Healthcare apps are transforming the patient-care paradigm, offering multifaceted benefits for patients and medical professionals. These apps provide real-time health monitoring, instant communication channels, and many functionalities tailored to individual needs. From secure symptom checkers to instant appointment bookings, these apps elevate the healthcare experience, combining technology with wellness. 

Key takeaways:

• Key features of an effective healthcare app include secure messaging, medication tracking, appointment bookings, and interactive symptom checkers.
• Navigating the design challenges of healthcare apps involves addressing regulatory constraints, system integrations, and ensuring stringent data security.Adopting tools like UXPin Merge can optimize the design process, ensuring high-fidelity prototypes that mirror final product functionalities.

Use React components without writing a single line of code to move quicker from healthcare app design to development. Discover UXPin Merge.

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What is a Healthcare App?

A healthcare app is a digital tool designed to address health-related needs, from wearables to mobile and web apps. This mobile app technology is especially significant for on-the-go healthcare solutions. From booking doctor’s appointments to monitoring vital signs, these apps streamline health management processes for patients and healthcare professionals.

Designing a healthcare mobile app is a delicate process, considering the importance of the data it manages. Beyond medical interventions, these apps also promote overall wellness by providing resources for preventive care. 

Medical applications are crucial in bridging the gap between patients and health services. They provide real-time health monitoring, data-driven insights, and efficient communication channels to improve patient outcomes and enhance healthcare efficiency.

What are the Benefits of a Healthcare App?

Healthcare apps have revolutionized the way patients and medical professionals interact, bringing forth a range of benefits that cater to modern-day healthcare demands:

Benefits for patients:

• Immediate Access: No more waiting in queues; patients can book or reschedule appointments in seconds.
• Health Tracking: Seamlessly track vitals, medication schedules, etc.
• Personalized Insights: Get tailored health advice based on real-time data.
• Secure Communication: Safely discuss health concerns with healthcare professionals.
• Digital Records: Access medical histories, prescriptions, and test results anytime, anywhere.

Benefits for providers:

• Efficient Scheduling: Automate appointments, reducing administrative tasks.
• Real-time Monitoring: Oversee patient health metrics as they come in.
• Data-driven Decisions: Use gathered data for more accurate diagnoses and treatments.
• Improved Outreach: Connect with patients, send reminders, or share health information easily.
• Cost-effective: Reduce overhead costs through automated processes and streamlined workflows.

What are Some Features That a Healthcare App Should Have?

The healthcare tech industry is broad, with many features and user interface design possibilities. Here are some features you might consider based on your product’s purpose, user needs, and goals.

Appointment and procedure bookings

• Instant Bookings: Allow patients to schedule, reschedule, or cancel appointments within moments.
• Smart Calendars: Integrate doctor schedules so patients view real-time availability.
• Notification Alerts: Send reminders for upcoming appointments or procedures to reduce no-shows.
• History Tracking: Record past appointments and procedures for easy reference.

Remote consultations

• Video Consultations: Enable face-to-face consultations without physical constraints.
• Secure Messaging: Offer encrypted chat options for patients to discuss health matters privately.
• File Sharing: Facilitate the secure exchange of medical records, lab results, or images.
• Billing Integration: Process payments for online consultations.

Medication Tracking and Reminders

• Digital Prescription Lists: List down medications prescribed with their timings and dosages.
• Timely Alerts: Notify patients when it’s time to take their medications.
• Refill Reminders: Alert patients when they need to refill a prescription.
• Dosage Information: Provide details about each drug, its side effects, and interactions.

Symptom checkers:

• Interactive Questionnaires: Guide patients through questions to evaluate their symptoms.
• Immediate Triage: Based on symptoms, suggest if a user should seek immediate care, consult remotely, or book an in-person visit.
• Integration with Professionals: Facilitate a quick consultation booking if a symptom indicates urgency.
• Educative Content: Provide relevant information about the identified symptoms, potential causes, and preliminary care steps.

What are the Challenges of Designing a Healthcare App?

Healthcare apps offer design teams more challenges for patient and provider-facing interfaces than the average digital product. Designers must navigate the regulatory constraints and complex system integrations. Here are some key challenges to consider and plan for.

Regulatory and Compliance Considerations

Healthcare app design offers many challenges and complexities in processing and storing user data–the most sensitive and protected information globally. Here are some things designers must consider to stay compliant.

HIPAA and Data Privacy:

• Strategy: Prioritize user data safety from day one. Design the app structure so sensitive patient information remains encrypted in transit and at rest.
• Consideration: Understand HIPAA’s guidelines and make the app infrastructure compliant, ensuring that third-party integrations adhere to these standards.

FDA and Medical App Classifications:

• Strategy: Clarify the app’s medical classification, as it sets the foundation for regulatory compliance.
• Consideration: Is the app intended for diagnosis or treatment? Does it influence medication? Answers dictate FDA requirements and oversight.

Global Considerations:

• Strategy: Adopt a globally-aware design stance. Familiarize yourself with varying healthcare rules in targeted regions.
• Consideration: Countries differ in healthcare regulations. An app successful in the U.S. might require modifications for the EU due to the GDPR.

Integrating with existing systems

Healthcare product developers must deal with complex integrations and systems, each with rigid security and restrictions. Here are some of the systems designers must consider and research.

Electronic Health Records (EHR):

• Strategy: Seamless data flow is vital. Ensure the app can effortlessly pull and push data from and to EHRs.
• Consideration: Beyond integration, think about data accuracy and real-time updates. Mobile app users shouldn’t experience information lag.

Pharmacy systems:

• Strategy: Create an intuitive bridge between the app and pharmacy databases, ensuring quick medication data access.
• Consideration: Can users easily order or refill prescriptions? The smoother this process, the more value the app offers.

Insurance and billing platforms:

• Strategy: Financial elements in healthcare can be intricate. Simplify the design to allow straightforward navigation of insurance claims and billing details.
• Consideration: Offer summarized views, detailed breakdowns, and instant support options for financial queries.

Ensuring security and trust

Healthcare apps must have security features and protocols comparable, sometimes stricter, than banking or finance apps. Designers must incorporate features that secure app access while reassuring users their information is safe. Here are some considerations for designing robust healthcare applications.

End-to-end encryption:

• Strategy: Design the app with a security-first mindset. Use robust encryption methods to safeguard patient data.
• Consideration: Every piece of patient information, no matter how trivial, needs protection. Never compromise on encryption.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA):

• Strategy: Incorporate MFA to provide an additional security shield, deterring unauthorized access.
• Consideration: While MFA enhances security, ensure the process remains user-friendly and not overly complex.

Transparent data practices:

• Strategy: Be upfront about how the app uses, stores, and shares data. Design a clear, concise privacy policy and make it easily accessible.
• Consideration: Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. Be open about data practices; users will be more inclined to trust the app.

Accessibility and inclusivity

Accessibility and inclusivity are paramount for healthcare app development because their purpose is to serve everyone. Understanding user needs and limitations is crucial to ensure user interfaces accommodate all user groups.

Implement WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) Standards:

• Strategy: Aim to comply with WCAG 2.1 AA standards as a minimum benchmark.
• Consideration: Utilize accessibility tools like axe or WAVE to evaluate the app’s accessibility levels. Rectify identified shortcomings.

Voice command integration:

• Strategy: Enhance usability by incorporating voice command functionalities, beneficial for visually impaired users and those with motor disabilities.
• Consideration: Integrate with voice recognition platforms like Google’s Speech-to-Text or Apple’s Speech framework.

Captioning and transcripts:

• Strategy: Provide captions and transcripts if your app uses audio or video.
• Consideration: Collaborate with transcription services like Rev or use automated tools like Otter.ai. Ensure accuracy and clarity.

Provide Keyboard Navigation:

• Strategy: Ensure the app is navigable via keyboards for users with motor disabilities.
• Consideration: During development, enforce tab order and keyboard focus rules.

Language and localization:

• Strategy: Consider non-native speakers. Offer multiple language support and ensure clarity in translations.
• Action: Collaborate with localization services. Avoid direct translations–context is crucial.

How to Improve Healthcare Product Design With UXPin Merge

Step 1: UX Research and gathering requirements

Start by understanding the healthcare domain and your target audience. Conduct surveys, interviews, and field studies with end-users and healthcare providers to gather insights. Engage with experts from the healthcare industry for deeper insights. This research will guide the design process, ensuring the app meets user needs and regulatory requirements.

Step 2: Sketching and paper prototyping

Map user journeys, sketch UIs, and create paper prototypes of user flows to develop ideas and insights to guide the digital design process.

Step 3: Digital wireframing in UXPin

Use UXPin’s built-in User Flows library to design the app’s information architecture. Draft a wireframe version of the app’s interface. Map user flows and layouts using UXPin’s Forms and Shapes to identify structure and navigation.

Step 4: Choose a design system that meets your needs

Import React or other JavaScript framework components directly into UXPin using Merge. You can also use one of UXPin’s built-in Merge libraries to begin prototyping immediately, including Fluent UI, Ant Design, MUI, and Material UI.

Using code components during the design process helps maintain UI consistency while streamlining designer/development collaboration.

Step 5: Create high-fidelity mockups

This phase emphasizes refining the app UI to make it intuitive and visually appealing. Transition from wireframes to high-fidelity interactive Merge components. 

Merge creates a drag-and-drop environment with styling (fonts, colors, sizing, etc.) and interactivity (states, APIs, etc.) programmed into UI elements–far better than any UI kit in Figma or other image-based UI design tools. These Merge components mirror those in the final product and ensure your designs align with what’s feasible in development.

Step 6: Interactive prototyping

Implement screen transitions, navigation, animations, and interactivity using UXPin’s Interactions. Set component-level states, styling, and interactivity via UXPin’s Properties Panel. Merge pulls these properties from the component’s props defined in the design system’s repository, so designers and engineers work within the same constraints.

Step 7: Gather stakeholder feedback

Share interactive prototypes with stakeholders to gather feedback. Stakeholders can view and interact with prototypes and annotate feedback using UXPin’s Comments. They can assign comments to specific team members who mark them resolved after appropriate action.

“Our stakeholders can 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 comment directly on the prototypes. UXPin’s comments functionality is great because we can follow along and mark comments as resolved once we address them.” Erica Rider, Product, UX, and DesignOps thought leader.

Step 8: User testing:

Using Merge’s interactive components for testing means users and stakeholders can interact with prototypes like they would the final product. These realistic user experiences give design teams valuable, actionable insights to iterate and improve, allowing them to solve more usability issues during the design process.

Share the interactive designs with a varied group of testers. Capture their feedback to pinpoint areas of improvement, ensuring the healthcare app’s user experience is intuitive and caters to the needs identified during your initial research.

With UXPin’s Mirror app, you can test prototypes on iOS and Android devices to ensure designs meet platform-specific needs and requirements.

Step 9: Design handoff to developers

Document your component usage, design guidelines, and best practices for developers and future projects. Using React components in the design process means devs require less documentation and explanation. UXPin produces production-ready JSX so engineers can copy/paste to start development. This streamlined process paves the way for smoother app development.

UXPin is a full-stack UI/UX design tool with everything design teams need to execute complex projects like healthcare apps. Merge technology enables designers to prototype with code components and get meaningful insights to iterate and improve while enhancing collaboration with engineering teams.

Bridge the gap between design and development to simplify complex interactive digital products with UXPin and Merge technology. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

The post Healthcare App Design in 9 Steps – Overcome UX Challenges for Health Industry appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Internationalization is crucial for startups and companies with global aspirations. If organizations want to succeed in an international market and compete locally, they must create relatable, locally relevant product experiences.

Internationalization and localization go beyond translated text and currency changes. Designing experiences related to users, their cultures, and their environments create the trust necessary to increase adoption and grow in global markets.

Prototyping and testing are vital for delivering positive user experiences for a global market. Sign up for a free trial to explore UXPin’s advanced design, prototyping, and testing features.

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What is Internationalization? 

Internationalization (or what Google calls globalization) is designing and developing digital products to allow language, regional, and cultural adaptations. This flexibility enables companies to adapt products and enter new markets while maintaining the product’s integrity and user experience.

Simple examples of internationalization are language and currency selectors–not specific languages or currency, but the UI design and programming that make it possible. 

The Cuber Shopify Theme uses dropdowns for the store’s internationalization design. Shopify store owners can use these internationalization features to localize their eCommerce store for different countries–i.e., A US-based store providing Mexican Peso and Spanish for a Mexico-based target audience.

This eCommerce example leads us to localization.

What is Localization?

Localization is the process of adapting a product to meet specific market needs, including translation, currency, and cultural changes.

Localization aims to deliver a user experience that’s relevant and relatable–beyond simply changing the language and currency.

For example, it doesn’t snow in New Zealand over Christmas because it’s summer. Referring to snow and keeping warm during December wouldn’t make sense to New Zealanders as it would to Canadians.

Designers must also adapt user interfaces to meet native language markup and structure, like left-to-right (LTR) (i.e., English) vs. right-to-left languages (RTL) (i.e., Arabic, Hebrew).

Legal requirements and compliance

Product teams must also consider compliance for different locales and legislative impacts on content and user data. GDPR, CCPA, and other data privacy acts dictate how products and websites collect, store, and share user information.

Designers must notify customers in these regions about their cookie policy and allow them to opt out of tracking–like this example from Stack Overflow.

Internationalization and Accessibility

Internationalization is vital for accessibility, inclusive design, and making products localizable. W3C provides an overview of i18n (industry standard abbreviation for ‘internationalization’) and how to make products more inclusive for a global audience.

A universal source code base

Product developers must use Unicode for internationalization and architecture. Unicode gives digital products the foundation to translate and serve content in any language.

Engineers must also consider appropriate metadata to support different language structures and markups.

Text direction

Right-to-left languages are complicated for digital product design because they often mix directions within a single line of text. This example from W3C demonstrates bidirectional text in Arabic content.

Designers must collaborate with engineers to ensure these directional nuances are correctly addressed.

Names & addresses

Forms often create confusion for users from different parts of the world. For example, some European countries write the street before the number, whereas in the United States, its number, street.

Some countries don’t have postal codes, so making this a required form field creates a frustrating roadblock for those users.

Designers must also consider name lengths and structure. Some cultures place their family name (surname/last name) first and “first name” second. A person’s name may also have several words–how do they enter this data?

Time zones, currencies, dates

Date formats can cause a lot of confusion and frustration. For example, users can interpret 10/02/2022 as:

• October 02, 2022, in the United States
• 10 February 2022, in Europe

A good way around this confusion is to abbreviate the month so everyone can read the date–i.e., Oct 02, 2022. Designers can also separate these fields on forms, so users enter the correct date and databases read and save them correctly.

If your product uses time, it’s crucial to factor in timezones and daylight savings to save and present users with the correct time format.

Currencies present another design challenge. Some currency formats place the symbol before and others after. Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, and Sweden are four examples where people position the currency symbol after the number.

Cultural norms & expectations

UX teams must do their homework and perhaps hire local UX designers when entering a new market.

For example, thumbs up in the West means good, but it’s insulting in Japan, Bangladesh, and the Middle East! Using thumbs up or thumbs down to rate a service or feature might get mixed results from users in these regions.

Colors, symbols, words, phrases, and metaphors carry different meanings across various languages and cultures. Extensive user and cultural research must be a priority for UX teams, especially when they don’t speak the language.

Further reading and research: W3C provides a list of groups for regional internationalization, including the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, and South East Asia.

Internationalization and Localization Best Practices

1. Avoid metaphors and cultural references

Every country and culture has metaphors and references, but these often don’t translate to a global audience; in some instances, they might be offensive–like a thumbs up in Bangladesh.

Designers must also use descriptive names rather than “clever” cultural references. Australians are renowned for their hilarious slang, but using these in a product would be confusing rather than entertaining.

2. Design internationally-friendly forms

Form field labels, particularly addresses, can create confusion. Designers must design forms that accommodate an international audience.

For example, most countries use “postal code” instead of “zip code.” They also write the entire state/province/county rather than abbreviating it into two letters like the United States (i.e., Florida = FL). An international approach to form labels and field sizes will make forms more globally inclusive.

Further reading: 

• Web Form Design Best Practices
• Form Internationalization Techniques
• International Address Fields in Web Forms

3. Design UIs to accommodate translations

Designers must avoid designing UIs to accommodate a single language. As designer John Saito points out in a Medium article about internationalization, “Think of the label ‘New!’ for example. In English, it’s 4 characters with the exclamation point. But in French, it’s 9 characters: ‘Nouveau!'”

John recommends creating a Google Sheet and using a Google Translate function to visualize multiple languages and calculate character count.

We compared a standard CTA, “Sign up,” against ten languages. Sign up has seven (including the space), but most languages have ten or more characters, which could create issues if designers don’t leave enough room.

4. Prototype with real copy

The example above demonstrates the importance of prototyping with real copy. If you’re adapting your product for a new language, translate content on every UI as it would appear in the final product.

As we saw with translations, some words might be longer than the English version requiring the extra UI width.

If your UI element doesn’t have enough space, it will break the text into a new line. This looks unprofessional and might push other components creating usability issues.

5. Don’t embed text in images

Another recommendation from John Saito is not to embed text in images. Even if you translate these, it creates multiple assets which adversely impact performance.

Embedding text in images also excludes users with visual impairments and screen readers.

Text overlays are a good alternative, but they create additional CSS and Javascript, so designers must use this method sparingly.

6. Use relatable content

If you’re going to use content, particularly images and video, make sure it’s culturally relatable. Users must feel like someone from their country or region designed the product specifically for them.

For example, the Google News and Apple News apps use location tracking to present relevant, localized stories. In some instances, this localization might be as changing a picture of NYC for Americans to Nairobi for Kenyan users.

7. Internationalizing Typography

Yona Gidalevitz’s interesting UsabilityGeek article looks at language’s impact on typography. Asian languages like Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese have complex characters which don’t translate well into bold typefaces.

These languages also represent multi-character English words as a single character, requiring a large font for legibility which ultimately alters the UI element or the entire screen.

8. Number formats and separators

Number formats and separators differ in languages and regions. Microsoft’s number formatting for globalization demonstrates that countries will display the number negative five hundred and twenty-seven in four different ways:

• -527
• 527-
• (527)
• [527]

People also use date and number separators differently. Returning to our example of Oct 02, 2022, we can write this date in at least three ways:

• 10-02-2022
• 10.02.2022
• 10/02/2022

In the United States, people use a comma (,) to separate the thousands, while Germany uses a period (.).

While these might seem like minor issues, they could severely impact usability. Understanding these nuances will help product teams avoid potential problems.

Internationalized Product Design With UXPin

Designing digital products is challenging. Developing multilingual products for a global audience adds an extra layer of complexity for design teams.

With UXPin’s Design Systems, product teams can create multiple design systems for each language to streamline prototyping and testing. Create a new design system from an existing library and edit the components to meet language/market requirements.

Each design system can have locale-specific components, assets, typography, and documentation, giving designers the tools to build localized prototypes for testing.

Avoid the time-consuming process of prototyping and testing for multiple markets with the world’s most advanced user experience design tool. Iterate faster to build inclusive products capable of competing internationally with UXPin. Sign up for a free trial today.

The post Internationalization and Localization – Key Differences in App Design appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Design simplicity is a term companies use without truly understanding its meaning. As discussed in this article, simpler isn’t always better, and how designers apply simplicity can have positive and negative effects.

This article defines what UX design simplicity is (and isn’t), some common misconceptions, and strategies for implementing its principles.

Simplify your product design and development process with UXPin Merge–technology that allows you to design prototypes using production-ready components, and thus bridging the gap between design and engineering. Visit our Merge page to learn more about this revolutionary technology and how it can enhance simplicity in design.

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What is Design Simplicity?

Design simplicity refers to the UX principle of helping users achieve goals efficiently using intuitive UIs and minimal roadblocks. To achieve this, designers must understand user needs, their end goals, and the tools and features they need to complete tasks.

Simplicity isn’t always the best option. The users, product, context, and environment all play a critical role in balancing design simplicity with usability.

Simplicity in Design Does NOT Mean…

Simplicity in design is probably better defined by what it is not. The word simplicity is somewhat subjective, and therefore, open to misinterpretation. Here are three common misconceptions about design simplicity.

1. Simplicity is not minimalist

When people hear design simplicity, they often think it refers to minimalism–this is an incorrect assumption. Minimal design creates beautiful aesthetics, but that doesn’t mean it’s practical or helpful.

There is always a time and place for minimalism, but designers must present the appropriate tools and UI elements for users to complete tasks efficiently.

For example, this Shopify Theme creates minimalism by hiding the primary navigation behind a hamburger for desktop users. This design looks great, but shoppers must click twice to navigate.

Creating additional steps in the name of minimalism does not conform to the principles of design simplicity. Designers must be mindful of how minimalism impacts the user experience and find an appropriate balance.

2. Design simplicity is not about aesthetics

Design simplicity is not about aesthetics. While it’s crucial to create beautiful UIs, it must not be at the expense of user experience. Aesthetics include static images, video, UI components, styling, and microinteractions.

Designers must always consider the value of design decisions and whether making something look aesthetically pleasing impairs usability. For example, using elaborate, drawn-out animations might seem like an excellent way to impress users, but it slows progression resulting in a poor user experience.

3. Simplicity is not simplification

This heading might seem contradictory, but it’s another common misconception about design simplicity. Oversimplifying a product or feature can create negative consequences or dull the user experience.

For example, eliminating user verification to simplify onboarding results in bots, spammers, and other criminal elements accessing the product that harm the company and its users. Simplifying this onboard process means:

1. Making sure the system sends users a verification email immediately
2. The email has minimal text and a clear CTA to complete the verification process
3. The user can log in and begin using the product

Check how to create a secure user experience in our article Designing for Security.

Designers must also consider when to simplify. For example, simplifying a game, so users always win doesn’t present enough of a challenge, and players will lose interest. The simplification in this scenario lies in the game’s controls–giving players the appropriate tools and features to complete difficult tasks.

How to Apply Good Design Simplicity

With a clear understanding of design simplicity’s misconceptions, it’s time to look at some guiding principles and strategies and how to apply them.

1. Designing only what’s essential

One of the essential ingredients to design simplicity is only providing the UI elements and features users need to complete a task. Executing this simplicity effectively means designers must have clear objectives while understanding users, their circumstances, and the environment where they’ll use the product.

Delivering what’s essential might seem obvious, but too much reduction leads to minimalism–which we’ve already established we want to avoid. Designers must consider multiple scenarios rather than getting users to a single end goal.

For example, when designing an eCommerce checkout, it’s tempting only to push shoppers in one direction–complete the purchase! What about shoppers who change their minds and want to go back or save their cart for a later date?

The essential elements in this scenario are controls to complete checkout efficiently while providing offramps for shoppers who change their minds.

Complex products and UIs require more thought, UX research, and testing. Designers must reduce and prioritize content as much as possible to avoid cognitive overload, guiding users to complete tasks efficiently.

Coherency, consistency, and familiarity

Coherency, consistency, and familiarity are essential design simplicity components. Maintaining these three factors throughout a product requires attention to detail and effective cross-functional collaboration.

A design system is the most effective method to achieve coherency, consistency, and familiarity in product development. Organizations can build a design system from scratch or use an open-source component library to ensure designers and engineers deliver high-quality outputs with minimal errors.

PayPal uses Microsoft’s Fluent UI design system with UXPin Merge for the company’s sixty-plus internal products. When Erica Rider, Senior Manager for UX – Developer tools and platform experience at PayPal, joined the company, PayPal’s products lacked cohesion and consistency, resulting in countless usability issues.

By adopting a design system and using Merge to sync design and development, Erica created a single source of truth that enables PayPal’s product team to deliver projects 8X faster than before with significantly higher quality.

“Rather than separating design, prototyping, and development, UXPin Merge 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, PayPal

Offering the easiest solution

Design simplicity requires designers to think of the easiest path to completing a task. Ideally, designers want to reduce friction and obstacles to minimize cognitive load–there are exceptions to this rule, which we describe in this article about good and bad cognitive friction.

Designing an easy-to-use UI includes removing distractions and minimizing options. For example, designers often hide header and foot navigation for eCommerce checkouts and landing pages, so users only have one task to focus their attention.

Test, test, and test again

Testing is the best way to understand users and whether a design solution works. Seeing users struggle with a task and identifying the cause allows designers to fix the issue and simplify the process.

Testing is also an ideal space to see how users use a product and identify redundant features. Removing features and elements people don’t use helps minimize UIs and distractions.

Conduct routine UX audits

Routine UX audits are excellent for identifying usability issues that adversely impact simplicity. User testing and research during the design process often don’t tell the whole story. Designers must review analytics and monitoring tools to understand how users navigate the product and its features.

Designers can use UX audit insights to prioritize content, visual hierarchy, navigation, add/remove features, restructure layouts, and improve information architecture to simplify the user experience.

The progressive disclosure approach

Progressive disclosure is an interaction design technique for complex tasks and user flows. The idea is to break tasks into digestible steps to simplify a complicated process.

We commonly encounter progressive disclosure when a company has to capture lots of user data–insurance, visas, medical services, etc. Instead of presenting everything on one screen, designers split the form into multiple steps and categories. This user interface design technique makes forms less intimidating, allowing users to focus on one step at a time.

Learn more: What is Progressive Disclosure?

John Maeda’s 10 Laws of Simplicity

Graphic designer, visual artist, and computer scientist, John Maeda is arguably the godfather of simplicity. John’s 2006 book, “The Laws of Simplicity,” outlines 10 principles for design, technology, business, and life.

1. Reduce: remove what isn’t needed
2. Organize: makes complex systems easier
3. Time: saving time feels like simplicity
4. Learn: knowledge makes things simple
5. Differences: balancing simplicity and complexity
6. Context: “What lies in the periphery of simplicity is not peripheral”
7. Emotion: more emotion is better than less
8. Trust: simplicity = trust
9. Failure: some things aren’t meant to be simple
10. The one: subtract the obvious and add the meaningful

Simple UX Design With UXPin Merge

Simple design applies to the UX process as well as user experience. Bridging the gap between design and development enhances collaboration and streamlines handoffs while reducing errors and front-end debt.

UXPin Merge is an end-to-end product design solution that creates a single source of truth between designers and engineers. Merge allows organizations to sync a component library from a repository to UXPin’s design editor so everyone uses the same design system.

These ready-made, interactive components simplify workflows by giving designers the building blocks to create fully functioning prototypes that look and feel like the final product. With no designing from scratch, designers can focus on product development rather than component development.

Merge simplifies the design handoff process because engineers work with the same component library. Devs simply import the components from the design system’s repository and apply the JSX changes from UXPin to start front-end development. Less documentation. Less communictation between departments. Faster time to market!

Simplify your product development process with UXPin Merge. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

The post What is Design Simplicity and How to Achieve it? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Did you know that 80% of users delete an app if they don’t know how to use it?

They don’t reach out to the customer support team, nor do they research the instructions.

They simply remove it and move on to the next one. 

While this is a harsh statistic, it highlights just how crucial the user onboarding experience is. If you fail to properly teach your users how to make the most of your product or service, they will take their business elsewhere.

How can you counter this? In this article, you’ll learn what UX onboarding is and why it’s so important to get it right. You’ll also read about the six tips that will help you create a great user onboarding experience for your product.

Want to see if your design idea for an onboarding user journey is successful? Use UXPin to build an interactive prototype of your your UX onboarding and see how users respond to it. Iterate on your idea, pass it developers, and enjoy an improved onboarding flow. Try our prototyping tool that makes the work faster.

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What is UX onboarding?

UX onboarding is the process of introducing new users to your product in a way that educates and delights them, setting them up for success from their very first interaction. 

Technically, it’s a series of flows after the signup process, usually as screens or contextual cues within the app, that guide the user to the most important product features. This sort of a product tour highlights product’s values, and does so in the most engaging and quickest way possible.

Let’s imagine you’ve just downloaded a new app. 

A good UX-focused onboarding flow would be one where you’re guided through each of the app’s core functionalities. The walkthrough would explain how everything works and how you can use these features to improve your life or work.

On the other hand, a poor onboarding experience – especially for a complex product – would throw you in at the deep end. You’d be left to figure everything out for yourself. An app experience like this would likely frustrate you and quickly lead you to give up.

With that in mind, it’s important to understand that an effective onboarding process is about more than fancy video tutorials or pop-up instruction manuals. It’s about reducing any chance of error that could portray your product in a bad light and making the entire adoption process smooth.

Why is it important to build an onboarding flow for users?

To answer this question, it’s worth putting yourself in your users’ shoes. If they’re using your product for the first time, they might be feeling any (or all) of the following:

• Apprehensive
• Intimidated
• Overwhelmed
• Excited
• Curious

Your job is to design an onboarding experience that gently eases them into your product so they feel confident, understood, and supported every step of the way.

Make sure this happens the first time they use it. Here are some more reasons why this process is essential.

First impressions only happen once

A study by IPSOS reveals that there are three factors behind what we call a “first impression”. These are relevance, differentiation, and the price paid.

So, your onboarding flow needs to circle around proving that you’re relevant to the user’s needs, goals, and challenges. Secondly, it’s about showing what makes you unique, i.e., explaining what you’re better at than your competitors. The third aspect is subjective – given what they’ve seen, it’s up to your users to decide if the product was worth the price they’ve paid. 

To help users navigate through the app

As a product designer, it’s your role to ensure that users can freely move through your app. The more complex the information architecture and the more features, the more important it is to build an effective onboarding sequence. 

Let’s refer to the usability testing analogy here. Notice how user testing sessions feature tasks like “Go from the home page to your account settings and change your invoice details”  or “Find the option to change the ingredients from US cups to grams”. These questions are important, as designers want new users to ease into the platform. So, it’s important to create an onboarding flow that shows how users can get from point A to point B. Doing so will help prevent confusion and user frustration. 

To clearly convey your app value

While it might seem like a paradox, the more your app or platform can do, the higher the risk of certain users feeling overwhelmed. This doesn’t mean your app has to be simple and only offer one core feature. You can provide a complex app, but what matters is that your onboarding process makes it easy for them to find what they need and achieve the goal they came here for.

For example, say that you offer a suite of 10+ productivity tools, but a new user has signed up just for the time tracking feature. Upon logging in, they should be able to go right to it, but they might get distracted by all the other modules they don’t need (at least not yet).

Effective UX onboarding will help direct them to the right module quickly, all the while gently inclining that they can get much more value from your full offer.

To extend user lifecycles

A Salesforce study has found that there are two factors that can bring the user lifecycle to an abrupt end. 50% of respondents have admitted that they leave a business that:

• fails to anticipate their needs
• offers an app that isn’t easy to use.

These two risks can be minimized by your onboarding experience. Firstly, a good onboarding flow will showcase how your app can benefit the user. Secondly, it can give them a quick product tour and create a great product experience right after the account creation.

Beside those two points, app onboarding can increase retention rates and prevent churn, two metrics that product teams are concerned about.

To increase user engagement across the board

Taking all of the earlier points into account, a good onboarding experience will improve user engagement. This creates a whole range of benefits. From bringing value to your target user base and increasing conversion rates, to boosting app retention and even reducing customer support costs. Spending time on your onboarding process saves and makes you money.

Overall, it helps your product become as successful as it can be.

How do you design an onboarding experience?

With the importance of the UX onboarding experience fresh in your mind, let’s get actionable and talk about the onboarding flow itself. Whatever medium your process is in, these are six tips you have to bear in mind.

1. Understand whom you are onboarding

This is critical for any business decision, especially when we’re talking about UX onboarding. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Who is your target user? 
• What are their needs, wants, and pain points? 
• How much do they know about your product? 

The answers will inform your design decisions moving forward.

If you’re not sure where to get your answers from, do your research.

If you already have an existing product, look at your sales and existing user base. Conduct a customer satisfaction or NPS survey. Or, if you’re launching a new product and don’t have any user data yet, conduct market research. Look into similar businesses or niches. 

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to get to know your target users better!

Ultimately, you must take one step at a time. Start by understanding who your users are before building out a user onboarding flow that assumes what they want.

There is no one-size-fits-all onboarding template you can turn to. You have to tailor it to your target market. We will discuss this next.

2. Personalize and optimize your flow

Personalizing the UX onboarding experience is about more than adding their name to an email or a virtual walkthrough (although that’s a nice touch). We’re talking about using the data you’ve collected to focus their onboarding on the features that matter the most to them.

The goal is to make the user feel like this experience has been designed just for them.

And it’s not as difficult as it might sound.

If you’re a SaaS business, for example, you can show new users different features of your product based on their role. For example, let’s assume that you’ve created a CRM software for sales, product, and marketing professionals. If the new user is a marketing specialist, guide them through the features that are most relevant to their role.

3. Don’t overdo it with the number of screens 

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is overwhelming your users with lots of screens and information.

The UX onboarding experience should be short and sweet. Give users enough information to get started and nothing more.

You can always provide more info later on, in the form of tooltips or customer support. In fact, you should constantly be testing and adding new content to your onboarding flow based on user feedback.

Despite what the term might make you think, user onboarding is not always for new users only. Your existing users will also need a quick explanation of the new features and updates you’ve provided. Therefore, always design your UX onboarding flow with both of these user groups in mind.

4. Onboarding must align with the product

If your product is sleek, minimal, and professional, the onboarding must be sleek, minimal, and professional, too.

Think of your UX onboarding experience as an extension of your product. Everything from the colors you use to the tone of voice should reflect what your product is about.

The whole purpose of an onboarding process is to get your first-time users into using your product. It’s about them slipping into the value of your product, feeling your brand, and, ultimately, building loyalty.

If you’re distracting them with colors and content that don’t make sense, you’re not going to achieve this. User experience onboarding is not a time to get creative; it’s a time to be consistent.

Make sure your onboarding flow aligns with the product and its UX design. This way, your user can familiarize themselves with your app or service as early as in the onboarding flow. Next, they can transition into using the product with as little friction as possible.

UXPin is ideal when it comes to getting this process right.

Product designers can use UXPin to quickly bring their onboarding ideas to life and build out a prototype of the onboarding sequence. You can share these prototypes with the team to collect feedback at any stage of the onboarding process. 

With multiple design iterations, you can easily test and evaluate each step and screen, until you’ve designed the perfect UX onboarding experience for your users.

5. Give users the option to skip the onboarding flow

While some users will appreciate an in-app onboarding experience, others will prefer to skip it entirely and find their own way around your product. This will be particularly the case if your desktop or mobile app has a simple information architecture and/or if some of your users are tech-savvy.

Take a simple project management board like Trello, for one. High chances are that your users have used similar platforms in the past and will understand how a Kanban board works. And even if they haven’t, the drag-and-drop feature is fairly self-explanatory.

So, add a clear “skip” button so that your new users can jump straight to using your product, at any step of the onboarding sequence.

6. Create an external onboarding sequence

Your UX onboarding experience doesn’t have to live inside your product only.

In fact, it’s often more effective when you balance having an in-app flow, and then accompanying that with an external tutorial. For instance, you could send out an automated email sequence that you divide into chapters and send out over a number of days. You’ve probably experienced this with products you use in your own life, especially if you operate in the B2B industry.

Again, you don’t want to bombard your users with too much information, but instead, give them a little nudge in the right direction.

The great thing about an external onboarding UX sequence is you can be a lot more flexible with the content and design. It’s also an opportunity to show your brand’s personality in a way that may not be possible inside the product.

But don’t think you’re only restricted to email. 

You could also create a series of social media posts or even blog articles that new users can engage with to learn more about your product.

Consider where your target audience can be reached best, and target them there. 

7. Don’t overuse words–swap them with graphics

Your UX onboarding experience should be as visual as possible. Words are definitely powerful tools. However, your screen has limited space, and users are experiencing depleting users’ attention spans. So, convey as much information as possible by leveraging graphics.

Make use of images, videos, and even animations to guide your users through your UX onboarding experience. For example, instead of a written description, you can record a 10-second video where you show how the user can download their invoice.

By using video and images where applicable, you simplify the onboarding process and, as a result, make it more effective.

Design an Onboarding Flow in UXPin

An effective UX onboarding experience is crucial to the success of your product, and if you click away from this guide with one thing, let it be this:

Your onboarding process must provide value. 

If your product is the beach on a summer day, your onboarding is the GPS directions to get there. Make it simple for the best results.

And this is easy thanks to UXPin.

UXPin is a state-of-the-art prototyping tool that enables you to create prototypes and easily share them with the rest of your team. If you’re serious about creating an onboarding experience that will engage and educate your users, check out UXPin today. 

The post 7 Tips to Help You with Effective User Onboarding appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

App design tools help craft smoother design processes – breathing life into concepts and bringing teams closer together. 

However, mobile app development processes are often fraught with frustrations. Especially at the design handoff stage, which can derail the entire project through an endless volley of back-and-forths. 

If you’re struggling to foster cross-departmental collaboration, if your user interface designs aren’t coming out like the prototyping tool promised, or the workflow feels inefficient, then looking for a better alternative to your current mobile app design tool is a must. 

But what key features should you look for when choosing your app design software? Let’s see what are your options if you want to build a prototype of your next mobile app, gather feedback, and pass your product design to developers for their app building process.

App Design Software – 7 Must-Have Features

1. Creating lifelike, interactive prototypes

Any app design software needs to let you build prototypes for various stages of your design process. You may want the start with creating wireframes – basic, non-functional templates used to communicate a broad outline of your UI design, so this is the feature you may focus on.

But you’ll also need to design fully functional mock-ups that look, work, and feel exactly like the finished mobile application. These are essential when conducting user testing and gathering feedback (which helps to make your app user-friendly.)

A top app design tool like UXPin makes it simple to innovate designs at every stageof a mobile app design. 

UXPin will let you build an interactive prototype that’s high-fidelity by default. By setting up custom triggers and conditional interactions, which only activate after a user performs a specific set of actions, you can effectively breathe life into previously non-interactive prototypes – whether it’s a simple click-through or advanced animations. 

The app design software makes it really simple to create more than one default state for these elements. You can create a single button with default behavior depending on a user’s action. To help tailor the experience further, variables offer a way to store inputs and take actions based on that data.

Ideally, you want your prototypes to mirror the final product as closely as possible. It’s vital, getting buy-in from stakeholders in the company, gathering user feedback, keeping everyone working on the project on track, and nailing that awesome vision for eCommerce store, Android application, or an Apple plugin. 

But one of the biggest obstacles to keeping that vision ‘pure’ is the back-and-forth between design and development. An exasperated ‘I want it to X’ met with an equally exasperated ‘It doesn’t work like that, the transitions are completely off.’ 

That’s why you need a design tool that doesn’t have a huge learning curve for your developers to get it. Tools like UXPin has a Spec mode in which your engineers can inspect the design, be it for a web app or mobile one, and clearly see what should be built and how it should behave before they start implementing the prototype in their development platform.

2. Easy design handoffs

Design handoffs are a tricky part of the process. Design proudly hands over their brilliant ideas – only to be met with stone-code reality. Bottlenecks are pretty common, irritations become frustrations, projects feel like they grind to a halt as the teams go back and forth with fresh ideas to make it all work as imagined. 

Any UX app design tool worth its weight in gold needs to make these handoffs smoother. For the good of the design process and everyone involved in it. 

Because UXPin is a high-fidelity app design tool, developers will be immediately familiar with the components laid out by designers (and design projects automatically generate CSS details for devs). Just to keep everyone on the same path, all project-specific specs and documentation are a few clicks away. 

The result is a smoother design handoff. Designers know what’s possible and developers know how it all works. Some designers are using Zeplin or Marvel to pass on their designs from Figma or Proto.io to developers, but with UXPin you can design interactive prototypes of MacOs, Android or web apps, and hand them over to developers without switching to another tool.

Other people skip prototyping phase and they go straight to no-code app builders. It’s okay to use them when you’re a beginner who learns their craft or if you are making an MVP, yet complex, comercial apps may find no-code solutions hinder their ability to scale.

3. Designed for fast iterations

A robust design process goes big on iterations. They’re a snapshot of the project at various stages. Instead of sharing an actual work in progress, you can link to previous iterations to help you assess design ideas (and assumptions, thoughts, and hunches). 

Ideally, your mobile app design tool needs to be able to quickly create iterations of a project – and just as quickly let you pull up an older iteration if user testing reveals a flaw in the latest design. In UXPin, you’re easily able to grab past iterations. 

UXPin Merge extends that level of control to all your different versions. At best, using different design system versions for different prototypes can be frustrating. At worst, they can derail the workflow. UXPin Merge makes it quick and easy to manage and move between each project’s library.

4. Ability to manage the design system within your app design tool

A design system is a set of standards and standard components used by everyone on the project to design and develop a product. Think of it as a bible for your mobile app design that says, ‘This is the way.’ 

Teams that build without a design system in place don’t just risk the odd bit of inconsistency for users looking for intuitive, frictionless experiences. They risk hitting the brakes on the design process, as time and resources are thrown away creating and recreating components. 

When you’re looking for the best app design tool, Design System management is a necessity. 

In UXPin, the Design System lets you create and maintain a comprehensive library of interactive components to ensure consistency from design to development and beyond.

Your Design System is a way of ensuring consistency across your brand with a clear style guide, component library and what not that set you apart from the competition. If you want a tutorial on building a design system, go to our open web eBook where we outline the steps of creating a design system.

5. Using real data inside the project

Prototypes don’t always need to feel like prototypes. When they’re two steps up from a sketch on a napkin, that’s fine. However, as your project begins to take form, you’ll want to start populating the prototypes with real-life data that replicates what users might actually see, like names, cities, and text, and images.

That doesn’t have to mean hours spent downloading stock images and copy-pasting lorem ipsum. UXPin lets you insert and sync real data into prototypes, giving designs a detailed polish. Teams can see how the finished article should look. 

But a bigger benefit comes during user testing. If your app design tool can more accurately recreate the real-life UX design, then user feedback becomes much more valuable and actionable (and they won’t be distracted by immersion-breaking walls of lorem ipsum). 

6. Advanced collaboration features

Collaboration is the backbone of the creative industry. You only have to look at how a vague but genius flash of inspiration in one mind grows into a fully realized app to see that. And with the rise in hybrid working, choosing a mobile app design tool means choosing advanced collaboration features that bring teams together, remotely and in real-time. 

UXPin makes live collaboration as easy as possible. With Slack and Jira integration, in a few clicks you can transform communications and project management, and improve visibility over any design edits made by team members.

Whether you’re working in real-time on a design, sharing project status with the team via email or Slack, or waiting for stakeholder approval, UXPin’s collaboration tools keep colleagues on the same page.

7. Sharing your designs with the team

Sharing isn’t just caring. It plays a strategic and tactical role in successful collaboration. Designers bounce ideas around with each other. When the thoughts start flowing, it can be hard to keep track of all the brilliant concepts. It means the right mobile app design tool needs to be equipped with friction-free sharing options to effortlessly communicate ideas that might make the design an even bigger success.

Let’s start with the basics. UXPin supports the popular PDF, PNG, and HTML exports – so as long as your colleague can turn on a computer, they can probably view your designs.

The UXPin Mirror app, meanwhile, lets authorized users live-preview prototypes on mobile devices. It’s a great way to see how your app looks and feels, with edits updated in real-time to make before-and-after comparisons a breeze. 

These app design tools make it easier to collect feedback from the rest of your team to refine a product into its best possible iteration.

High-fidelity Prototyping with UXPin

Not all app design tools are equal, though. And not every tool packs features that seamlessly drive you from initial idea to final iteration. It’s critical to assess where your current processes are lacking and how a tool like UXPin can improve them. This can be done through real-time collaboration and smooth design handoff that let design and development teams work seamlessly.

The post How to Choose the Right Mobile App Design Software? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

If you’re just about to launch an app (or update your existing one), then it’s essential to be aware of the latest app design trends. Here is a list of the top eight evolvements that you should be aware of in the coming years.

8 Mobile and Desktop App Design Trends Worth Knowing About

1. No password login

Simplicity has always been critical to app design. Great designers build innovations that draw the eye. The details easily parsed by the user – without them even needing to think about it – create a seamless, free-flowing user experience. 

And nothing is simpler than ‘nothing’. 

That’s why no password logins are one of the latest user experience app design trends to consider. No forgetting passwords. No resetting passwords. No trial and error as users guess their way through or rely on password managers. 

Facial recognition is one option, if you want passwordless solutions in your app. Apple’s FaceID and Windows Hello for Android have familiarized users with simply looking at the camera to unlock the system, so you’re building on existing foundations. 

Fingerprint sensors are already in place on most modern phones. In the smartphones’ sphere, most banking apps already feature this because a fingerprint is a lot less guessable than a password you can write down. 

Voice recognition, popularized by Alexa and Google Home, offers another login method. Still, it’s worth considering whether, in a world where most phones are switched to silent or vibrate, your users will be comfortable using this outside the house.

So long as you offer the traditional alternative (it’s also a good backup when you’re not looking your best), ease the user journey with no password logins. 

2. Designing for inclusivity

Everyone’s using mobile devices these days. Phones and tablets aren’t just for youngsters, oldsters, and the somewhere-in-between stars. 

Kids today learn how to crack find videos on YouTube before they learn the alphabet. Elderly users have grown up during the technological revolution of the last thirty years. Folks with physical and mental disabilities rely on phones and tablets to keep them connected. 

That informs one of 2022’s biggest trends in app development: inclusivity. 

Your mobile app design needs to consider everyone who’s using your app. Accessibility is key to creating experiences that are appealing to everyone and usable by anyone. After all, it makes no sense to cut off potential audiences when you can be inclusive of all. 

There are tons of ways to create an inclusive experience and earn points for UX design trends. 

You might want to make tappable buttons big and bold – helping those with visual impairments or younger children. Or bump up the font size, adjust typography and add alt text to imagery, for the benefit of those using screen readers. Popping subtitles on videos is one of the most common ways to increase accessibility for those that need it (and those that just like to watch videos without the sound up). Adding a colorblind mode for those that need it. Really simple solutions that open up your app to a broader user base. 

Want to make sure you’re creating accessible, inclusive designs? Use a tool like UXPin, which offers a whole range of accessibility features like a color blind simulator and a contrast checking feature, so you can be confident you’re building app experiences that work for everybody. 

3. The use of augmented reality

Everyone’s talking about the metaverse. Augmented reality is a step towards that future – where the digital and the real are indistinguishable. 

AR is one of several app design trends that takes advantage of device features to create a more interactive experience, inserting itself into a user’s life in fresh, new ways (so, users aren’t just mindlessly scrolling as they stare at the screen). 

Let’s say you’ve developed an app to increase geography knowledge among students. The easiest angle would be a series of Wiki-style pages, maybe a quiz or three. But imagine if users could scan a code and view a virtual globe right on their mobile’s screen. And as they dive in for a closer look at the world, the app displayed location-based information, supplemented by artificial intelligence. 

That’s a lot more powerful than boring walls of text and a library of videos and images. 

That’s essential to the user and your goals. 

Smaller design teams may find AR a bit tricky to implement. It’s a pretty technical undertaking, after all. But if you have the power already, you’re ready for the challenge, or you’re ok with outsourcing, augmented reality implementation will put you in a strong position in the years ahead. 

4. Incorporating gaming in app design

Gaming is big business. Globally, the industry is worth more than $138bn – putting it well above the value of even the biggest Hollywood blockbuster machine. Everyone’s got a phone in their pocket, a console under their TV. Gaming, in other words, is accessible in unimaginable ways. 

But there’s another good reason gaming is one of the major trends in app design in 2022: interactivity. 

Just like augmented reality, whether it’s the principal reason to download your app or an optional extra that keeps users coming back, gaming creates an entertaining space for users. It’s not just screen-based dialogue. 

Duolingo is a great example of adding a gaming aspect to an app. Rather than mimicking fusty old textbooks and hard-to-follow listening and translating tests, it makes learning a new language fun. It adds novel ways to challenge users. As a user progresses, they unlock new levels, new challenges to prove themselves. Just like in gaming. 

5. Multidirectional navigation

Up and down is so last year, right?

Ok, not really. It’s an integral part of the mobile experience. But multidirectional navigation is a mobile app design that means you don’t have to limit yourself to traditional scrolling. 

By introducing horizontal as well as vertical sliders, users can scroll and swipe their way around your app in a way that’s intuitive and interactive. It’s fulfilling in a way that simple, overly familiar vertical navigation in web design isn’t. 

Multidirectional navigation is a core function in multimedia apps – swipe to see the next radio station, music artist, or video. And social media dating apps are famous for it. ‘Swipe right’ and ‘swipe left’ have already entered popular parlance. No wonder it’s become one of the latest UX design trends to watch out for. 

6. Putting illustrations at the forefront

Nothing says ‘phony’ faster than a stock image. Our eyes glaze over. Our trust-o-meter starts to ping. 

So, expect to see illustrations take center-stage over the coming months. Drawings help build and humanize your brand. 

Visuals are important in mobile app design – your testing has probably already shown that users respond better to human faces than inanimate objects, for instance. Illustrations act to signal to users what you’re about, what they need to do, displaying information in a way that, and, in many cases, it’s unique to you and enticing to your target audience.

They also help make otherwise unengaging screens, data visualization, and graphs look more approachable. 

Let’s go back to the geography app we’ve mentioned above. A wall of text about the capital city of Canada isn’t going to entice anyone half as much as a series of screens broken up into bite-sized paragraphs and complemented with ‘home-grown’ illustrations. 

By putting illustrations to the forefront of your app design, you can effortlessly (and instantly) create a warm, comfortable environment for the user.

All in all, don’t underestimate the power of graphic design, as illustrations are one of the leading UI design trends.

7. Dark mode as one of the latest app design trends

Dark mode has been an unbeatable trends in the recent years. An evergreen in the world of app design trends. It’s been around for ages, and it’s just as relevant now as it’s always been. A simple toggle switch and a ‘negative effect’ that makes navigation easier on the eye, especially at night. 

Yet, despite its intense popularity among users, there are some brands that still haven’t incorporated dark themes into their desktop and mobile applications. So, for many businesses, it’s a chance to attract users’ attention. To offer something that’s intensely popular among users before anyone else does. 

Better still, it’s a chance to. After all, the user experience is critical to successful mobile app design. Dark mode eases eye strain (and can also look really cool), meaning users are comfortable using your app any time of day without getting blasted by rays of white light. 

If you want to get super-technical, you could also offer a dark mode schedule. This would let the mode kick in during certain hours of the day (or, more appropriately, night). 

8. Transparent elements

You may have already heard of transparent elements when it comes to the latest app design trends. It’s sometimes known as glassmorphism. And it’s a way to create a lightweight aesthetic by letting on-screen elements ‘float’ on the screen. 

The main design characteristics of glassmorphism are:

• Layering, placing one element over another rather than directing users to a new screen
• Transparency – particularly the ‘frosted glass’ effect that overlays an element in the foreground while blurring out the background
• Stand-out colors to help users differentiate actionable elements
• Borders around the transparent element, again to help users understand the limits of the transparent element.

To create a great glassmorphism user interface, you need to consider the background as much as the foreground. For example, a really bright, vivid background without too much detail highlights the tonally different transparent foreground, making it simple, visible, and super-clear to direct users to their next action in the app. 

Which Trend Are You Going to Follow?

User Experience and User Interface Design are all about the user. They always were. Always will be. 

Little wonder, then, that the biggest trends in app design continue to be focused around how to create simple experiences for users that ‘just work’, exactly as they should, and exactly how they want. 

Successful mobile app designs can attract and retain users. You don’t want to expend resources on capturing an audience, only to have them uninstall it because they can’t find their way around the app, or because the experience itself is flawed. 

Because, when competition in the mobile app space is so high, companies can’t afford not to follow the trends. The best app experiences are those that users don’t even need to think about. That meet their needs before they even know they need them. And create a comfortable on-screen environment that keeps them coming back for more.

It’s time to put this knowledge into practice. Design user-friendly, highly realistic prototypes in our design tool, UXPin. Learn more about it.

The post 8 App Design Trends for 2022 & Beyond appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Material Design is one of the most popular design systems. If you own an Android device, you use Material Design daily. Many companies use the Material Design System as a foundation for building mobile and web applications.

The system’s comprehensive component library and resources, including Material Icons (now Material Symbols), give organizations and startups the building blocks to scale products infinitely without designing from scratch.

This article explores Material Symbols and other Material resources you can use for your next product development project.

Material Design UI and Icons come standard with every UXPin plan. Sign up for a free trial to build beautiful apps with UXPin and Material Design today!

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What is Material Design?

Material Design is a design library developed by Google, including UI components, icons, typography, and more. Every Material component includes guidelines for implementation, usage, anatomy, behavior, and more to help designers and engineers achieve the best results while delivering high-quality user experiences.

Google launched the first version of Material Design at the 2014 Google I/O Conference. In May 2021, Google released Material Design 3, including notable features like Dynamic Color, foldable device components, and design tokens.

Material Symbols Launch

One of Material Design’s most exciting recent updates was the launch of Material Symbols–a customizable icon set with over 2,000 open-source icons in five styles. You can still find all your favorite Material Icons, but now you have more flexibility and customization to meet your product and brand’s requirements.

Material Icons are still available but don’t offer the same customization as Symbols. You can only adjust the size and density versus the four variable options with symbols.

Material Icons Set

Google has kept the old Material Icons, albeit fewer than the Symbols catalog. Icons are available in five styles, Outlined, Filled, Founded, Sharp, and Two-tone.

Material Symbols – What’s New?

Material Icons has moved under Google Fonts, offering a variable icon set in three styles, Outlined, Rounded, and Sharp. Designers also have the option to customize the icon set with four variables or axes:

• Fill: Fill or unfilled appearance
• Weight: Defines the symbol’s stroke from 100 to 700 weight
• Grade: Granular adjustments to the symbol’s thickness to convey emphasis
• Optical size: Size icons to 20, 24, 40, or 48 pixels

The variable methodology allows engineers to store multiple variations in a single font (or icon) rather than several files. By reducing the file size and number of files, engineers enjoy better performance and fewer assets to manage.

Three Styles

Google also introduced three new styles to match a brand’s identity and UI design.

• Outlined: Clean and light. Designers can adjust the icon weight to complement the product’s fonts.
• Rounded: The curved aesthetic works well with rounded logos and heavier fonts.
• Sharp: Designed to match UIs with straight edges and 90-degree corner styling.

Build Your Own Material Icons

If you can’t find the icon you need in Material Symbols’ vast catalog, Google includes guidelines for designing custom icons, including:

• Design principles: best practices to create clear iconography that’s meaningful and helpful to users.
• Icon sizes and layout: how to set up the grid size and layout for designing icons using a design tool.
• Grid and keyline shapes: techniques for creating consistent a consistent icon set.
• Icon metrics: icon design anatomy including corners, weight, stroke, and complexity.

Following these helpful guidelines, you can utilize Material’s comprehensive icon set while including a few relevant to your brand.

How to Use Google’s Material Icons & Symbols

There are several ways designers and engineers can use Material Icons and Symbols. 

Downloading SVG or PNG

You can download Icons and Symbols in SVG or PNG format. We recommend using SVG for its performance and customization benefits. PNG files are much larger and more complicated for designers and engineers to edit and resize.

Google allows you to customize your Icons and Symbols before downloading, so you have a finalized asset to use in your project.

CSS/CDN

Material Symbols provides a CSS file for website installations similar to what you use for Google Fonts. The problem with this method is that it requires your website to make additional requests, which can severely affect performance.

If you’re planning to use more than one Material Symbol, it’s better to use another method for installation.

Operating Systems & Frameworks

Material Icons and Symbols offer downloads for Android and iOS to install as project assets, with code snippets for implementation. Material Design includes instructions for Flutter (a Google-developed programming language) and Angular. React instructions are available in MUI’s documentation.

Designer Usage

Most design tools offer plugins or extensions for Material Icons. If you’re using UXPin, the complete Material Icons set comes standard with every plan.

You can also import your own SVG icons, edit them in UXPin and save them to your Design System to share with other team members.

Using Material Icons and Symbols With Typography

Google’s Material 3 documentation offers tips and best practices for pairing icons with typography.

Weights

Never use different weights for your icons and text. Google makes it easy to pair these assets with Material Symbols’ Weight customization variable. Ensure you always match the font weight with the icon weight to achieve a clean and consistent aesthetic.

Correct font weight.

Incorrect font weight.

Sizing & Alignment

Always match the icon size and alignment with the text. Users must be able to read both and recognize they’re related. Google recommends designers “shift down the baseline of symbols to approximately 11.5% of the type size.” This technique will keep icons and text uniform and aligned.

Material Icons Accessibility

Google provides brief but helpful advice to designers about icon accessibility. Designers must always use meaningful, descriptive labels with icons, especially for navigation. Icons without text labels can appear ambiguous and confusing to users. Designers must also include alt text for screen readers and other assistive technologies.

Target size is also a crucial factor for icons. People with large fingers or hand disabilities might accidentally hit the wrong icon button, causing confusion and frustration.

Google recommends designers use a minimum target size of 48 pixels. If you’re using a 20-pixel icon, provide enough padding to make the total target area 48 pixels.

Designing with Material Design’s Icons in UXPin

With several icon sets, including Material Icons, preinstalled with UXPin, designers don’t have to install plugins or upload external files. Here’s how easy it is to add icons to your project.

Step One – Click the icon element

Click the icon element in the Quick Tools panel to the left of the canvas. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut OPTION+I (on Mac) or ALT+I (on PC).

Step Two – Draw an icon on the canvas

Click and drag a square where you’d like the icon to appear on the canvas. Hold down SHIFT to maintain an equal width and height.

Step Three – Icon properties panel

Once you draw an icon, an icon properties panel will appear on the right Properties Panel. You can select Material Icons or one of the other sets, including Fonts Awesome, Retina Icons, and a UXPin set, to name a few.

Step Four – Select an icon

Scroll through the available Material Icons to find what you need. Click on any icon in the properties panel (while you have the icon selected on the canvas) to make your selection.

Step Five – Adjust icon properties

Once you have chosen an icon, you can style it using the Properties Panel above the Icon section. Below the Color Picker is a dropdown with available design systems, including Material Design, so designers don’t have to copy/paste HEX codes from elsewhere.

Step 6 – Add interactions

At the top of the Properties Panel, you’ll find Interactions. Add interactions, animations, transitions, etc., to make your icons interactive. For example, we might want this user icon to open a personalized profile page.

Check out UXPin’s Interactive UI Patterns and App Examples to see how UXPin’s features work and what’s possible with code-based design.

Improve Prototyping and Testing With UXPin

Material Icons are just one convenience of working in UXPin. Our goal is to help designers build prototypes quicker and with greater functionality and fidelity as image-based design tools.

Using one of UXPin’s built-in design libraries, designers can drag and drop elements to build interactive prototypes in minutes. We’ve included five popular design libraries to accommodate every type of project, from websites to web and mobile applications for enterprise and B2C products.

Every UXPin plan includes Material Design, iOS, Bootstrap, Foundation, and User Flows, with each library’s interactive elements, colors, text styles, and icons.

UXPin’s Design Systems feature allows designers to build a design system from scratch, automatically categorizing the library into Colors, Assets, Typography, and Components. You can also set up permissions and include documentation for designers and engineers to follow.

Build better prototypes that accurately replicate the final product experience using UXPin’s code-based design tool. Sign up for a free trial to discover the possibilities of designing with UXPin.

The post Material Design Icons – Building Blocks of Web and App Design appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

When you look at the apps that have hit thousands, if not millions of downloads (and boast thousands of happy reviews!), you might wonder: is there an ‘it’ factor they all share? Among others, whether an app has a high download and retention rate comes down to great app design. Namely, there are certain UI/UX design principles that can keep users coming back for more.

Use UXPin and design a prototype that will surely become the next great app! Sign up for a free trial and use its incredible component-driven prototyping approach to build your app’s user interface. Leverage the tool’s power to create a design using a single art board that you can add interactivity to instead of linking multiple art boards to simulate interactions.

9 App Design Examples – What Makes for a Great App Design

We’ve reached out to a group of product and design experts to learn about their favorite app design examples and what exactly makes them love their favorite mobile apps. Here’s what they told us.

1. Wolt App – putting great user experience first 

Uladzislau Luchkouski, Head of Design at Orangesoft

The Wolt app is a prominent example of great app design that’s user-friendly. Wolt is a food delivery app that prioritizes superior UX design by offering unmatched categorization, search, and content display, no matter whether you download its iOS app for Iphones or access it on Android devices.

But what makes Wolt a standout in the niche is the overall flow of order placement and wait time in their user interface. Every single step is thought out and aims to address all possible customer needs.

• Delivery Settings – an in-built translator, customization tools, and the ‘Order Together’ feature drive maximum personalization for the app user, thus improving the user experience.
• Search – an intuitive search user interface with easily discoverable food items, meal categories, and dynamic pricing leaves no place for uncertainty and displays accurate pricing for each option.
• Checkout – the app implements an innovative ‘Slide to Confirm’ form instead of the usual ‘Tap Yes’ feature. This nice touch ensures that there is no accidental touch and the customer is fully aware of placing an order.
• Wait time and delivery – the Wolt app turns the hangry wait times into a quirky tapping game. Thus, the ‘In Delivery’ interface displays a timer with a big tappable button where the user needs to tap as many times as possible. If the user beats the target number, the delivery fee is completely free.

2. Google Maps – function over form

Can Burak, Executive Creative Director at 2fresh.com

When it comes to app design, form follows function. Being able to deliver the promise you give to users is far beyond having a cool user interface design. In that regard, Google Maps delivers great value, and it’s one of the best app designs.

The app brings the world onto your screen and is an example of responsive app design done well. It’s available both as a web and native mobile application. While I opt for a web app on my laptop or desktop, I use it as a native app on my mobile device. I use the offline maps functionality particularly often. 

I like the integration of the target destination in the form of text, photos, and comments. And I find great value in its core functionalities. As demonstrated, product design is all about the value and experience.

The app’s UI design is decent to deliver this promise. Nothing fancy or nothing to show off in here. When it comes down to functionality, subtle UI design is the best, which goes for any app, be it a banking app, a fitness app, and more.

If I were to name a downside of Google Maps from a user perspective, I’d say that I’m disappointed by the fact that resolution is crippled over time and that high-resolution satellite images are reserved for Google Earth.

3. Pocket – example of app redesign powered by users

Jay Soni, Marketing Director at Yorkshire Fabric Shop.

Another app design example worth looking at is Pocket. This amazing software allows you to save articles or movies to watch later, even if you don’t have access to the Internet, which is an awesome design concept. Pocket, in fact, recently received a Webby Award for user experience design. The app was reworked in large part thanks to Google Ventures. 

They enlisted the help of five users from their target audience who had never used the app before, and they used their feedback to design the app’s simple interface. The end outcome is visible to all with improved usability and a better experience.

4. Pinterest – simplicity of use

Sharon van Donkelaar, CMO and Head of Growth at Expandi

I really love Pinterest’s mobile app, not only because of its minimalist and visually appealing display but also because of how simple it is to use it and find what you’re looking for.

The app certainly has a clear and comprehensive UI design that, without taking much space on the screen and taking the focus away from all the beautiful visuals, allows users to move from one place to the next in the smoothest fashion.

Besides, the fact that with the mobile app you can do everything you’d do on the Pinterest website is the cherry on top of one of the most neatly designed mobile app UI designs I’ve recently used on my smartphone.

5. Viber – super fun to use 

Adam Moore, Founder of SocialPlus

I love that you can video chat with high-quality resolution, and also text people anywhere in the world. It is perfect for work as you can also communicate with this app through your computer. This multi-platform application is also highly protected, and you will feel secure that only you are seeing your own content between other people.

You can also join groups of people with similar interests to you, not unlike Facebook. This all-in-one app can also nurture your creative side as you can create your own stickers to send to others.  This app is fun, simple to use, and overall is a really pleasing app to look at. 

6. Uber – simplicity and user-friendliness 

Daniel Florido, Chief Web Development & Designer, Director of Pixelstorm

As a website and app designer, I’m always looking for inspiration in the form of well-designed UIs and clever UX. One great mobile app design example is the Uber app.

Uber is a popular ridesharing app that makes it easy to get around town quickly and conveniently. I love Uber’s design because of its simplicity and user-friendliness. The interface is intuitive, with large buttons that are easy to tap and clear information displayed uncluttered.

One of the standout features of the Uber app is its map view, which makes it easy to see exactly where your driver is in your current location. Another feature that I love is easily splitting fares with other riders, which can be a real lifesaver when traveling in a group or with friends.

So those are just a few of the things that make the Uber app’s design great. If you’re ever looking for inspiration for your web or app design projects, I highly recommend checking out Uber and seeing what makes it such a great user experience.

7. Etsy – great app design doesn’t overwhelm you 

Granger McCollough, CEO & Founder, Elite Patio Direct

As someone who works in eCommerce, I really love the design of the Etsy app purely due to its simplicity and the fact that it doesn’t overwhelm you with products from the start. A lot of eCommerce apps can really throw products in your face with sales and featured products. Etsy simply gives you a search bar and some suggestions for the type of product you may be looking for. 

The homepage of the app doesn’t give any prices or product names and is very visual, using only images and headings to narrow down your search. Because of this image-based design, it makes scrolling through the different headings feel very smooth.

8. Airbnb – setting a new standard for easy search

Trevor Larson, CEO and Founder of Nectar

I have always loved and tried to base a lot of what I do at my business off of the app design and UX of the greats. One great app design example is the Airbnb app. The overall experience is fantastic, irrespective of the device you use thanks to the responsive app design. But one particular feature that stands out to me is the search – the way that users can easily search for and find exactly what they are looking for. 

Whether it’s a room in a specific location, or an entire apartment to rent, the app makes it quick and easy to find exactly what you need. Overall, the Airbnb app has set the bar high for other apps in terms of great design and UX, and I believe that it truly exemplifies what great app design and UX should look like.

9. TripAdvisor – great app design for various user goals

Patricio Paucar, Co-founder of Navi

I’m awed by Tripadvisor’s app. Intuitive? Check. Great graphics? Definitely. Consistent branding? Yes. Tripadvisor’s overall user experience is the promise of the digital revolution bringing the world to your hand, realized. 

The app’s unique differentiator is versatility. It caters to people looking for guided experiences in trip planning as well as users looking for a restaurant recommendation nearby. That’s a rarity in travel apps but not surprising from a company that’s been in the travel business for over two decades.

What’s Your Example of Great App Design?

What makes an app great goes beyond responsive app design. Among others, it involves simplicity of use, which allows users to quickly meet their goals, minimalistic design that isn’t overwhelming and prioritizing function over form. Feel free to inspire yourself with our list while designing your own mobile app.

It’s your turn now. Use the powerful lessons you’ve just discovered and design a fully interactive prototype using UXPin’s best features. There’s no limits to what you can build if you put your mind to it. Sign up for a free UXPin’s trial.

The post 9 Experts Share Examples of Great App Design appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

We spend a lot of time on mobile devices, and it’s hard for us to imagine our lives without our favorite apps. However, the number of applications for Iphones or Android smartphones we can choose from is huge, and it’s safe to say that people won’t tolerate bad mobile design. 

In the following article we’re going to take a look at a few best practices, which you can use to make sure your app design interface is flawless! It’s not a step-by-step tutorial, but an easy walk-through of successful app design.

Good App Design TL;TR

• Before you even begin working on the design, be sure to understand the app’s purpose – whom you’re serving, why, how, and what value you’ll be adding to their lives.
• Avoid web-like experiences. These are hardly optimized for mobile devices and are now a big ‘no’ in terms of UX design and UI design.
• Prioritize app consistency and remember to constantly collect feedback from users.

Do you need to design a good app? Sign up for UXPin’s trial and see how easy it is to build an app prototype in this code-based design tool.

With UXPin you don’t need to draw multiple art boards to simulate your product. It allows you to add interactions, expressions, and variables that make your design feel like a finished product that is ready to be tested.

Sign up for a UXPin trial and start prototyping!

The Consequences of Bad App Design

Great app design is effortless. Intuitive. Everything works, just as it should, without users even thinking about how to do what they want to do. Bad app design is like placing a boulder in the middle of the road. It forces users to deviate from their path, changes the flow, or – the worst case scenario – has them backing off in search of another app that does what you don’t. 

Bad app design, i.e., the kind that confuses people, causes friction during the experience, or simply overwhelms them. Simply put, it has serious impacts on your app’s success. 

1. User drop-outs

You don’t just want to attract new users – you need to retain and keep them coming back to your application, thus increase metrics such as DAU or MAU (see other UX metrics). Poorly designed apps can’t deliver on that. As the user-base crumbles, it harms your business. 

2. Low or no engagement

Every app designer wants users to engage with their product – and the less user-friendly the app’s user interface is, the less likely it is that those that stick around actually engage with it. It affects game apps, productivity apps, ecommerce apps and other kinds of apps. With so much choice in the digital marketplace, users will go elsewhere.

3. Lack of referrals

Word-of-mouth is a powerful tool. The majority of users aren’t willing to spread a good word about an app or leave a great review of a mobile app that’s not user-friendly.

Even die-hard fans of your startup or previous products will find it difficult to endorse an app, meaning potential ‘evangelists’ won’t tell others ‘You gotta try this iOS app’.  And if they do, users don’t want to hear, ‘But if you do, remember you need to X, Y, and Z, before it works.’ Today’s users just don’t want to use an app if the learning curve is steep.

8 App User Interface Practices for Good App Design

Follow these mobile app design guidelines to build a product users will love. 

1. Prioritize mobile users

User-centric design is paramount. Because if an app isn’t built for the people that actually use it, then it’s little more than a vanity project. Users are used to everything being crafted for them. Whether it’s an easy ecommerce experience, like the kind provided by Amazon, or simple actions, like swiping right on a dating app, each component of the design needs to be designed with the user (and the device) in mind. 

Apps that don’t take a user-centric approach are destined to fall out of favor with users drifting to rival apps and sites. 

Testing can help you figure out how they use your site, letting you tweak the design until you find something that totally meets their needs. 

Read more about mobile-first responsive design.

2. Make it easy to navigate

Make it as simple as possible to get around – that’s just good mobile app design guidelines. If a user wants to reach their account information, or take a key action (like, ‘Play game’ or ‘Buy now’) then it should be obvious exactly how to do that. Remove the awkward moment when users think, ‘Is this right…?’, because it destroys usability of the app.

A simple app design interface isn’t the same as an underpowered one. It’s about removing what isn’t important and focusing attention on one or two core actions per screen. 

Take Facebook app as an example. It’s one most of us are familiar with, and it’s a masterclass in intuitive navigation. No one has to pause and think how to post an update or find the messenger icon. Familiarity and consistency are key to creating easy navigation.

So, the search button is found in the top-right corner, just as it is on countless other apps and sites. The menu button, also in the top-right, is shown as a three-line button. So, users know what it is, where it is, and how it works. Users aren’t overloaded with information and input options. Plus, their onboarding process goes way smoother this way.

3. Use the right app design tools

When following tried-and-tested mobile app design guidelines, think about how you’re going to craft your product. 

If you’re keen to get your app to market quickly without compromising on quality, choose the right app design tools. You wouldn’t build a skyscraper with wood shavings. And, even if you did, just how close to your initial idea would it be? 

You and your team won’t want to fiddle with clunky workarounds. Forcing design tools to do what they were never meant to do. It harms product development and risks shattering that original vision. 

The tools you use are absolutely critical to bringing your app to life in a way that chimes with your original vision and what your users crave. So, look for good app design tools that are specifically made for product designers in the website & app design and development space – like UXPin.

UXPin helps designers and developers stay efficient, consistent, and creative every step of the product design process – from prototyping to simplifying those sometimes tricky design hand-offs.

UXPin has multiple features that will make you design user interfaces fast and efficiently. It also helps you adhere to accessibility standards, easily test your prototype with the simulate mode, and it aims to make front-end developers build products according to your vision by giving them access to code.

Sign up for a free trial now.

4. Remember about feedback

Feedback is, of course, a really important part of product design – it helps you refine your product, turning a good app design into a great one. 

Users love feedback just as much. There’s nothing more frustrating, as a user, than tapping a button. And nothing happens.

That lingering sense of dread as they wonder, ‘Did it work? Is it doing what I want?’ 

That’s bad app design, pure and simple. Because it leaves the user adrift, even if just for a second or three. Users aren’t just used to ‘instant gratification’ here. They positively demand it (there’s a reason good website design dictates load times of no more than about three seconds). Without feedback, they can’t tap back fast enough, even if the action is still processing. The result is a lost user, and potentially a win for your competitors. 

One of the best examples of this is the Domino’s pizza tracker. It offers users feedback at every stage of the order. They’re not worrying whether their order went through – they can just open the app and see where it’s at and when it’ll be delivered. 

In your own app, use animations and transitions, audio and physical signals, like a vibration, to tell users that their action has been a success. 

5. Understand the app purpose

The why is just as important as the what and the who and the how. 

Take time to really understand why you’re building your app. It’s all about finding your purpose in the digital space. 

Let’s say you’re making a user-generated video social network. If your reasoning is, ‘I have an app idea for a social media mobile application because TikTok is popular’, that’s not a good enough why. TikTok already addresses a particular user pain point. In order to succeed, your app needs to do more than that. It needs to fill a niche, achieve new results in new ways. 

Understanding the why at an early stage of mobile app development – ideally, right at the beginning – informs the direction of the project for everyone involved. 

6. Avoid web-like experiences for mobile apps

Dare to be more than a website on mobile. Apps, especially the ones made for smartphones like Android or Apple, have some things in common with web design. Yet, there are things you should consider when designing mobile app UI.

Creating web-like experiences in an app should be avoided. – for two main reasons: 

• Technological limitations
• User-centric design

If you’re essentially ‘porting’ a website to an app, the tech limitations will impact your final product. Your app won’t work in the same way that a native app can. It’s true to say that HTML-powered apps that work across operating systems are easier to update. But it also means they’re prone to lag and are generally less capable than apps designed specifically for the iOS and Android platforms. 

The result is a bad user experience – a cardinal sin when building apps made with the user in mind. Web-style apps lack interactivity. That fundamentally changes what users can do and how they do it. 

If it doesn’t do what users want, in the manner they expect, they’re sure to find native apps (those built for specific platforms) that do. 

7. Don’t include too many notifications

Notifications are a necessary part of making an app – whether you want to highlight an important message or want users to perform a particular action. But they also disrupt the user flow, which means it’s important you strike the right balance. How quickly do you press ‘No thanks’ a website asks if they can view your location? And how frustrating is it to X an annoying pop-up? The same is true in an app and the notifications that pile up in the home screen. 

Bad app design throws real-time notifications at a user with reckless abandon. At that point, the focus is on the app’s functionality, not what the user wants (and the user, frankly, wants as few notifications as possible).

Frequency is important. But so is the content of those notifications. If you’re disrupting the user journey just to tell them how to do something they’ve done a million times before, then it only serves to frustrate them. 

Make your notifications useful or necessary (or both). A reminder to redeem their points or an item is still in their cart, for instance, is great; a reminder that pressing ‘Buy’ lets them buy an item isn’t. 

8. Prioritize design consistency

Have you ever tapped onto a new screen and thought – just for a second – that you’re in the wrong app? Gone is the familiar, replaced by a whole new style. It’s a pretty jarring experience (and one that might even see you closing the app, your mind filled with well-earned distrust). Consistency is more than using one color scheme or typography.

When creating a consistent design, make sure you align:

• Font type
• Spacing
• Images and icons
• Navigational elements

Consistency is important in great app design. Avoid changing UI elements up too much, at a screen-to-screen level, or introducing too many different concepts all at once. It risks overwhelming and confusing users. 

Best App Design is Within Your Reach

Given how most of us interact with services and products on mobile devices, no business can afford offering a bad mobile app design experience. Luckily, as we’ve shared in this piece, there are a set of best practices you can follow as you work on your application.

Sign up for UXPin trial and use those tips above to design a powerful prototype that follows good app design principles.

The post Good App Design – Top 8 Best Practices to Follow appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

UX design has a significant impact on brand consistency. A product’s visual aesthetic and usability are often the first thing people notice and, therefore, must relate to the brand and create a strong first impression.

Brand consistency in UX design goes beyond using a brand logo, correct colors, and fonts. Designers must create an experience that mirror’s the company’s image, makes sense for the product, and appeal to the target audience. This article explores the importance of brand consistency in UX design and how designers can create on-brand product experiences.

Design consistent user experiences with UXPin’s revolutionary Merge technology. Request access and discover how a single source of truth can ensure your organization delivers consistent, on-brand product experiences with every release.

What is Brand Consistency?

Brand consistency refers to how a company delivers consistent messaging and stays true to its core brand values across every touchpoint. This consistency relates to everything from visual design and copywriting to how employees engage with customers or solve problems.

Brand Consistency in UX Design

Design and UX are vital for brand consistency because these are components customers see and experience when engaging with a product or service. A company can have an excellent name, slogan, logo, brand messaging, etc., destroyed by a poor user experience.

Why Does Brand Consistency Matter?

A brand gives a company human-like characteristics, making it easier for customers to relate and engage. Here are several reasons why design leads and stakeholders must prioritize brand consistency in UX.

Reason #1: Building Trust

If you meet someone and they tell you they stand for one thing, but their actions contradict this, you might become suspicious. If you notice more of these inconsistencies, you stop believing them and lose trust.

The same is true for brands, probably more so. People want to see consistency, even down to a product’s typography, colors, and microinteractions.

In a case study from the password manager, TeamPassword, Tony Caccavo, Director of Operations, stated, “Brand is essential in this market. Customers entrust us with sensitive information in their login records. Inconsistencies or an outdated design can cause some customers to question whether we are technologically up to date enough to keep that information secure. Front-end development builds trust and confidence in the backend performance.”

Reason #2: Strengthens Brand Recognition

Brand consistency enables customers to find your business and other products in app stores, social media, and physical locations. A great example is the global mega-brand Virgin.

Virgin competes successfully in multiple industries worldwide, including services, experiences, and physical and digital products. Loyal customers immediately recognize Virgin’s signature red and white branding–associated with its high-quality service delivery, playful nature, and friendly customer service.

Reason #3: Boosts Sales and Marketing Efforts

Strong brand consistency can have a significant impact on revenue, according to a Lucidpress study. The latest State of Brand Consistency Report found consistent branding can increase revenue by 33%–a trend that appears to be growing, as indicated by a 10% increase since Lucidpress’ 2016 report.

Reason #4: Design and Development Efficiency

Branding, or any design inconsistencies, result in design drift, bugs, rework, technical debt, project delays, etc. These inconsistencies lead to poor customer experiences, but they also create workflow and delivery inefficiencies that cost organizations valuable resources.

To overcome these design and development inefficiencies, companies build design systems, including brand guidelines, to ensure teams deliver a consistent user experience across all touchpoints.

How to Increase Brand Consistency Through UX Design

Much of brand consistency is about building trust. If your company’s actions contradict messaging, people lose confidence in the brand. Here are six tips to ensure products deliver a consistent brand message.

Build a Design System with a Brand Style Guide

Design systems solve several big problems for companies implementing them, most notably cohesion and consistency–for the product and workflows.

A comprehensive design system includes brand guidelines that help reinforce the organization’s messaging and brand identity. Design systems ensure every project delivers the same design language, using the same principles and component library, creating a consistent brand experience for users.

Universal Design Patterns

Design patterns create familiarity, reducing a product’s learning curve and human cognitive load. These universally recognizable patterns give products a foundational consistency to strengthen the brand.

Furthermore, when a product is easy to use, customers are more likely to use and recommend it, thus increasing brand trust and affinity.

Showcase Your Brand’s Voice & Tone Using Design

Like a product’s messaging and copy, the color palette and visual elements must represent the brand’s voice and tone. The best way to define these UI elements is by testing designs with potential customers.

UX design agency Divami does this by developing a brand’s personality based on UX research. When Divami designed Celes Care, “a specialized healthcare platform – For Women, By Women,” they wanted to create a feminine UI without using the stereotypical “all pink.” By testing the color scheme, the agency found a “soft, mellow” palette that, most importantly, end-users associated with the brand’s personality.

Internal vs. External Brand Consistency

Internal consistency refers to the user experience within a product, while external consistency includes a suite of products. While each product might differ slightly, designers must meet a high level of consistency between products.

Apple has a wide range of hardware and software, but the brand’s physical and digital design features leave no ambiguity about who made it. Apple’s design consistency across products strengthens its brand and customer loyalty.

This consistency is easier to manage when the organization designs, develops, and manufactures every product, but what happens with third-party marketplaces?

Products like Shopify, Salesforce, Atlassian, and others, rely on third-party apps to complement their core product(s). While every app offers different features and functionality, the product’s design system ensures each matches the core product. 

For example, app developers must follow Shopify Polaris to ensure that every app in its marketplace meets Shopify’s guidelines (including branding) for content, design, components, and patterns. Even if someone uses multiple apps from different suppliers, it feels like one Shopify product.

Visual Design Consistency

Minor UI design details like spacing, sizing, layouts, colors, etc., can impact brand consistency. When these UI elements are consistent across all UIs, users can focus on completing tasks rather than thinking and searching for content and features.

Furthermore, designers must use consistent microinteractions, page transitions, and notifications that align with the brand’s voice and tone. Again, a design system can solve many of these issues, so user interfaces are always on-brand and consistent.

Be Transparent

Transparency is a significant factor in building trust and brand affinity. Designers must make features simple and transparent so users can complete any task, even those that adversely impact the business, like unsubscribing or canceling a paid plan.

A product must always inform users of a financial incentive, like affiliate referrals, sponsors, third-party data sharing, etc. Designers must also avoid clickbait or deceptive links that ultimately damage trust and brand.

Increase Brand Consistency With UXPin Merge

Merge enables you to sync a component library from a repository to UXPin’s design editor, so designers use the same UI elements as engineers. Any changes to the repository automatically sync to UXPin, creating a single source of truth across the organization.

The design system team can give designers the freedom to change components via React props (or Args for our Storybook integration). They can also hardcode and restrict specific properties teams aren’t allowed to change, like brand assets, colors, typography, microinteractions, etc.–maintaining brand consistency across the organization for every product release.

Programing brand elements and core values into the design system mean product teams can focus on developing new products rather than worrying about small (yet critical) design decisions.

Merge also streamlines the design handoff process because engineers already have copies of the components in a repository. Furthermore, UXPin renders JSX code for each component’s props. Engineers simply copy/paste components from the library and any changes from UXPin to start front-end development.

The post Brand Consistency – Check How You Can Boost it with Design appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Buttons are essential components in any digital product. While there are many ways to design a button, designers must follow principles and best practices to create familiar and intuitive user experiences.

Button design is more than choosing a shape and color. Designers must consider a button’s states, placement, size, responsiveness, consistency, icon usage, suitable text/labels, and more.

Design beautiful UI elements that look and function like code components using UXPin. Sign up for a free trial to explore the world’s most advanced design, prototyping, and testing tool.

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What is the Purpose of a Button in UI Design?

While this might seem like an obvious question to experienced UI designers, many digital products still misuse buttons. Buttons convey a specific call to action (CTA), like “Submit” or “Pay.”

Buttons tell users, “if you click me, something will happen.” Designers also use buttons to communicate with users through states, color, and text. For example, a disabled button state (unclickable) remains until the user completes a form’s required fields.

Should you use a buttons or a links?

Many digital products and websites use buttons and links incorrectly. There is a simple rule to follow when deciding between a button or link: Links are for navigation, and buttons are for performing actions.

4 Types of Button Design

There are four types of buttons designs, and each button conveys a different message to users:

• Contained Button: Often used as the primary button for CTAs and important actions. Contained buttons use a background color with contrasting text.
• Outlined Button: Also referred to as a secondary or ghost button, and often placed next to a primary button as an alternative action, like “Cancel” instead of “Submit.” Outlined buttons use a transparent background with a contrasting border and text.
• Text Button: Also called a flat button and often used for low important actions, like date pickers. Text buttons have no background or border, with only the label colored and visible.
• Toggle Button: Designers use toggle buttons for two or more related actions–like switching dark/light mode on an app or bold, italic, and underline in word processors. Designers use states to indicate which option is active.

Modern mobile apps also use a floating action button (FAB) for important actions. Designers often place FABs at the bottom of the screen so that it’s a thumb’s reach from the user.

UI Button Anatomy

Designers and engineers can modify several button properties:

• Background
• Label
• Icon
• Padding
• Margin
• Border
• Border radius
• Drop shadow

6 UI Button States

Designers use states to provide context and communicate with users. There are six types of button states:

1. Default: How a button looks without any state. A default button could be contained, outlined, or flat, depending on your UI design and design system
2. Active: Tells the user they have pressed the button
3. Hover: Activated when a mouse cursor hovers over a button. Hover tells the user this is a clickable element
4. Focus: Used to indicate selection when using the keyboard or assistive technologies
5. Disabled: Indicates the user can’t click the button until completing another task
6. Loading: Communicates the system is processing the user’s action

Best Practices for Using & Designing Buttons

Designers must follow certain principles for designing buttons and user interfaces. Use these button design best practices to guide your next project.

Button Hierarchy and Placement

Designers must consider button hierarchy and placement to provide users with clarity and highlight the most important action. Google’s Material Design recommends designers must create emphasis through color:

• High emphasis (Primary): Use a bright color, preferably a contained button, to show this button is most important. Avoid using more than one high-emphasis button on a single screen.
• Medium emphasis (Secondary): Use a lighter shade of your high-emphasis color to signify this button is less important. 
• Low emphasis (Tertiary): Use a text button or outlined button with a transparent background to show users its low importance.

By applying button hierarchy principles, users can complete important actions without much thought. If you use a single button for every action, users will have to examine each to determine which one they must press.

Correct button placement is also essential to guide users through a digital product. If you place two buttons side-by-side, always use a contained button as the primary action and outlined or text button for the secondary action. 

For example, if you have “Save” and “Cancel” at the bottom of a form, “Save” would be the primary action with the higher emphasis.

Button Consistency

Designers must use buttons consistently throughout a digital product. If you use a contained button for a primary action on one screen, repeat this choice throughout.

Designers must also be consistent with button sizes, fonts, icons, colors, border radius, whitespace, and other properties to create a familiar user experience that’s easy to navigate.

Button Sizing & Spacing

Size matters when it comes to buttons, especially on mobile applications where users use their fingers. Designers must use appropriate button size and spacing to ensure users don’t accidentally hit another element. 

Designer Taras Bakusevych recommends making UI elements a minimum of 48×48 pixels to avoid touch target errors. 

Button Labels

Labels should be as short and meaningful as possible. Designers must also keep labels on a single line for legibility. 

Button text language is also critical for conveying the correct message and action to users. For example, if you’re removing a song from a playlist, the correct phrasing would be “Remove” instead of “Delete.” Delete might confuse the user into thinking they’re deleting the song from their device or application.

Capitalization is also a critical factor designers must consider. Google Material Design recommends using uppercase for languages that allow it, while UX Movement says to use sentence-style capitalization.

The argument for sentence-style capitalization is better for users with reading disabilities like dyslexia. Google reasons that uppercase “is to distinguish the text label from surrounding text.”

The best option is to test your product with users. Color, contrast, size, UI layout, and many factors impact legibility, so there is no one-size-fits-all for capitalization.

Button Accessibility

Accessibility is a critical factor in modern UX design and product development. Designers must test UIs using tools and diverse usability participants to ensure buttons and other UI elements meet accessibility standards.

The color contrast between the label and background is one of the biggest considerations for button accessibility. With UXPin’s built-in accessibility features, designers can test color blindness and contrast on the fly–keeping them focused in UXPin rather than turning to external tools.

Label size, spacing, and padding can also impact accessibility. These properties are harder to test using tools, so designers must use usability testing to get meaningful results.

Devices & Screen Sizes

Recognizing how buttons look across different devices and screen sizes is crucial for designers. For example, dialog boxes look completely different on Apple devices compared to Android. The floating action button also looks different on iOS vs. Android.

Designers also need to consider how buttons will appear across multiple screen widths. For example, a button with a long label might not look the same on mobile vs. desktop.

Designing Buttons in UXPin

Designing buttons using an image-based design tool can be challenging. The static nature of image-based tools means buttons lack interactivity, functionality, and fidelity.

With UXPin’s code-based design tool, designers can create authentic user experiences with components that look and function like code. Here are some of UXPin’s advanced features to enhance your button design.

Components

Designers can build buttons from scratch and save them as Components to reuse throughout the design. Designers can also share these components through a shared design system to maintain consistency throughout the team.

States

UXPin States allow designers to create multiple states for a single UI component, like a button. For example, you can design the six-button states mentioned above, each with different properties that change according to user and system actions.

Designers can also use UXPin’s States for other components like carousels, dropdown navigation, accordions, and more.

Interactions

Create code-like interactivity using UXPin’s Interactions. Designers can choose from an extensive list of triggers and actions for desktop and mobile interactions. 

UXPin takes interactivity one step further with Conditional Interactions, allowing you to create dynamic, unique experiences based on user and system actions.

Variables & Expressions

With Variables and Expressions, designers can build high-fidelity prototypes with interactivity mirroring code.

For example, using UXPin Variables, designers can create a dynamic pay button that displays a variable total from a shopping cart, “Pay $25.”

You can also use Variables to create a personalized user experience during testing, like a welcome message with the name from user input or populating a profile page.

With Expressions, designers can validate form fields, like emails and passwords, and even disable a button until the user completes a form’s required fields.

With UXPin’s advanced prototyping features, the possibilities are endless. Designers can design prototypes that look and function like code, saving countless hours developing an identical prototype simply for testing purposes.

Sign up for a free trial and start building your first UXPin prototype immediately. Install one of UXPin’s free example apps to see how to create working buttons and other UI components.

The post Button Design – Get Site Visitors to Actually Click Your Buttons appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Why does Twitter chime with users? What is it about Amazon that keeps us all coming back for more? 

Awesome mobile app design ideas don’t just happen. That first, exciting spark of inspiration might be lightning fast. But building that out into a tangible product that users love demands a strong mobile app design strategy. 

If you want your app to take off, there are certain ‘best practices’ that are absolutely worth adding to your existing strategy. If you’re already doing some of these, you may also find it useful to look at where improvements can be made. 

Make sure these seven best practices are built into your app design strategy from the start – they’re core to the design process, not an afterthought or a nice-to-have. This will ensure you’re building the most successful app you can. 

Creating an App Design Strategy – 7 Best Practices to Follow

1. Know your target audience inside out

Good mobile app design revolves around the user. If you can’t point to any element of the design process and answer ‘what’s in it for the user?’, then it needs reworking or rethinking. 

And the only way to build a user-centric app is to gain a deep understanding of your target audience. Everything, like a profiler. Who are they? What do they want? Why do they like your competitor? What don’t they like?

You can apply the following methods to learn about your potential users: 

• Competitive analysis. Identify which apps you’re up against (and make tons and tons of notes and actionable insights based on your research). It’s a crowded market, so you may find it easier to limit this to the top three-to-five competitors. Use software and product reviews sites to get a feel for what users like and dislike about them. It’ll breed app design ideas that hit the mark.
  
• Social media. Social media platforms offer a good insight into how the competition positions its brand. That helps you understand audience preferences and what really matters to them. Most importantly, it reveals how users engage with your rivals. Those findings can totally redefine your app design strategy.
  
• Surveys, interviews, and focus groups. Get it straight from the horse’s mouth. There’s no better way to really get inside the heads and hearts of potential users than by directly talking to them. A mix of surveys, face-to-face and phone interviews, and focus groups helps glean. Some, for example, might feel like they’re on the spot during a sit-down chat. So, they give the answers they think you want to hear – not their true thoughts and feelings. 

2. Define your app design idea

What does your app do? Not generally. Not vaguely. This isn’t a single-sentence elevator pitch. Your app’s objective needs to be specific. Because if it’s not, the app development becomes a resource drain. 

Clearly defined app design ideas keep everyone on the same page. Each member of the design and development team knows what they’re creating – and how their roles fit into realizing that concept. 

As a base requirement, you should know:

• What is the purpose of this app design idea? 
• Who are you building it for?
• How will people use it?
• Why should they choose your app over another? 
• What resources are needed? 
• How will you measure success? 

3. Figure out your budget

Early on in the process, set a budget for developing your mobile app. This is a good way to avoid mission creep – the ‘art’ of adding more and more features to a product, resulting in spiraling development costs and, in many cases, failure. Your budget will help you decide which features you want to add (and which can be dropped or returned to at a later date). 

Align the budget to a project timeline with objective-based milestones. It’ll help you keep finances on track. 

Laying out a budget determines not just what you’re going to develop, but how you’re going to develop it. For instance, you might find it best to build a whole new team from scratch, if you’re a start-up. Or grow an existing team. Or use a specialized tech partner – these companies act as an experienced, external in-house team without the risks that come from the wholesale outsourcing of your app design idea. 

4. Learn how to activate users (making sure they stick around)

Long before your user downloads your app, you should have a pretty good idea of how you’re going to keep them around. What is it about your app that will ‘activate’ users, make them want to open it every day and spend time there rather than in another app? 

Part of this goes back to understanding the target audience and defining your mobile app design ideas. Let’s say your users are looking for snackable 10-minute sessions in an app they check out while they’re on the go. Your design, content, and experience will be totally different from an app that’s built for users who want to spend hours browsing products. Because if it isn’t, users probably won’t come back.

Amazon offers a masterclass in activating its users. Its app is consistently popular because it’s built for mobile use. And it does exactly what the user wants: makes it really simple to shop for a range of items. 

Meanwhile, Twitter is ready-made for bitesize chunks of content that can be consumed quickly in sharp bursts of time like waiting for the bus (or even for hours, if you get lost doom-scrolling). More recently, Wordle did the same in the gaming app sphere. Users just couldn’t get enough of it. Boom. Activation activated! 

Focus on that one thing that activates your users. 

5. Agree on KPIs

You’ll often hear the words ‘what does success look like?’ thrown about in pitch meetings. And, ok, it’s a pretty ugly, business-y phrase that no one in the real world would ever dream of using. But it’s still an important conversation to have. You can’t know if your app’s achieving its objectives if you haven’t really set any. 

For this reason, you want to set out key performance indicators (KPIs). These are the metrics against which you’ll measure your app design idea. And there are a bunch you could potentially use. Heaps and reams of data to parse. 

Instead of reviewing them all, choose a few metrics that are best aligned with your vision and your goal. These include: 

• The number of downloads – Do users like your product enough to install it? What needs to change to boost this? 
• Monthly active users – Does your user base stick around and check in regularly? If not, why not?
• Daily active users – What makes your most engaged users log in every day? 
• Churn – How many users are leaving or uninstalling or ignoring your app? What is it about the experience that’s driving them away?
• Session count and time – How many users keep your app open and active and for how long? Why? 

6. Choose the right mobile app design tool stack

Bringing concepts to life is often easier said than done. For many, this can be a seriously frustrating part of the design process. After all, you’ve got a picture in your head. Somehow, that needs to be communicated to the team, who can then execute it. 

 The trick is to deploy the right tools to the right teams to make that vision a reality. So, make choosing the right tool stack a key part of your app design strategy. 

Your designers and developers will have preferences. Those need to be taken into account (they’ll hopefully be masters at using them, giving them the confidence, experience, and knowledge to build a better product. But you should also consider how well those tools play with other software. If they don’t properly integrate into your existing software, or require slow, clunky workarounds to get them talking to each other, they may not be the right choice. 

UXPin is one of those tools that helps create a seamless workflow – a start-to-finish-and-beyond-type tool that lets designers begin the creative work from building lo-fi wireframes to crafting hi-fi, pixel-perfect prototypes of your mobile app. 

This ‘concept art’ uses the same real-life code components your developers use to actually build the final product. So, they don’t need expert coding skills to make a design that works how intended – and can continue being worked on post-launch without hand-offs that go back-and-forth endlessly between teams. And because it’s important that your team feels comfortable mastering UXPin, it integrates with other popular design and dev tools like Sketch, Slack, and Jira.

7. Implementing a feedback & improvement design process

‘Continuous refinement’ is the real buzzword when developing your mobile app design ideas. It’s as much a mindset as it is part of your overall process. A way of thinking that constantly questions, ‘how can we make things better for our users?’. 

To make ongoing improvements that actually matter, introduce a feedback loop. This should be a combination of comments and reviews from your users and behavioral data analysis: how do users use your app, what do they do, what don’t they do?

It’s about going back to the start – conducting interviews, focus groups, and surveys – to better understand how users respond to your app’s interface and experience. That doesn’t mean you need to act upon every comment a user makes. Who has time for that?

Instead, create a system where valuable, actionable data can help direct features and updates aligned to business objectives. It’ll simplify the design and development process – but also helps build buy-in from key stakeholders across the company. 

A strong feedback loop will help you see where refinements can be made, continuously. 

So, you’ve centered the user, championed their needs, aligned their desires and loves to your own business objectives, and used that to determine the ongoing development of your app. 

Execute Your App Design Strategy with UXPin

A winning strategy draws on all of these best practices to put all your mobile app design ideas into the hands of users. And the great thing about each of these concepts is how well they work in tandem together (just like your tool stack, right?).

You can only specifically define your app strategy by fully knowing your audience. The budget will determine where to focus your refinements. Each one integrates with the others, creating an intuitive, easily adoptable process.

Try UXPin and explore the tool that creates meaningful experiences for designers, developers, and users. 

The post 7 Best Practices Worth Including in Your App Design Strategy appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Without the right app design steps in place, it’s like rolling a dice and wishing for a six. Sure, the app you unleash into the marketplace may be a hit. More likely, it risks sinking without a trace because it didn’t appeal to the target audience and didn’t work the way it should. 

Effective mobile app design processes are laser-focused on testing, from that exciting initial concept, and continuously post- launch. Testing functionality and usability. Testing user demands. Testing the boundaries of what your design and dev team can achieve.

Design your first app with UXPin. An end-to-end design tool for building interactive prototypes that behave like a fully developed app. Sign up for a free trial and see how fast you can design your app and share it with your stakeholders.

3 Major Benefits of Creating an Effective App Design Process

If you’re creating a new mobile application, an effective app design process brings three major benefits. You’ll get your product to market faster. You’ll build a successful app that really hits your users’ spot. And you’ll stop wasting unnecessary time and money on an app that doesn’t work (or, at least, doesn’t work for your users). 

The app design steps aren’t set in stone – every business is different, after all – but we’ve mapped out the general process every successful design and development team follows to reach a successful launch, and well beyond. Along the way, you’ll learn more about your users, your market, and your business.

Explore how to get from that first spark of inspiration to a fully-fledged and fleshed-out app. 

3 Steps that You Should Follow in the Mobile App Design Process

To build a successful product, your process needs three core app design steps:

• Plan & research
• Design & app development
• Launch & continuous testing

Let’s look at what you’ll need to apply at each stage of the mobile app design process. 

1. Plan & Research

What are your business goals?

Your app design process starts with a solid foundation: what do you (and your end-users) want? 

Start broad. Write down every goal. Every problem and every solution. Then step back and assess. Now you’ll be able to see a path towards your true goal – tangled and overgrown and only just visible, but it’s there. 

It’s really important, here, to have a single vision. One that can be easily communicated to all stakeholders including the C-suite. 

‘Create a mobile app’ doesn’t tell anyone anything. 

‘Create a mobile app for stockbrokers’ offers the team direction. 

‘Create a mobile app that lets stockbrokers share professional advice’ gives everyone a clear objective, and how their work will make that vision a digitally tangible product. 

With your business goals and specification in place, you can then work up a design team’s to-do list and define the delivery time frame.

Who will the user be?

Next, it’s time to dig deeper into who your user is and the broader market. That “sharing app for stockbrokers” only tells half the story. It doesn’t contain any detail about the target audience, demographics or how their use computers or mobile devices. These are the sort of factors that now need to be built up.

Don’t let assumptions run the mobile app design process. Run user research. Assess your initial ideas through:

• Focus groups
• Surveys
• Phone and face-to-face interviews

This feedback will tell you what your users really want, what are their pain points, and what they like. So, you don’t spend months building an app that doesn’t meet their expectations.

When you run the user research, turn it into personas that will guide you throughout the full application design process and refine your app idea.

Who are your competitors?

You know the user and their needs. But how much does the team know about the market you want to operate in? The most successful app design processes include a heavy dose of competitor analysis. It’s like a CEO of a retail company ordering products from a competing store online or browsing around their brick-and-mortar store, aiming to understand the way they operate (and, ultimately, defeat them). What’s working, what isn’t? What do they do well, what don’t they do at all? What makes top competitors popular, what misses the mark completely?  

Ideally, you should analyze only a few companies – especially when developing an MVP. It will keep your research hyper-focused (and won’t overwhelm you as you refine your vision). 

Try out existing android, iOs, and web apps on the market. You might spot an opportunity straight away by reviewing the existing use cases and checking what the real users think about one app or the other.

To see what users make of the same product, head to review sites like G2Crowd, Capterra, and Serchen. The findings can be revealing. Don’t neglect social media, either. Undertake a deep dive of competitor profiles using social listening tools to make the research phase more efficient. 

2. Come up With a Design & App Development Process

Engage in wireframing

Wireframing is a 2D mock-up of a product. It’s typically simple, lacking color and styling, and it won’t feature any functionality. Wireframes help visualize your app information architecture without wasting tons of precious resources on a product that isn’t viable, doesn’t meet business goals, or just doesn’t work at all. During the wireframing stage, remember to make sure that your app design layout is in line with the Apple and Google app store guidelines. Otherwise, your app could be rejected. 

Hopefully your wireframes are bang-on target. All that user and competitor research has paid off. Which means you can begin scraping feedback from real users, or even colleagues, and key stakeholders across different departments.

It’s really easy to collect and collate this feedback using UXPin for wireframing. Just to make it easier, those serving up their views don’t even need a UXPin account to leave feedback. They can just add comments in the Editor and on Preview screens. The tool lets you add two kinds of comments in UXPin: 

• Team comments.Team comments are internal – only those added as team members via Team Management can leave and see them. 
• Public comments. Public comments are visible to everyone – even if they don’t have a UXPin account. You can explore more about how to ask the right questions in our guide Tips on Asking for Feedback. Use that feedback to refine the vision, direction, and scope of your app design layout.

Start thinking about the design system

After you’ve started working on your wireframes and collected feedback, it’s a good time to also start considering your design system. It entails a style guide with visual elements such as:

• Color & typography
• Sizing and spacing
• Imagery and animations
• UI components

Having a design system in place will help you speed up your work as you engage in the next steps and ensure that your design is consistent as you bring your app to the market. A step-by-step guide on design systems is here: Creating a Design System: The 100-Point Process Checklist.

In UXPin, you can create and maintain your own Design System or use one of the available design system library that are already in the app. Sign up for UXPin’s trial and see how easy prototyping is when you have a design system in place.

Proceed with high-fidelity prototypes

Low-fidelity prototypes like wireframes give you a good idea of how the app will look. But it doesn’t tell you how it works. For that, you’ll need to work up a high-fidelity prototype. 

There’s more to this than just an app design layout. Hi-fi prototyping blends user interface (UI) considerations like how the app looks with user experience (UX) factors like how the app behaves and how users interact with it. 

UXPin is tailor-made for this prototyping phase of the app design process. Your team can build clickable prototypes that are fully interactive. That’s because UXPin’s powerful advanced features, such as variables, expressions, and states. Elevate your prototyping to be more life-like than vector-based prototypes. Sign up for a trial.

The aim is to create a functional product fit for usability testing. It’s a way to let potential users (and your testers) try out the app to see how well it meets their needs – and pick up on any possible problems to be addressed before you start product development. 

Develop the app

It’s time to see how well the groundwork was laid. Or, to put it in Star Wars terms, ‘this is where the fun begins…’ by handing off the app UI design to front-end and backend developers who will code it into reality. There’s that flurry of emotions welling inside. Excitement. Tension. Joy. Frustration as designs go back and forth between the teams until they finally do what you need them to do. 

Efficiency is critical. It’s not an effective app design process without it, and the endless back and forths can really put the brakes on your momentum, or worse, stall a project seemingly indefinitely. To harmonize the workflow, UXPin lets designers build clickable prototypes with the same code used by front-end developers. So, design team knows what’s possible and devs know precisely how to recreate the UI design in fully functional code. 

3. Launch & Continuous Testing

Test the app with real users (and launch a beta version)

You now have an app. Or something that looks and works a lot like the finished product should. So, it’s time to test it among your target market to see what they make of it. Just as you did when you were determining the end-user all that time ago, organize focus groups to assess the product. Throw in remote usability tests, as you did during the prototyping stage, to assess navigation and interactions. 

Don’t just seek praise. Seek feedback to make your app even better (and iron out any annoying bugs).

Here’s the step way too many mobile app developers miss: the beta phase. 

A beta version of your app is a great way to observe user behavior. It opens up your user base. More users means more feedback that can translate into meaningful design tips – and who doesn’t love exclusive access to an app, anyway?

Then there’s the financial factor. If you jump straight to launch, and find you need to make changes, it costs a lot more to make those tweaks to the ‘finished’ product. UXPin simplifies testing, since you can observe the user truly interacting with the app and design elements, such as signup forms, data tables, etc.

Test your app with a robust prototype before you expend time, money, and all those other far-too-precious resources on developing the final iteration of your mobile app.

Launch the app

Of all the app design steps, this is arguably the most thrilling. The launch. The moment when the hard work of your whole team is delivered into the world for all to see (and download and love and use on a daily basis). 

Ok, let’s not get carried away. Before you launch, give your app one final check: does your app still meet the Google and Apple app store guidelines? A lot may have changed from the last time you checked. You’ve come too far to have your app rejected at the final hurdle. You need to make sure your product is 100% ready. 

All right, after that check, it’s time to launch. 

Collect user feedback & refine the mobile app experience

But the launch doesn’t mean the story’s over. In user experience and visual design as well as app development, the product launch is really the beginning of the journey. Everything that came before was just a prologue. UI/UX design is all about refining and reiterating on the initial idea. It’s the reason why Facebook initiated so many UI and UX changes, particularly in the years when usage exploded. The core idea remained – how users accessed the platform’s options evolved. 

Your users know what they want. 

Their feedback tells you how you can give it to them. 

You should still continue running focus groups and usability tests. Alongside these, monitor social media platforms, app store reviews, and customer satisfaction and UX design surveys. Make use of all the feedback collection methods you can. Just like during the app testing stage, the more data you can collect, the more on-point your innovations will be.

If you have access to a tool that helps you filter feedback by user sentiment, then that’s going to be invaluable. Congratulations – someone left a positive review. That’s ripe for the marketing team to help build social proof. Oh no – several users said they found menu navigation slow and clunky. Now, you’ve identified an area where you can make your app even better. 

Continuous product refinement ensures you’re always meeting market and user needs. 

Build High-Fidelity Prototypes in UXPin

App design process is pretty easy to follow once you understand its distinctive phases. Yet, you can be almost certain that you will hit a lot of bumps, especially when doing the testing part.

Spending a lot of time on testing with real users, letting them interact with a prototype and experience it can help you save loads of money and ensure your success. Use the prototyping tool that helps you design real interactions, not simulate them. Try UXPin and check how much you can gain.

The post How to Create an Effective App Design Process appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

User interface design (UI design) is crucial for aesthetics, usability, and branding. It’s a balancing act of form and function, where designers must push the boundaries of creativity while designing a functional, cohesive user interface.

This article looks at some creative web UI design examples and what makes them great. We also include a checklist of 16 UI design principles designers can apply to create great customer experiences.

Creating exceptional customer experiences starts with comprehensive prototyping and testing. UXPin’s code-based design editor allows designers to build high-fidelity website prototypes that look and function like a coded website. Sign up for a 14-day free trial and experience code-based web design with UXPin.

What is UI Design?

UI design is the process of adding color, fonts, icons, images, and other content to convert wireframes or sketches into mockups. UI designers are also responsible for adding interactive design and animations to turn mockups into functioning high-fidelity prototypes.

UI Design Principles

Before we dive into our website design inspiration, we thought it would be helpful to understand essential user experience principles designers use as a guideline for UI/UX design.

1. Focus on the user: Make sure you base every design decision on user research and testing. Start by empathizing with users to define the problem you need to solve—next, ideate and prototype before testing and iterating. Good designers recognize the user’s needs and design products and features to fulfill them.
2. Be consistent: Consistency is one of the keys to a good user experience. Design elements, components, and interactions must be consistent across every user interface. A design system is an essential tool for developing product consistency and cohesion.
3. Easy to digest: UI design and content should be easy for users to understand. Use basic language so users can absorb and understand how to use your web application or website.
4. Don’t make users think: Your website navigation and content should be obvious to use. Someone shouldn’t have to think about what elements and components are supposed to do. Try to use industry-standard UI patterns to create familiarity and reduce cognitive load.
5. Points, lines, and planes–understand visual grammar: Points, lines, and planes are the building blocks for design. Great UI/UX designers understand these principles and how they affect user experience.
6. Identify the problem first: UX designers must study research and user feedback to find the root cause of a problem. Avoid designing on intuition and assumptions–always test these hypotheses to make informed design decisions.
7. Simple language is best: Further to point 3, avoid using jargon and insider language that exclude users. Use obvious labels for UI elements, so users always know what to expect if they interact with your design.
8. Have empathy for your audience: Empathy is the heart of human-centered design. Designers use empathy so they can relate with users, their struggles, and their environment. When you fully understand your users, you can design an intuitive experience that solves their problems.
9. Provide feedback: UI designers must use microinteractions and animations that provide users with feedback and context. Users should always know what’s happening, and error messages should help users solve the issue.
10. Don’t forget business value: UI designers must identify ways to solve user problems while increasing business value. For example, optimizing an eCommerce checkout benefits both the user and the company.
11. User testing: Designers must constantly test user interfaces and design decisions with real users, especially when adding new UI elements, components, and patterns to a design system.
12. Visual hierarchy: Designers use color, contrast, scale, typography, and grouping to create hierarchy and help users identify critical elements and content.
13. Accessibility: Website UI design must be inclusive for users with impairments and disabilities. Designers should also optimize UI elements and layout for multiple viewports so users can access the website from any device.
14. Give the user control: Users should always have control to opt-out or change their minds. UI design must allow for these options with explicit icons, text, and buttons. For example, adding a “back” button in an eCommerce checkout flow or making a subscription’s “cancel” button prominent on the user’s account page.
15. Design handoff: UI designers must ensure they document their work and provide style guides so engineers can understand and develop the final website.
16. Reevaluate and revise: Once a website project is live, designers should use tools and analytics to evaluate their designs and look for improvements. How do users interact with your designs? What happens if you A/B test different colors or language for CTAs? You should always look for ways to test and improve. Designers might also need to update interfaces to align with new trends or legislation.

9 Web UI Design Examples to Inspire Your Next Website Project

With an understanding of the principles, let’s explore some UI design inspiration you can apply to your next design project.

1) Boost’s On-Brand User Experience

Boost does a fantastic job of aligning UI design with the product. Everything is on-brand, simple to navigate, and allows users to get to the checkout flow in no more than three clicks!

The product page uses minimal text with large button components to choose a single purchase or subscription plan. The bright orange ADD TO CART button on a white background screams “CLICK ME.” As soon as users click add it cart, the cart slides out so the shopper can begin the checkout process.

Boost’s website is an excellent example of UI design that helps users while providing significant business value through an engaging visual design and optimized checkout process.

2) Illuminating Radioactivity’s Creative Content Cards

Users often scroll mindlessly without reading the content on a page. The Illuminating Radioactivity website solves this issue by designing content cards with a parallax effect. Scrolling causes the cards to move down slowly, drawing your attention to the content. 

It’s a simple concept but a creative and engaging way to get users to read important information. If you’re designing an informational website that relies on users to spend time reading your content, a scroll effect like this could help engage more users, reduce bounce rates, and increase click-through rates–all essential factors for SEO.

3) An Engaging and Entertaining Menu From Lunchbox

Lunchbox’s designers had a lot of fun creating an engaging and entertaining UI design experience. Lunchbox helps restaurants digitize their menus, so everything is food-themed. 

The designers have changed the pointer to a chef’s knife and literally created a hamburger from the hamburger icon to access the main navigation. The menu has a strike-through hover effect, so it looks like the blade is cutting it in half.

Lunchbox’s entire website is filled with these immersive experiences that beg you to explore and read the content. If you’re looking for a lesson in how to use UI animation to sell a product, Lunchbox is definitely worth a visit!

4) Bennet Tea’s Engaging Color and Page Transitions

Like Boost, Bennet Tea’s UI is wonderfully on-brand with a striking color palette to match the product’s packaging. Even with lots of colors, Bennet Tea’s designers have done an excellent job of drawing the user’s attention to important content and CTAs.

Bennet Tea uses an immersive scroll effect giving you the illusion of staying above the fold while only the product images and description change as you scroll. It’s a clever way always to have a product and CTA in full view, enticing users to add to cart and checkout.

Bennet Tea’s theatrical page transitions feel like someone is pulling back the curtain to reveal a new visual experience. The three-page navigation is always visible in the top right of the screen (on desktop), making it easy for shoppers to explore the site.

5) Bauwerk’s Search Filter UI

Bauwerk’s immersive and intuitive property search filter helps users narrow their search to find exactly what they’re looking for. The UI does an excellent job of highlighting the user’s selection and the ability to remove any field by clicking X–providing the user with clear feedback and control to change their mind.

The bottom left also shows the user how many properties they can expect with their current selection, thus managing expectations. Designers have cleverly used different, bright colors for the number of properties UI element and the “show results” button to attract users’ attention.

6) Apple AirPods Max Immersive Scrolling Experience

What do you do when you’re trying to sell a $549 pair of headphones in a highly competitive market? Create an immersive UI experience that uses animation and effects to wow shoppers into buying your product!

Apple’s AirPods Max landing page is a masterclass in how UI design can showcase and sell a product. As you scroll, designers take you on an immersive product experience using typography, animation, color, images, and video. Apple has done an incredible job of using UI elements and movement to help tell the AirPods Max story, why these are the best headphones, and why you must have them!

By the time you get to the bottom of the page, you’ve learned every aspect of the product and why it’s worth $549. If you’re going to sell a high-ticket item, find a way to create an immersive UI experience that will convince users of your product’s value.

7) Glide’s Clear CTA

Glide lets you create web applications using Google Sheets. The goal of their website home page is to get you signed up. Glide uses a luminescent blue for the CTAs throughout the home page, and a “Sign Up” button in a sticky header. 

Glide also does an excellent job of using color, images, GIFs, and typography to explain their product and the problem it solves–giving non-tech people the ability to create an application. As you scroll through the website and learn about the product, that luminescent blue CTA is always prominent; yelling CLICK ME!

Websites and landing pages with a single CTA work best. Users don’t have to think about where they should go next or choose between different options. Great UI design can help facilitate that call to action by using color and contrast to make important buttons and links stand out.

8) ETQ’s Responsive UI Design

One of the biggest challenges of responsive design is maintaining consistency between the desktop and mobile experience. ETQ’s minimalist responsive layout complements the brand and user experience consistently across multiple viewports.

Designers have used hero images and titles that maintain the same focal point on desktop and mobile. Their clever use of white space on the desktop website draws your eye to important content and images. Designers have done well to translate this same experience on mobile, creating a premium, luxury appeal that aligns with the brand.

Maintaining consistency across desktop and mobile helps build familiarity, trust, and brand loyalty. Users know they can access your website on any device without compromising on features or usability.

9) Vintageria’s Helpful Cookie Policy

While GDPR does a lot of good, it’s also spawned the annoying cookie popup! For most websites, it’s pretty irritating, and many don’t offer a straightforward way to decline cookies. You have to accept and use the website.

Vintageria’s cookie policy is transparent, entertaining, gives the user control, and uses language most people can understand–all fundamental UI design principles.

Improve UI Design With UXPin

Are you feeling inspired after reading the examples above? UXPin’s code-based design tool allows designers to build prototypes with significantly higher fidelity than any vector-based design tool.

With UXPin’s code-based design tool, you can enhance prototype fidelity with states, Javascript-like interactions, conditional formatting, variables, data capture and validation, functions, and more.

Get started with a free UXPin trial and discover how to create better customer experiences with code-based design.

The post Web UI Design Examples and What You Can Learn From Them appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

The role of typography in design is enormous – that goes without saying. Uber has its own Uber Move, Airbnb uses Cereal across its product and brand, BBC replaced the good old Gill Sans with Reith. Seeing companies design their own custom typefaces that work alongside the brand’s aesthetics, we took the opportunity to provide our users with as many possibilities as we can when it comes to fonts.

Now, we’re happy to break the good news: from now on, every font installed on your computer is going to be available and ready for use inside the UXPin desktop app.

We’ve kicked this off because we know that unlimited possibilities when it comes to fonts is absolutely key to designers’ workflow. We want to ensure that your creativity will not be limited and that you can consistently use your company’s assigned fonts.

How it works

Apart from online libraries Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts (formerly Typekit), and uploading your own custom fonts to UXPin, we give you access to all fonts which are already in your system. In other words:

• No more limitations related to font uploads and integrations with online libraries. Our desktop app will now list all the fonts in your system and make them available inside the UXPin editor. 
• You can use fonts that have pretty strict limitations, such as Apple’s San Francisco which (currently) comes only in the iOS version and not the web version.

Pro-tips to remember

 1. If you want to share a preview of your prototype with someone, make sure they have the font you used inside the editor on their computer. To do that, you can:

• Send the file to the recipient of the preview link and make sure they install it.

Thanks to that, the design is going to render correctly and they will see things as you’ve designed them. In case the recipient doesn’t have it installed, we will replace the font with Arial and inform them about it.

2. Also, you must use the UXPin desktop app to avoid browser limitations – browsers don’t have access to the list of font files installed on your computer.

The post Use Your Own Local Fonts in UXPin appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Editor and Preview

• [New] Asymmetric and disjointed curve types for pen tool.   
• [New] Possibility to switch elements height/width from the properties panel. 
• [New] Possibility to flip elements horizontally/vertically. 
• [New] Possibility to loop interactions.
• [Improved] Updated icons for common elements on the layers list.
• [Improved] Improved performance when dragging layers on the layers list.
• [Improved] Elements added with shortcuts are placed so that their top left corner matches the cursor position.
• [Improved] Moved distribute controls to alignment sections.
• [Improved] Moved front/back controls to the top bar.
• [Improved] More coherent shadows for all elements.

Desktop App 1.1.2

• [New] More actions in the top bar menu.
• Small bug fixes and visual improvements.

If you’re interested what we released in June, please check out Changelog 2018 #9.

The post UXPin Changelog July 2018 #10 appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Editor and Preview

• [New] Redesigned properties panel split into separate styling sections.
• [New] Context top bar menu – allows to group and ungroup the  elements, turn them into symbols and open the interactions panel quickly. 
• [New] Blending modes – allow to determine how two layers are interacting with each other.
• [New] Spread support for shadows – helps control shadow contour.
• [New]  Shortcuts for elements distribution: vertical (cmd/ctrl+alt+Y) and horizontal(cmd/ctrl+alt+X).
• [Improved] Show/hide elements is now available in the layers section in properties panel. 
• [Improved] Improved way of managing elements in layers depending if you click or double-click on the element.
• [Improved] Dragging with cmd/ctrl pressed selects only elements entirely in selection bounds.
• [Improved] Disable snapping with a key (cmd) modificator.
• [Improved] Reorganised and shrank right-click menu in the Editor.
• [Improved] Zoom control has been moved back to the top bar.
• [Improved] Locked elements are selectable from the layers panel only.

Pen tool improvements

• [New] Added 10 different types of endpoints for a path to create different arrows.
• [New] Set the shape of ends and joins for any path.
• [New] Set dashed line – allows to decide whether a path should be solid, dashed or dotted with precise control of each dash and gap length.
• [New] Added start/stop options for stroke.
• [New] Set the position of each path node directly from properties panel.

Design Systems

• [Improved] Select the whole image and then delete it with backspace
• Small bug fixes and visual improvements.

If you’re interested what we released in May, please check out Changelog 2018 #8.

The post UXPin Changelog June 2018 #9 appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Editor and Preview

• [New] Line element.
• [new] Pen Tool – drag with Shift locks x/y axis. 
• [new] Pen Tool – pressing Shift adds a node in the middle of the path. 
• [new] Pen Tool – double-clicking on nodes creates a circle. 
• [new] Set element rotation to any angle (including negative and > 360° values).  
• [new] Possibility to group a single element and a single group to organize all layers types
• [fixed] Pasting elements multiple times using shortcuts wasn’t working.
• [fixed] Symbols were refreshed on Preview inconsistently.
• [fixed] Incorrect position of the element pasted inside a symbol.

Design Systems

• [new] Support for emojis in DS documentation.
• [fixed] Design System tile on Dashboard wasn’t refreshed after updating colors.
• [fixed] JSON wasn’t generated for some Design Systems.

Desktop App v1.1

• [new] Option to copy a Preview link from the top bar menu (Windows/Copy Link to Preview).
• [new] Manage application windows from the dock/taskbar.
• [new] More options added to the top bar menu.
• [new] Options in the top bar menu are displayed depending on the area of UXPin (Editor/Preview/Dashboard/Design Systems).
• [new] Minimal initial size of the window based on the screen resolution.
• Other bug fixes and small visual improvements.

If you’re interested what we released in April, please check out Changelog 2018 #7.

The post UXPin Changelog May 2018 #8 appeared first on Studio by UXPin.