and synced a custom MUI design system.

Since changing to a code-to-design workflow, TeamPassword’s speed-to-market has drastically improved, and the product has no usability issues or inconsistencies, making the company more competitive.

Ready to overhaul your design-to-code workflow with a revolutionary code-to-design solution? Visit our Merge page.

The post Code to Design vs. Design to Code – Which is Better? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Product thinking is where UX design and product management intersect to deliver outcomes that create value for the organization and its users. There are several frameworks for product thinking, but the underlying concept is always the same–finding a problem-solution fit with clear goals and measurable KPIs for a successful product.

Whether you’re a startup or a multinational organization, developing a product-thinking mindset is crucial for modern product development and its highly competitive landscape. Some variation of what you plan to build already exists. It’s about identifying problems and opportunities competitors haven’t seen or aren’t fulfilling.

Experimentation is core to product thinking and finding the right solution. These experiments require MVPs or prototypes to test ideas and hypotheses. UXPin Merge is a powerful design tool empowering product teams to build high-fidelity, fully functioning prototypes with little or no design tool experience. Visit our Merge page for more details.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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What is Product Thinking?

Product thinking is a problem-solving methodology for developing valuable solutions for user problems. It looks at how users, technology, and business goals intersect to deliver products that benefit customers while generating a positive return on investment.

One of the fundamental aims of product thinking is to ship value rather than features. Instead of, “this is nice; customers will love it,” product thinking forces teams to ask, “Does this solve a problem? Will customers use it? Is it valuable for customers and the organization?”

Product thinking is crucial for extending a product’s lifecycle as product teams explore new problems, users, and markets. 

Product thinking vs. design thinking

Product thinking is a holistic method for understanding users, the market, competitors, business goals, and other influencing factors. When an organization designs a new product, the product management team uses product thinking to understand the problem and decide how to solve it using technology.

Design thinking is more user-centered and focuses on solving a specific user problem. Where product thinking defines what to build, design thinking considers the user experience and solving specific usability issues within a product.

The biggest overlap between these methodologies is that they place users and user problems front and center. The primary differentiator is that product thinking is a broad mindset encompassing multiple factors and complexities, while design thinking focuses on user experience.

The Product Thinking Process

In a webinar with Mind the Product, Merissa Silk outlines a three-part product thinking framework. The framework has many hallmarks of the design thinking process but with a broader scope and a greater emphasis on business goals, the market, and competitors.

Problem

Product managers start by identifying the problem. This first stage looks similar to the empathize and define steps of the design thinking process but looks beyond users to understand the market and competitors. Product teams identify a user problem and analyze it from multiple perspectives to determine the value of solving this issue. 

There are two key research tools product teams use to define the problem:

• User personas: understanding users, their motivations, habits, environment, and problems
• JTBD (jobs to be done): a technique for visualizing markets, customers, needs, competitors, and customer segments from multiple perspectives to identify innovative solutions

There are two templates product teams can use to define problems for stakeholders.

Basic template:

• Description of the problem or pain point
• How will the organization solve the problem?
• What are the KPIs for success?

Advanced template (5W1H):

• What is the problem?
• Who does it impact?
• Why is this problem important?
• Where does the problem occur?
• When does the problem occur?
• How could we solve this problem?

Opportunity

Next, product teams assess how they might solve the problem and what that will mean for the organization and its users, including the size of the opportunity and the return on investment. They also look at the market opportunity and how solving this problem might increase the organization’s market share or attract new customers.

While assessing the opportunity, product teams may build prototypes to test ideas and hypotheses.

Solution

Finally, product managers must analyze the results and decide which solutions solve the problem best. They must consider multiple factors, including:

• Possible ROI
• Constraints–including financial, human resources, and technical limitations
• How does solving this problem align with the current product roadmap
• Does this new product align with organizational goals?

How to Use Product Thinking for Building Products

Ex-Google PM Prashant Nair outlines a Practical Template for Product Thinking. Prashant makes the case that product thinking isn’t linear like many product frameworks. Instead, product teams use “continuous recalibration” as they move through the process and identify opportunities.

Prashant’s product thinking template has eight “boxes,” each with a set of questions to dig deep and stress test ideas.

1. Users
2. Market
3. Solution
4. Build
5. Team
6. Measure
7. Research
8. Iterate

PMs start by going through each box systematically and can jump to any box when an idea or opportunity arises.

Users

The first box is identifying your users and understanding their needs. You might ask:

• Who are the direct users?
• Who are the impacted users?
• What are the users trying to achieve?

These are examples; you might have specific questions about your product or market. This step aims to understand your users deeply, their motivations, problems, goals, needs, wants, etc. Using this data, you can create personas to guide the product thinking process.

Market

The second box looks at the market:

• How are the use cases being met today?
• Do you see any gaps/opportunities?
• Are those gaps big enough worth solving?
• Why are market players not solving this problem?

The primary aim of box two is identifying marketing opportunities and assessing whether there is value in solving them. When you identify a problem, it’s crucial to dig deeper and understand why competitors aren’t addressing this issue.

Solution

The first two boxes are designed to find problems and opportunities. The following two boxes focus on solutions and delivery, which brings us to the third box, Solution:

• Does our solution address the gaps providing value to the users?
• Can we sufficiently monetize the value so that our solution is sustainable?
• Have we uncovered any 10X innovation?

Build

The fourth box looks at building an MVP while identifying any challenges:

• How can we test our solution quickly and cheaply?
• How can we anticipate issues and unblock the team?
• How can we ensure a smooth landing?

The build box aims to test solutions. PMs need a cost-effective way to test hypotheses–i.e., prototyping. During the prototyping phase, product teams might identify a new opportunity, returning them to an earlier box to research further. From there, they might jump back to the build box to iterate on a new idea and so on.

At the same time, PMs must anticipate any issues related to the solution; some examples include:

• Regulations or legal implications
• Organizational limitations and capacity
• Cost and resource challenges
• Technical constraints

Lastly, PMs must look at how they might enter the market with this solution and what that process might look like.

Team

The fifth box looks at the organization’s current resources:

• Do we have the right skills and motivations?
• Are incentives aligned?
• Do we have funding/sponsorship to see this through?

The team box is crucial because if you don’t have the skills or resources, the solution is redundant, and you must return to the drawing board. 

PMs must also assess whether the solution aligns with the organization’s values, goals, and roadmap. You may have an excellent solution, but if it pulls the organization in a new direction, that could have adverse implications.

Measure

The sixth box looks at key performance indicators (KPIs) for success and failure:

• What metrics will tell us if we are heading in the right direction?
• Have we built the instrumentation to track continuously?
• When things fail, do we have enough granularity to know what is failing?

PMs will identify business and product metrics and measure these across multiple demographics like location, age, language, gender, etc.

The most important thing when designing these metrics is granularity–do you have the ability to pinpoint issues? 

Research

Continuous research helps keep product teams in touch with market and competitor changes. Some questions the team might ask include:

• Are we tracking external factors?
• Are we able to generate insights?
• Are the insights making it to the correct forums?

It’s crucial to keep track of external factors like market and competitors because it could render your product redundant. For example, if you’re developing a new crypto product in the United States and the government passes legislation requiring new licenses and oversight, this could increase your time and cost to market. Your company might not have the resources to meet these new requirements.

Any external changes will force PMs to return to earlier boxes to address the new problem and adapt the current solution. Without these research systems in place, PMs risk delivering a product that no longer fits the market or serves users.

Iterate

The final box is Iterate, which is something that applies to all boxes:

• Have we fostered a culture of experimentation?
• Are we making data-driven decisions?
• How fast can we adapt?

Google is one of the world’s leading tech innovations. One way they achieve this is by encouraging experimentation and framing failures as learning experiences, eliminating negative connotations. Innovation and great products come from many iterations. When team members are afraid of failure, they don’t try new things, resulting in mediocre outcomes.

Product teams must measure each iteration using KPIs defined in the Measure box. Those KPIs are crucial for telling team members when something isn’t working and why. They can use this data to make changes and iterate. Data-driven decision-making also informs teams when to abandon an idea altogether.

Product teams must go through each box systematically to create a baseline. Then, when they make a change to one box, they have to recalibrate the other seven to get a holistic view of the product idea.

UXPin Merge – The Ultimate Product Design Tool

UXPin Merge enables UX designers and product teams to build fully functioning prototypes using interactive components. Product teams can iterate on new ideas and test hypotheses faster than traditional design tools or code.

“With UXPin Merge, some of our product managers can build similar one-page prototypes in eight to ten minutes—the same time it takes our experienced designers in UXPin! Before, with our limited resources and designers, a one-page product would take two or three months just to design mockups. Now product teams can design and deliver a product within the same time frame.” Erica Rider, UX Lead EPX at PayPal

Revolutionize your product thinking and build better MVPs with the world’s most advanced design tool. Visit our Merge page for more details.

The post What is Product Thinking and Why it Matters? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

The design culture examples in this article demonstrate how design-driven companies create positive customer experiences and enhance overall business success.

Creating a good design culture starts with understanding user needs, encouraging collaboration between departments, experimenting with new ideas, investing in the right tools, and developing design team rituals.

Examples from J&J, PayPal, Rexlabs, Google, Revolut, and Dave Malouf demonstrate how these strategies can lead to better decision-making, improved efficiency, and increased innovation.

Build fully functioning prototypes that look and feel like the final product for meaningful feedback from user testing and stakeholders. Create a design culture focused on solving more user problems during the design process with accurate prototyping from UXPin Merge. Visit our Merge page for more details.

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What is Good Design Culture?

Good design culture is the practice of proactively incorporating design principles into the product development process. Incorporating these principles takes a lot of work and collaboration. Design avocates must actively work to integrate design culture and user experience values into the company’s culture and daily operations.

These five key factors characterize good design culture:

• Focus on user experience
• Commitment to researching and understanding customer needs
• Advocating for UX and user needs
• Willingness to take creative risks through experimentation
• Encourage collaboration between disciplines

Creating a good design culture requires commitment from leadership and collaboration between different departments within an organization.

The importance of design culture

Good design culture can significantly impact the success of an organization’s products and services. It allows organizations to create products that are more attractive, easier to use, and better suited for customer needs.

How do you Create a Healthy Design Culture?

Here are five things you can do to build the foundation for a strong design culture.

Focus on collaboration: Design is a collaborative process. Creating a thriving design culture starts with fostering an environment that encourages collaboration between all stakeholders.

Celebrate successes: Acknowledge and celebrate big and small achievements for design initiatives. This acknowledgment helps foster a culture of creativity and innovation.

Foster open dialogue: Encourage an open dialogue between designers, developers, and other stakeholders throughout the design process. An open forum for ideas ensures everyone is in sync with the project’s vision.

Encourage experimentation: Give designers the freedom to try new things and experiment. Like successes, teams must celebrate experimentation–succeed or fail. This autonomy encourages creative thinking while celebrating the attempt and what the organization learned rather than the result.

Invest in tools: Investing in the right tools is essential for successful design projects. Designers must have the hardware, software, and resources to create great work and push creative boundaries.

Implement DesignOps: DesignOps can reduce operational burdens and break down silos that adversely impact morale and culture. The DesignOps mindset, which we discuss in DesignOps 101, takes the same strategies and thinking for design projects and applies it to your company structure and work mentality. 

Activities to Enhance Design Culture

Design team rituals

Design culture must flourish within the design department before spreading organization-wide. Design team rituals are an effective way to instill UX principles, foster connections, and create design advocates within the department.

Some design rituals include:

• Design critiques: designers present ideas and designs for feedback.
• Coffee rituals: scheduled informal meetups to keep designers connected.
• Weekly 1:1s: Design leader one-on-ones with team members to discuss their challenges, work in progress, career path, etc.
• Daily stand-ups: an agile exercise where team members share their daily progress and any blockers/challenges.
• Check-in/Check-out: morning check-in and afternoon check-out rituals foster communication and allow designers to ask for help if needed.

Design sprints

Design sprints foster a culture of experimentation, collaboration, and rapid prototyping. These intensive, focused sessions encourage a diverse team to solve problems using design thinking principles.

Including participants from different departments creates more design advocates while spreading design thinking and user experience principles across the organization.

Design thinking workshops

Design thinking workshops provide an opportunity for non-designers to learn about and practice design thinking methodologies. These workshops encourage a culture of empathy and problem-solving, which are core UX values.

Participating in design thinking workshops teaches team members how to approach problem-solving and innovation with a user-centered mindset, helping to promote design culture within the organization. Design teams can leverage this organizational mindset to encourage cross-functional collaboration for developing ideas for new products and features.

Invite team members and stakeholders to user testing

User interviews and testing are fantastic opportunities to humanize users and create empathy. Usually, only designers and researchers see how users struggle with problems, leaving other departments and stakeholders to question design decisions.

Bringing these parties into user interviews and testing sessions allows them to witness problems firsthand and how design teams use design thinking to solve them.

Design Culture Examples From Six Leading Organizations

Design culture through education at J&J

J&J debuted its design system at a “Lunch & Learn” session where the design team demonstrated how they create interactive prototypes using UXPin Merge.

J&J’s team hosts regular Lunch & Learn sessions where they discuss interactive prototyping and encourage team members and stakeholders to develop their own ideas using anything from basic sketches to high-fidelity prototypes–depending on their available tools and skills.

When team members have a concept to test, they bring it to designers to prototype using the organization’s design system and UXPin Merge. This educational process encourages everyone at J&J to develop product concepts, creating a diversity of ideas and more possibilities for innovation.

DesignOps 2.0 at PayPal

In 2019, PayPal completely reinvented its internal product development process using UXPin Merge. The org’s DesignOps 2.0 creates a single source of truth with UXPin Merge while bringing design and development into a single iterative process.

DesignOps 2.0 educates product teams and engineers about user experience and user-centered principles. Now, everyone in the product development team shares accountability for user experience, including a custom tool to measure UX success in delivering products.

Through DesignOps 2.0, PayPal’s small team of designers has increased their sphere of influence and developed a UX mindset for everyone in the product development process.

Designing a Design Culture at Rexlabs

Yolanda van Kimmenade, a Senior Product Designer at Rexlabs, describes how she and her design team designed a design culture at the software development agency.

Yolanda and her team started by defining the values and behaviors they believed were important to them and the organization, including:

• Collaboration
• Inclusivity
• Continuous learning
• Open communication
• Giving and receiving feedback

Next, Rexlabs’ designers created systems and processes to support these values and behaviors, which included:

• Establishing a shared language and set of tools for communication
• Setting up regular check-ins and feedback sessions
• Creating a system for sharing knowledge and resources within the team

Yolanda emphasizes that design culture isn’t static. The design team must revisit and adjust the culture as the organization and products evolve. Rexlabs’ designers created a positive and productive work environment by continuously aligning their culture with their goals and values.

Rexlabs’ design team spread these values through a design ritual called “Scribbles.” 

“We meet every Wednesday for ‘Scribbles’ — alternating in-person and remote meetups. We discuss topics of interest, give each other feedback on designs (e.g., user research insights, user flows, or WIP designs), and have a delicious coffee…During one Scribbles session, the topic turned to our frustrations about processes that needed improvements. Anton Babkov (our head of design and CEO, who gives us business insights and support), suggested we document these challenges and decide how we’re going to tackle them.” – Yolanda van Kimmenade, Senior Product Designer at Rexlabs.

This discovery from Rexlabs’ CEO was made possible by the company’s strong design culture that welcomes giving and receiving feedback.

Building a Better Design Culture at Google

Mike Buzzard, a Design Manager at Google, argues that a strong design culture leads to increased innovation, customer satisfaction, and overall business success.

Mike suggests three key strategies for developing a healthy design culture:

• Establish clear design principles and apply them throughout the company, so team members understand the organization’s design philosophy and how to make design decisions
• Invest in ongoing design training and education for all team members to foster continuous learning and improvement
• Encourage collaboration and communication to create a sense of community, so that team members feel invested in the success of the organization’s design efforts

“I do think Google can become more design-oriented. Signals of that would be in the vocabulary engineers use when talking to designers about their work, or even just a top-down, bottom-up sort of comfort in understanding how design influences the company’s products and culture… The number of people working in UX at Google has multiplied over the last 5 years—that magnitude of growth is partly why we created a team dedicated to UX community and culture, to ensure the health and success of UX across all of Google.” – Mike Buzzard, Design Manager at Google.

Creating a strong design culture at Revolut

In a 2020 Medium article, Lucas Vallim discusses how a strong design culture can lead to better decision-making, improved efficiency, and increased innovation.

Lucas says you must first understand the role of design within the organization and how this fits into the overall business strategy. Conversely, the company must prioritize design and invest in design talent and resources. Additionally, the company should foster a collaborative and inclusive design process and encourage open communication and feedback.

Lucas argues that building a design culture on these values helps the organization better understand its customers while creating more effective and satisfying products.

Using Holistic DesignOps for enterprise design culture

In an informative UXPin webinar, long-time DesignOps advocate Dave Malouf describes how a holistic DesignOps strategy creates a design culture beyond the design team.

Dave argues that the foundation for a holistic design culture starts with communication and collaboration, which helps everyone in the organization understand design, its principles, needs, areas of influence, and potential.

Dave describes three pillars for holistic DesignOps:

• Delivery operations: how to get things delivered by optimizing efficiency, velocity, and cost reduction.
• Practice operations: The people, spaces, methods, and tools that make it possible for designers to design.
• Business operations: Streamlining organizational bureaucracy from finance, IT, procurement, compliance, legal, etc.

Revolutionize your design workflows and bridge the gap between design and development with the only design tool built to solve modern DesignOps challenges. Discover Merge.

The post 6 Design Culture Examples and How to Create Your Own appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Building a design system is expensive. Whether an organization develops from scratch or adopts an open-source design system, theming is crucial for customization. This customization could be as simple as creating a dark mode or a multi-brand design system to accommodate a product suite.

Design tokens and variables are crucial to design system theming, allowing teams to make significant, global changes by editing a few lines of code–sometimes a single digit or letter.

Sync your multi-theme design system to UXPin using our Git Integration for React component libraries. Visit our Merge for Git page for more details and how to request access.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

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What is Design System Theming?

Design system theming is a process of making a design system flexible to stylistic changes. These changes are made possible through design tokens or stylesheet variables, where engineers make a single change to impact the entire cross-platform ecosystem.

Some examples where organizations use design system theming include:

• Dark mode: essential for accessibility in modern product development to accommodate users with visual impairments.
• White labeling: open-source design systems use theming to allow users to customize the component library.
• Multi-brand design systems: organizations with a suite of products use theming to change a single design system rather than develop multiple component libraries.
• Marketing campaigns: theming allows product teams to make stylistic changes for marketing campaigns, like green, red, and white for Christmas, red for Valentine’s Day, or red, white, and blue for July 4th.

What are the benefits of design system theming?

A themeable design system enables organizations to reuse a single design system for multiple products or purposes. For example, MUI is one of the world’s most widely used open-source component libraries. MUI’s theming enables brands to customize the library to meet their specific requirements. So, two or more products using MUI can look completely different.

Theming saves product teams considerable time and resources because it allows them to make many changes with minimal effort. The benefit for organizations is that designers and engineers spend more time on product development than messing with styles or designing and programming from scratch.

How Does a Design System Theme Work?

Products use design tokens or variables to represent a specific property–we’ll use color to explain how design system theming works.

A design system’s color palette typically has several essential colors:

• Primary
• Secondary
• Error
• Warning
• Info
• Success

For websites and web applications, engineers use a six-digit HEX code to define each color. These HEX codes appear many times across multiple components in the design system. If engineers need to make a change, they must find every instance where the HEX code appears and revise it–which could be hundreds, even thousands of changes.

Using variables

Theming provides a global solution for applying these changes. Engineers assign properties to a variable they use in place of fixed values. So, a primary blue value of #1976d2 becomes “primary” or something to that effect, depending on the design system’s naming convention. A button component may look something like this:

<Button color=”primary”>Submit</Button>

If engineers want to make a global change, they change the primary variable, updating every instance where that variable appears in the product’s stylesheets. Instead of hundreds of changes, they make one.

Creating theme stylesheets

To create multiple themes, engineers only have to update the stylesheet with the variables and give it an appropriate name. For example, a multi-brand design system may have three brands, each with dark and light modes, resulting in six different variable stylesheets:

• Brand A Light (brand.a.light)
• Brand A Dark (brand.a.dark)
• Brand B Light (brand.b.light)
• Brand B Dark (brand.b.dark)
• Brand C Light (brand.c.light)
• Brand C Dark (brand.c.dark)

This button component’s code would look the same for every theme, but the primary variable would reference a different color code.

<Button color=”primary”>Submit</Button>

To apply Brand B Light, engineers import brand.b.light into the component’s file and apply it using a theme property.

What Can You Change With Theming?

Theming happens within a product’s stylesheet, meaning you can create design tokens or variables for any CSS properties. Common theming properties include:

• Color palettes
• Typography and font styles
• Spacing and sizing
• Responsive breakpoints
• CSS transitions and animations
• Radii

When to Use Design System Theming?

Should you use design system theming? And how much theming will you allow? You also need to consider factors specific to your product and business, including:

• Framework constraints
• Platform-specific requirements
• Supported tech stack
• Technical requirements and limitations
• Budget and human resources

Dark mode

Most organizations will only use design system theming to switch between dark and light modes. This type of theming should only impact your design system’s color palette.

Designers will need to test how these colors appear across many styles, including:

• Font colors
• Background colors
• Borders
• Shadows
• Gradients
• Icon colors

Color contrast is the most important thing designers must focus on for light and dark modes. Contrast significantly impacts users with visual impairments.

With UXPin’s built-in contrast checker and color blindness simulator, designers can test colors for light and dark modes without leaving the design canvas.

Multi-brand design systems

Multi-brand design systems are another reason organizations use theming. Product teams and engineers need more flexibility than color to meet each brand’s requirements. But greater flexibility impacts more properties, meaning more customization.

For example, one theme might use square corners while another uses rounded ones. They may also use different typefaces and font styles. Changing fonts will impact other properties like padding, spacing, margins, line heights, etc.

Cross-platform design systems

Many devices and operating systems have specific styling, or components products must use. For example, you might want to use the system typography for iOS (San Francisco) and Android (Roboto). Each of these would need a different theme to accommodate the fonts and any additional styling, like padding, sizing, line heights, etc.

White-labeling

Software developers often use white-label design systems to deliver products to multiple customers more efficiently. This design system theming requires a lot of customization to meet many scenarios, platforms, brands, and use cases.

If you’re building a white-label design system, you might want to use variables in place of every value to offer complete customizability and flexibility–i.e., everything has a variable.

Design System Theming Resources

Here are some resources to help with your design system theme:

• The many faces of themeable design systems – Brad Frost
• How to add a theme switcher to Storybook – Storybook Blog
• Creating themeable design systems – Kolby Sisk
• Evolution of theming in NewsKit design system – James Spencer
• Theming in Design Systems – Knapsack

Multi-Theme Design System Prototyping With UXPin Merge

Multi-theme design systems are challenging to develop for engineers but require even more effort for designers. Every theme requires a separate UI kit to use in image-based design tools.

With UXPin Merge, you can sync your multi-theme design system to UXPin’s design canvas, so designers and engineers use the same component library. Any changes to the library, including adding a new theme, automatically sync to UXPin and notify designers of the update–a true single source of truth saving your DesignOps and DevOps teams countless hours of work and collaboration.

Higher-quality prototypes and testing

Theming is currently only available for React with Merge’s Git Integration, which syncs directly to your component library’s repository. Merge components are fully interactive and include properties (via React props) defined by the design system.

Component props appear in UXPin’s Properties Panel so designers can make changes and switch themes with a few clicks. They can also combine components or save multiple versions as Patterns to streamline prototyping and testing by simply swapping Patterns instead of adjusting properties.

These Merge components function as they do in the final product, allowing designers to create exact prototype replicas resulting in accurate, meaningful results during user testing.

Erica Rider, UX Lead EPX at PayPal, describes how UXPin allows her team to iterate faster during testing, “It’s been so helpful for us to have these high-fidelity prototypes built with UXPin Merge. We build high-fidelity prototypes much quicker, and we get immediate feedback after the session. If there’s something we can fix immediately, we make that change before the next participant and get feedback much faster than before.”

Streamlined handoffs

Design handoffs are smoother, almost non-existent with UXPin Merge. Engineers already have copies of every component, so it’s a matter of importing them from the repository, copying JSX changes from UXPin, and replicating the design team’s layouts.

Since switching to UXPin Merge, German-based software developer dotSource enjoys “seamless collaboration between design and development,” including some other key benefits:

• No inconsistencies or design drift
• One change automatically syncs design and code
• Documentation is always up to date

Switch to the only design tool that automatically syncs multi-theme design systems between design and development for a powerful single source of truth to reduce DesignOps burdens while optimizing product development workflows. Visit our Merge for Git page for more details and how to request access.

The post What is Design System Theming? [+ 4 Use Cases] appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

If you’ve ever heard about continuous discovery (CD), then high chances are you associate it with the work of product managers. However, this agile approach to research and project refinement isn’t confined to product people work only. It’s also a critical part of how design teams shape products and create value. 

CD offers a method of discovering and adapting products based on customer feedback, allowing both design and development teams to pursue results that provide value to users. 

Once you have all this feedback, time to check if you can use it to improve your product. UXPin is a collaborative, end-to-end design tool that makes it easy to create interactive prototypes that guarantee the most accurate feedback. Sign up for UXPin trial and design your first prototype right away. Try UXPin for free.

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What is Continuous Discovery? 

Traditional product release involves two main processes: discovery and development/delivery. In the ‘discovery’ phase, product teams decide what to create based on customer needs and pain points. Simply put, you’ll discover what your users need and develop solutions to those problems. 

Over time, however, your customers’ needs and problems may change rapidly. And so, traditional product development doesn’t allow any opportunity space to iterate on existing solutions. 

In continuous discovery, product people and product design teams use ongoing user research and iterations in order to understand and improve the user experience and business outcome. 

It integrates the “discovery phase” into the entire product development process, and makes sure that day-to-day product decisions are guided by user research and validation. 

Within this, insights are continuously discovered so they can be acted on immediately as they change. These include things like new requirements, problems, or a change in user habits. As a result, you can rest assured that products stay relevant and useful to customers.

How Can UX Design Benefit from Continuous Discovery?

Continuous discovery can guide UX design teams to create good products. 

Here’s how.

Lets designers prioritize work to align with users’ changing needs

Many startups suffer from scope creep, where they focus on solutions and features that aren’t relevant to users. After all, it’s difficult to prioritize based on your user’s needs when they change so frequently. 

Instead, why not let your users tell you their up-to-date problems and pain points? By infusing customer feedback and research into your design decisions, you can prioritize work and features to match your customers’ needs.

Recent data can guide your decision-making process and improve prioritization, saving your team plenty of time and resources. You can also prioritize the product backlog based on user feedback.

Build genuinely user-centric products

Engaging with customer feedback regularly helps you understand what your users want from your product. Without regular insight into user pains and expectations, you risk creating products that have no customer value. 

This is especially the case for design teams, where UX designers can get lost in what a product looks like, and focus less on how a user wants to interact with it. 

This can lead to end products that are disconnected from users’ goals – and so customers simply won’t find it useful enough to keep using it. 

Reveal interesting new solutions and features

Continuous discovery can also help you build user-centric products by presenting new solutions and pain points they would have identified in an initial discovery phase.

Design teams will often have a different understanding of their product than customers, and using data and feedback can help reveal interesting ways to solve customer needs. Sometimes, you might go as far as discovering that users have a completely different image of what your product does than product people.

Also, this process may very well uncover features and approaches you wouldn’t have thought of before, resulting in a more creative and resilient product.

Uncover market and competitive opportunities 

When you collect feedback from users, chances are the insights you’ll gain will identify gaps in your new product that direct competitors may provide. 

Staying on top of what your users want from your product can help establish yourself in a crowded market and even uncover new growth opportunities. 

For example, customer interviews uncover that users in a specific industry wish your product had a new feature that would help their workflow, focusing on this pain point may further expose your product to a new target sector. That’s a true power of discovery work.

Keeping track of trends

Continual research can help identify patterns and changes in the way your users behave and interact with your product. Identifying trends is an important step to keeping your product relevant to your core audience. 

Where do these behavioral changes come from? How can you identify them? 

• Users asking for a missing functionality could indicate that your customer’s preferences and needs may have shifted. 
• Shifts in the UX design orthodoxy may change your users’ expectations. For example, if customers are used to interactive experiences from other apps and services, they’d love to see it in your product.

To integrate such customer input into your product roadmap, your UX design team should examine how these shifts and trends impact both user and business objectives.  

Implementing Continuous Discovery

How should your UX design team approach continuous discovery? Here are a few things to include:

Ensure that you have a steady flow of customer feedback

Gaining actionable insights into how your users interact with your product requires comprehensive user feedback. In essence, icorporating user reviews into your design process helps you make better products. 

Recruiting customers to participate in discovery calls or fill out customer surveys is crucial. By planning customer touchpoints, you’ll be able to find out how your product hinders or enables your customers’ goals.

You’ll need a representative sample size for your product development team members to be confident in your insights and implement effective continuous discovery. 

Different users experience different usability issues and user needs. Reach out to a wide variety of customers from different backgrounds, sectors, and locations. 

The best part? Useful customer feedback doesn’t just come from voluntary means. Customer-facing teams such as sales and customer support will find out useful insights every day from both thrilled and disappointed customers. 

Work with these teams to gather a list of users to contact for honest, grounded feedback.

Agree on the roles in the product discovery process

A product discovery team will often involve three departments: 

• Designers
• Developers 
• Product manager

Each member will likely have a different point of view on how to approach the discovery process. We recommend encouraging leaders from all three of these departments to interact with customers. This will give them an accurate view of the user situation. 

As a result,  all teams’ perspectives are taken into account when discussing user feedback, avoiding inefficient silos. These leaders will then discuss the next steps jointly. In the discussion of solutions, they may bring in more members of their respective teams when needed. 

Keep a clear focus on the outcomes you want to achieve

To avoid scope creep, continuous discovery should stay focused on the outcomes and business objectives that you want to meet. 

That’s where defining team goals is so important. We recommend using OKRs (objectives and key results) methodology to keep your team focused on metrics and goals. 

This process guides teams to both identify what the intended objectives are and keep track of progress through real data. 

How can design teams ensure that solutions align with desired outcomes? KPIs, or key performance indicators, outline how you can measure whether a design decision creates business value. 

As you engage in product discovery, keeping your OKRs in mind will help you decide whether a piece of feedback from your discussions with users is critical for achieving your team-level goals and reaching crucial business objectives.

Want to explore how the OKR methodology can guide your team? Read our full guide on design team goals.

Use a prototyping tool that makes continuous delivery easier to implement

The secret to effectively adapting products based on user feedback is using a prototyping tool that allows different departments within a discovery to collaborate on product iterations.

Prototyping is a crucial step in the product development process, and involving development teams, product managers, and more in this step can help iron out any potential issues later down the lifecycle. 

That’s why it’s so important to use a prototyping tool that allows teams to work together collaboratively.

UXPin is a component-driven prototyping tool that lets you build prototypes that act like real products. You create products in the cloud and loop in key team members to ask for comments and revisions. 

This tool helps product teams maintain UI consistency, speed up design handoff, and help ensure that user feedback is instilled into every design decision. Designers can create interactive prototypes to successfully demonstrate your product’s user experience. 

The increased collaboration and information flow afforded by UXPin support teams as they embrace continuous discovery as part of their process.

Prototype User-Centric Products Through Continuous Discovery with UXPin

Continuous discovery ensures that every design decision is laser-focused on improving your user experience and providing solutions to customer pain points. It keeps your digital products relevant and useful to your target user base – especially in our ever-changing digital world. 

To keep up with shifts in consumers’ tastes and expectations, we recommend using this agile and adaptable approach to product development. 

Collaborative prototyping is a crucial part of this step, allowing product discovery teams to shape and craft the user experience to address customer feedback. That’s where UXPin can help. Our all-in-all prototyping tool allows you to bridge the gap between design and development so that teams can build user-centric products together. Get started with UXPin.

The post What is Continuous Discovery and How to Get Started? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.