We’ve just launched a new feature that brings full responsiveness to UXPin Merge. With it, you can seamlessly switch between different layouts such as desktop, mobile, and other devices and your design stays responsive. The feature keeps your projects visually consistent, fully functional, and looking great on any device.

What is Frames?

Frames is a versatile capability that allows designers to assign code-backed components to specific presets, making it effortless to transition between different layouts like desktop and mobile.

With this feature, you can preview how your designs behave across various devices directly in the Editor and Preview modes. This capability ensures that your designs are not only visually consistent but also functional across all screen sizes.

Frames come equipped with a full set of interactions — such as Resize, Scroll, Load, Click, and Hover — allowing for dynamic and engaging user experiences. This feature mirrors the flexibility and interactivity you already have enjoyed when working in UXPin’s Editor, now enhanced to support fully responsive design.

What Do You Get with Frames?

Besides being a much-needed tool for creating truly responsive designs with minimal effort, Frames comes with a host of benefits: 

• Responsive Design – Frames makes it easy to design layouts that adapt seamlessly to different devices. Whether you’re designing for desktop, mobile, or any other screen size, Frames ensures that your designs are fully responsive, providing a great user experience across all platforms.
• Seamless Transitions – Easily switch between layouts such as desktop and mobile, ensuring that your design looks great on every device. With Frames, what you see in the Editor is what users will experience, reducing guesswork and revisions.
• Real-Time Previews – Designers can see how their layouts respond to different presets without leaving the Editor. This feature enables you to make adjustments on the fly, ensuring that every element of your design is optimized for various screen sizes.
• Consistency Across Projects: By using Frames to manage responsive components, you ensure a consistent look and feel across all your projects. This is particularly valuable for maintaining brand identity and user familiarity.
• Support for Media Queries: Frames support dynamic resizing and styling through media queries, including those from design systems pushed to UXPin via merge-cli.
• Isolate Components from the UXPin Interface: Placed in frames, code-backed components are isolated from the rest of the canvas. This prevents components with overlay properties from interfering with the design, ensuring a smoother workflow.
• Artboard-Like Experience in UXPin: For those of you who don’t use code-backed components, Frames is a useful feature that will make your design feel like a set of artboards, just like in vector-based design tools. Instead of clicking between pages, you can see your designs side by side.

Why Responsive Design Matters?

Responsive design is a crucial consideration at every stage of the design process, particularly during prototyping and the handoff to development.

Accurate representation of the end product

During the prototyping stage, responsive design ensures that the prototype fully imitates how the end product will behave across different devices and screen sizes.

By using Frames, designers can see exactly how the layout, content, and interactive elements will behave across devices, which helps you keep total control over the design look and feel.

Enhanced user testing

Prototyping with responsive frames helps you evaluate how your users interact with the design on different screens. It ensures that your design is user-friendly regardless of the device used.

Streamlined collaboration across the organization

A responsive prototype provides a clear, unified vision of how the design should function across all devices, reducing ambiguity and aligning everyone involved in the project.

It also facilitates more productive feedback and discussions, ensuring that all team members have a shared understanding of the design goals.

Smoother design handoff

When handing off the design to developers, a responsive prototype is invaluable. It provides developers with a comprehensive guide that includes all necessary breakpoints, layout adjustments, and interactive behaviors for different screen sizes.

This detailed information helps developers implement the design accurately and efficiently, reducing the likelihood of misunderstandings or misinterpretations that could lead to delays or additional work.

Design consistency

By integrating responsive design into your design process, you can ensure consistency across all devices from the outset. This consistency is crucial for maintaining brand identity and providing a uniform user experience.

How to Use Frames

You can change the frame’s dimension, change its properties, add actions and triggers. Let’s see how or read about it in our documentation.

Creating frames

There are a couple of ways of creating frames. Let’s see them:

• Click “F” on your keyboard: select components that you want to put in one frame and press “F” on your keyboard.
• Use a shortcut in Top Bar: select components or layers and go to Top Bar. Click on the Icon named “Turn into Frame”. 

Switching dimensions

We can adjust the dimensions of our frame. A default frame is set to be 300 X 100 pixels, but we can easily change its size by dragging the frame’s corners, or typing in a specific width (W) and height (H) values in the right panel.

Enable “Responsive Width” to ensure your components automatically adjust to 100% of the frame width. See below:

Naming frames

WIth size adjusted, let’s change our frame’s name. We can rename our frame from either the Layers panel or the Top bar. The frame’s name will be reflected in the Layers panel, Top bar, and on the canvas.

Other properties

Besides changing the name, we can also adjust the look of our frame. We can add:

• Scrolling: To view components inside the frame that are outside the visible area, we can add vertical or horizontal scrolling.
• Fill: This one’s for adding a solid color, gradient, or image to the frame.
• Border: We can add a stroke to any frame that we have on the canvas.
• Shadows: Use it to apply outer or inner shadows to the selected frame.
• Blur: It works on the entire frame or its background.

Adding interactions 

There are specific triggers and actions that are set just to Frames.

Frame triggers

• Scroll: Triggers when the Frame Preview is scrolled to a specified height.
• Frame Load: Triggers when the Frame is fully loaded.
• Frame Resize: Triggers when the Frame’s window preview is resized, either manually or by changing the Frame preset in the Top bar.

Frame actions

• Go to Frame: Use this action to link to other Frames within your canvas.

Preview and Share Frames

To see how your frames behave, you can preview individual Frames or the entire canvas, and share previews of specific frames (or the entire canvas) with others, just like you can when sharing a regular prototype.

We added a “Preview frame” button in the Top bar of a Preview mode to help you view and share a specific frame. You can also use a keyboard shortcut “Cmd” (or “Ctrl”) + “I” to preview a frame you clicked on.

To share a preview of the selected Frame, press “Cmd” + “Shift” + “P” or click the “Share frame” button. You’ll see the Share modal. Copy the URL or QR code of the frame or share it via email.

Note: Frames do not support comments. To add comments, you will need to do so outside of the Frame.

Start using Frames in UXPin

By using Frames, you’ll ensure that your designs are optimized for any device, reduce guesswork, and streamline your workflow. It allows you to assign code-backed components to specific presets, seamlessly transitioning between layouts like desktop and mobile. With Frames, you can preview how your designs will look across various devices directly in the Editor and Preview modes, ensuring visual consistency and functionality across all screen sizes.

Frames also come equipped with a full set of interactions—such as Resize, Scroll, Load, Click, and Hover—making it easy to create dynamic and engaging user experiences. Whether you’re working with code-backed components or not, Frames enhances your design process by supporting responsive design, providing seamless transitions, and offering real-time previews to make adjustments quickly. It also helps maintain consistency across projects, isolates components from the canvas, and offers an artboard-like experience for organizing designs side by side, much like in vector-based tools.

Frames are available for all UXPin’s users, sign up here. Those of you who don’t use code-backed components can use this feature like an artboard on the canvas and set some interactions to it. Merge users can truly benefit from full responsiveness and total control. If you’re curious about designing with code-backed design, see how it fits into your design process. Request access to UXPin Merge.

The post Responsive Design for UXPin Merge – What is Frames? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

So you wanna be a Web Designer huh?

I mean why not? After all, everything is on the web …

As of writing this article 100 Million+ companies have an online presence through their websites.

But AI is here! Does that mean Web Design is dead?

Not at all! AI is changing the game, yes. AI can assist with the heavy lifting, no doubt. But creativity and empathy? Those are things it’s still catching up on. We need to be realistic about what AI can do and separate the hype from practical applications.

In this beginner’s guide, we’ll cover the fundamentals of web design to get you started on your path to becoming the next Mark Wheeler.

I’ll also show you a case study without overwhelming you so you get a sense of what you’ll actually be doing as a Web designer. Hopefully, this will give you a practical understanding of what it’s like to work as a web designer and inspire you to learn more.

Let’s go.

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What Is Web Design?

Web design is the creation of visually appealing and functional websites. It involves planning, and designing (not coding) the structure and layout of a website and its content.

Wait, “and its content”?

Yes, more often than not, a company will not hire a separate content planner which can sometimes mean the designer takes on that responsibility. We’ll come back to that later.

Just like other design disciplines, web design also has humble beginnings. In the early 90s, websites were primarily text-based, focusing on information. As the web evolved, visual elements like images and graphics added engagement. Today a website can have hundreds of web elements. Buttons, text, fields, dropdowns, icons, video, sliders, gifs, checkmarks … you name it.

In web design, like many other fields, we face a common challenge: balancing form (how it looks) and function (how it works). This is why we have two specialties – UX for user experience and UI for user interface.

Many experts will categorize the web design process into many parts or phases.

But here is the industry standard:

Discovery Phase > IA and Wireframing > Visual Design > Prototyping > Testing

While these are important, they’re not what this post is about. This post is focused on the fundamental/core principles of web design. Let’s take a look:

The 7 Pillars of Web Design

Not to be mistaken with Principles of Web Design, These are one the first concepts every web designer must be familiar with. These pillars are the foundational elements that ensure a website is effective, engaging, and functional.

Pillar #1: Usability (UX)

Frustration doesn’t have to be vocalized! Usability in UX Design measures how effectively users can interact with and navigate a website to achieve their goals. Oh, and one of the most ubiquitous terms you’ll get used to as a web designer is actually “User Goals”.

What are User Goals? Let’s look at an example:

Sarah, a busy working mother, is looking for a birthday gift for her 7-year-old son. During her lunch hour at work, she uses her iPad to surf internet stores. Sarah’s primary goal is to buy a gift that her kid would enjoy, and her secondary goal is to make the transaction swiftly and effectively.

So, as a Designer, you want to LISTEN to these queues. If you’re designing an eCommerce store in this example, you’d wanna make sure that there are filters. Filters for gifts for example, and maybe you can go down to specifics of what kind of gifts and for what age.

Amazon has a collection of Gift Ideas for example. With sub-optimal filters … take a look:

On this page, Shara could filter by product category, but it’s hard for her to find filters for age range or toy color. And since she’s browsing on a tablet with weak eyesight, the font used in the filter section can be difficult to read – these are the kinds of usability issues that you try to solve.

So, To solve them you have to KNOW the user. There is a simple three-step process approach to getting to know the user:

Define Pain Points > Create Journey Maps > User Personas

We’ll use MOLDO: a sample case study project I was involved in as an example. “Moldo” is an online shopping app for furniture and interior ware.

To understand our users’ needs, my team conducted research through surveys. We analyzed the results, prioritized the feedback, and identified the most common pain points that users were experiencing:

Then, we analyzed the major phases the user will have to go through on the App, and for each phase, we mapped user emotions, actions, and opportunities.

And finally, we have our personas …

Great UX design should consider the following factors:

• User’s Goals. As we already saw above: these are User Needs.
• User’s Emotions. How does the user feel when using the product?
• User’s Behavior and Actions. How does the user behave when using the product? Are they able to complete their tasks efficiently?
• User’s Context. Where and how is the user using the product? Are there any environmental factors that affect the user’s experience?

You will need to put yourself in the user’s shoes so that ultimately you can be able to create an intuitive design.

What is intuitive design? A design that is easy to use and understand, even for first-time users. This means that the product should be developed to align with the user’s expectations and mental models.

Here is another example …

Our home page has a clear and prominent call to action – a form that explicitly tells users what they need to do next.

The text clearly states the purpose of the product, which is to design UI with code-backed components. It is concise and free of distractions, making it easy for the user to focus on the main message and CTA.

The initial CTA is “Try for free”, which guides the user to take action and try the product. And even tells the user that we prefer their work email.

Again, this is why UX always comes before UI. UX is the why, and UI is the how.

Make it functional, then make it pretty.

We’ve written extensively on this topic in our blog – like Heuristic Evaluation, and UX Requirements feel free to browse around after you finish reading this one.

We even have a free ebook: Guide to Usability Testing.

Pillar #2: Design (UI)

UI Design focuses on the visual elements of a product, based on UX research findings. Visual elements are the ones a user directly interacts with, such as buttons, menus, and typography.

Its primary objective is to ensure that these interfaces are not only visually appealing but also user-friendly, enhancing overall satisfaction and efficiency in task completion.

I’ve been a UI Designer for half of my career, and let me tell ya, it’s fun. We worry about design movements, hierarchy, layout, interactions, and so on …

To start with, There are three types of UI Elements, Input, Output, and Helper elements, we cover them broadly in an article about UI elements, but let’s look at them quickly:

• Input elements. These elements allow users to enter data into the interface. Examples include text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-down menus, and sliders.

• Output elements. These elements display information to the user. Examples include labels, text, images, and icons.

• Navigation elements. These elements allow users to move around. Examples include buttons, links, menus, and breadcrumbs.

The UI Design Process

As I mentioned before, UI Design mainly involves the visual design and prototyping (and testing phase shared between UX and UI) part of the design process.

Depending on who you ask, Wireframing is part of UI design. Wireframes are the blueprints for your interface. So it goes like this:

Wireframing > Sketching > Lo-fi Prototype > Hi Fidelity Prototype > Mockup

But for brevity, we’ll stick to:

Wireframing > Sketching > Prototyping

Usually, the UX Designer would provide the IA (Information Architecture) of the app/website, and based on that we can start sketching out the project design scope.

IA is just a fancy term meaning a graph or map of how the content and pages should be structured, and it usually looks something like this:

But it’s the foundation of Wireframing which is the next step.

We use wireframes to define page elements (buttons, forms, images), Arrange content (headers, sidebars, main content areas), and Show basic interactions (click paths, transitions).

You can create wireframes by hand (on paper) or digitally using tools like UXPin or Figma.

Getting back to the MOLDO example, here is what the wireframe looked like:

For most ecommerce products we found that the navigation was visually not inviting or was bulky. So we wanted to make sure that we have our UI balanced between obvious but not lame …

Beyond the optimized design itself, We also adjusted the size of buttons to be particularly bigger than what’s usually a standard in mobile apps.

The point of having a wireframe is to change and iterate to your heart’s content. As you progress through the design process there will naturally be less wiggle room so this is your way of telling your clients, “hey … here is what I’m thinking” and gathering feedback.

As you can see the wireframe stage makes it easy to know what goes where.

Next, you flesh out the Lo-fi and Hi-fi versions. Lo-fi usually is the flat but colored version of the wireframes. And Hi-fi almost looks like the real product. Sometimes we simply use a prototype and then a mockup.

You can see what a visual design prototype might look like in a design tool, with all the visual elements and layout finalized.

And then finally the polished Mockups … yay!

As UI Designers, we don’t only design how elements look but also how they behave during interactions. AKA animations.

And I’m not necessarily talking about transitions or motion animation.

Animations that guide and interact with the user in a way that feels natural, but consistent. That gives users feedback about their actions, so they know what’s happening.

We call these micro-interactions. are small, purposeful animations triggered by specific user actions (clicking a button, hovering over an icon … so on).

For example: When you click a button, it slightly depresses/shrinks to give visual feedback that your action has been registered.

UI Motion Principles

• Consistency. As a user, I should experience familiar motion patterns across different parts of an application. I should be able to predict how interactions will unfold. If a button slides in from the right on one screen, it should do the same elsewhere.

• Hierarchy. Primary actions (like submitting a form) deserve more attention than secondary ones (like canceling an operation). That’s just an example, but prioritize animations based on their importance within the user flow and website structure.

• Realism. UI animations should mimic real-world physics to feel natural. Depending on what you’re going for Objects should accelerate when they start moving (ease-in) and decelerate when they stop (ease-out).

• Context. Animations should align with the context and purpose of the interaction. A loading spinner during data retrieval makes sense. A playful bounce effect on a serious error message might not.

Pillar #3: Accessibility

Accessibility in UI design goes beyond just color. Color can not be used as the only way to convey information. Surely, many other disabilities are not related to the human eye.

According to a survey, more than 1 in 4 adults in the United States have some type of disability. That’s a population of more than 83.5M!

Accessibility refers to whether a product or service can be used by everyone, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. 

Read: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

Check out the full list of tools curated by W3.Org.

According to the WCAG, a website should do the following to be accessible: 

• Perceivable. Content should be presented in ways that users can perceive (e.g., through text, images, or sound).

• Operable. Users should be able to navigate and interact with content (e.g., using keyboard shortcuts or voice commands).

• Understandable. Content should be clear and easy to comprehend (avoid jargon, provide instructions, etc.).

• Robust. Content should work reliably across different technologies and devices.

WCAG also has Levels of Conformance ranging from A to AA and AAA.

At UXPin we are very serious about accessibility. With UXPin’s accessibility features, you can design for all users, both disabled and nondisabled.

Image Source: Web.Dev

Accessibility Ground Rules:

1. Color Contrast and Text Legibility. Poor color contrast can make text difficult to read, especially for people with limited vision or color blindness. The solution is to use high-contrast combinations (e.g., dark text on a light background or vice versa). Avoid relying solely on color to convey information. Use additional cues like icons or patterns.

2. Alternative Text (ALT Text) for Images. People who use screen readers rely on ALT text to understand images. ALT text Describe the image’s purpose or content concisely.

3. Keyboard Navigation and Focus States. Some users rely on keyboard navigation (e.g., screen reader users or those with motor impairments). All interactive elements (buttons, links, form fields) should be keyboard-navigable.

4. Semantic HTML and ARIA Roles. Proper HTML structure aids screen readers and other assistive technologies. Learn more about ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications).

5. Captions and Transcripts for Multimedia. Deaf or hard-of-hearing users rely on captions for videos and audio content.

6. Forms and Error Handling. Forms are critical for user interaction, but poorly designed forms can be frustrating. Label form fields clearly and provide error messages in a perceivable way.

7. Test with Real Users. Real-world feedback is invaluable. Conduct usability testing with diverse users, including those with disabilities.

Pillar #4: Layout

Layout refers to the arrangement of visual elements within a given space. It is part of UI primarily but decided by factors in UX.  A well-designed layout enhances user experience by making content easy to find and understand. Here are some common types of website layouts:

Grid Systems. In a grid-based website layout, elements like margins, flowlines, rows, columns, gutters, and modules work together to create a structured and visually appealing design. Margins define the edges, flowlines guide reading, rows and columns organize content, gutters provide spacing, and modules combine elements into organized groups.

Box Model. The box model represents how elements are rendered on a web page. It includes four components: margin, border, padding, and content.

Image Source: W3

Flexbox. A powerful layout mode that allows flexible and responsive designs.

Key properties include display: flex, flex-direction, and justify-content.

Using a flexbox system is perhaps the best choice for managing responsive layouts.

Here are the primary types of website layouts, that provide a solid foundation for understanding web design principles:

• Fixed Width Layout. The content area has a fixed width, regardless of the screen size.
• Fluid Layout. The content area expands or contracts to fit the width of the browser window.
• Responsive Layout. A combination of fluid and fixed layouts, using CSS media queries or clamp functions to adjust the layout based on the screen size.
• Adaptive Layout. Similar to a responsive layout except it’s specifically arranged in the most suitable way for each device. (Separate layout for each).
• Grid Layout. A flexible layout that uses a grid system to organize content into columns and rows.

Learn more about website layouts and how they affect user psychology.

A fundamental principle that greatly impacts layout is balance, which web design relies on. Balance is all about distributing visual elements in a way that creates a sense of harmony. 

There are two main types:

• Symmetrical Balance: Mirror-like fashion, creating a sense of formality and stability. This is often used in traditional designs and logos.
• Asymmetrical Balance: Arranged in a way that is not symmetrical but still feels visually balanced. This can create a more dynamic and interesting composition.

Another thing to keep in mind when working with layouts is Negative Space. This is an overlooked design element that differentiates between a noob and a pro.

Did I say “design element”? Yes!

In fact, thinking about negative space as an active element in web design will help you understand how layout works. It’s obvious that when a webpage is cluttered with too many elements, it becomes overwhelming for users.

But what is the point where it stops becoming clutter?

For example, look at this:

Unless you’re intentionally aiming for a busy, maximalist aesthetic and it makes sense for your audience, this approach can be detrimental to focus.

Modern WebUI is almost always incorporated with negative space like this:

Pillar #5: Typography

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type/letters, numbers, and symbols to make written language legible, readable, and visually appealing when displayed.

It’s an entire field of its own.

But in our context of web design, it involves choosing fonts, adjusting the spacing between characters (kerning), the space between lines (leading), and the overall layout of the text. Good typography guides your eye across the page smoothly without making you think too much about it.

It’s a big deal because it’s directly connected to clients’ ROI. So let’s take a look at  some typography basics:

Font Families

A font family is a group of fonts that share a common design style. Think of a typeface as a broad category of fonts that share a unified look and feel. Within a typeface, you’ll find individual fonts that vary in size, weight, and style.

Font families are classified into types: Serif, Sans-Serif, Monospace, Display and Handwriting.

Let’s focus on the first three:

• Serif Fonts. Have small strokes (called serifs) at the edges of each letter. They exude formality and elegance. Think Times New Roman, Georgia, and Baskerville.

• Sans-Serif Fonts. Mostly used on UI and are sleek and modern. They don’t have those little serifs just clean lines. Arial, Helvetica, and Open Sans.

• Monospace fonts. Give every letter the same fixed width. Fonts like: Courier New, Consolas, and Inconsolata.

I once designed my own custom font, although I loved Proxima Nova. It took two months and gave me an insight into what works well on the web. It might even be one of the factors that I was nominated for Awwwards.

And from that experience, here are some tips that I’ve learned:

• Use regular medium font weights and anywhere between 18-21px for body text.
• Don’t use more than two types of fonts. And always stick to one font for the body.
• When choosing a font for headlines or titles, feel free to explore more expressive options. Bold, playful, or unique fonts work well here.
• Use a clamp function for responsive text.
• Always use a different font style for links (usually bold or underlined).
• More typography tips.

Web-Safe Fonts

Web-safe fonts, also known as system fonts, are pre-installed on most operating systems. These fonts are readily available to users without requiring any additional downloads.

These should only be used as either a fallback font or if your client only wants raw performance and doesn’t give a dime about custom fonts. Or if other overarching elements on the site compensate for it.

Google Fonts

Google fonts are hosted by Google, making them easy to incorporate into your web projects. You can use the API or directly download them and include them in your projects.

HTML Example:

<head>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=inter">

<style>

body {

  font-family: "Inter", sans-serif;

}

</style>

</head>

Typeface Anatomy

I think while we’re at it it’s good for you to familiarize yourself with some common terms. Like “Glyphs”. So here is a quick rundown: 

Each letter, number, punctuation mark, or symbol is a glyph. X-Height is the height of lowercase letters (excluding ascenders and descenders). 

Ascenders and Descenders? They are upward-bound strokes of lowercase letters that extend beyond the x-height. The baseline is the invisible tightrope where letters stand. It’s their foundation the ground level.

Kerning is the space between individual characters. And tracking controls the overall spacing across a block of text. 

Here is a better look:

Image Source: Yesiamadesigner

And again you can learn in more detail about typeface anatomy.

Pillar #6: Responsiveness

Responsive Design (not to be mistaken with Adaptive Design) is a web design approach that ensures a website adapts seamlessly to various screen sizes and devices

Responsiveness is the ability of a website to adapt its layout and content to different screen sizes and devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

Design for mobile first!

It’s often easier to adapt a mobile design to a desktop than the other way around. Since larger screens can accommodate more content, it’s best to start by designing for mobile and prioritizing the most important elements.

Media Queries

Simple but if the user drags the window size they step towards the next set size.

Here is an example:

/* Tablets and smaller */

@media (max-width: 768px) {

  .container {

    width: 100%;

  }

}

/* Mobile devices */

@media (max-width: 480px) {

  .container {

    width: 100%;

    padding: 0 10px;

  }

}

Clamp Function

The clamp() function in CSS lets you set a value that’s dynamic between a minimum and maximum. It adjusts based on the screen size or viewport width. So, instead of using media queries, you can have a property (like font size) scale naturally between limits.

Formula: clamp(minimum, preferred, maximum);

Example: Responsive Font Size with clamp()

h1 {

  font-size: clamp(1.5rem, 5vw, 3rem);  /* Between 24px and 48px */

}

With clamp(), you don’t need to set up media queries for every screen size. The text grows naturally between your set limits, and you don’t even have to calculate it by hand there are great free clamp() generators out there.

Responsive Images

Images can be a big hurdle when it comes to making a website responsive. They can slow down your site if not optimized, or worse, they might look distorted or too large on smaller screens. But, don’t worry, you’ve got a few tricks up your sleeve.

• Srcset. The srcset attribute is for delivering different image sizes based on the device. You’re telling the browser “Hey, use this image for mobile, this one for tablet, and this one for desktop.” 

• Vector Images. SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) are amazing because they scale infinitely without losing quality. This makes them perfect for logos, icons, or any simple illustrations. 

• Image Optimization. Beyond just choosing the right size, you can optimize images to load faster using lazy loading. You can use Webp or any other modern web image format. Read more about what matters for web performance.

Flexible Grid Systems

While responsive images handle the visual content, flexible grids manage layouts across different devices. These grids allow your design to flow naturally, adjusting based on the screen size.

1. CSS Grid

CSS Grid allows you to define rows and columns that automatically adapt to the size of the screen.

Here’s a basic example:

.container {

  display: grid;

  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(200px, 1fr));

  gap: 10px;

}

2. Flexbox

While CSS Grid is perfect for two-dimensional layouts, Flexbox is awesome for one-dimensional layouts … think rows or columns.

Here’s how you can use Flexbox to build a simple responsive layout:

.container {

  display: flex;

  flex-wrap: wrap;

  gap: 10px;

}

.item {

  flex: 1 1 200px;

}

You can even combine both! For instance, use Flexbox to lay out different sections of your site, and then use Grid inside those sections for more complex layouts.

Now you need to think backwards FROM CSS towards your UI Design tool.

Pillar #7: HTML & Performance

Ultimately, your design will be brought to life in HTML, so having a basic understanding of HTML and CSS can be a huge advantage. It’s not a must for designers to know about this, but it sure helps a lot! 

Browsers read HTML like a book, from top to bottom. They create a DOM (Document Object Model) as they go. The simpler this book, the faster it can be built. Believe it or not, it all starts with the designer.

Image Source: Mozilla

If you’re a designer who understands this, you can start making decisions that not only look great but make life easier for the developer. For example, knowing how HTML is structured (with headers, paragraphs, images, and links) allows you to visualize how content will flow and stack across different devices. It also means you can avoid suggesting IMPOSSIBLE LAYOUTS that would take hours of unnecessary coding.

Benefits of Knowing Code as a Designer

• Identify and troubleshoot design issues more efficiently.
• Achieve precise control over the layout, typography, and styling of their designs, resulting in a more polished and professional final product.
• Experiment with more advanced techniques and create innovative designs that might not be possible for designers who rely solely on visual tools.
• Utilize a tool like UXPin much better because they can understand the code behind the elements.

The Handoff: Collaborating with Developers

The designer-developer handoff is often where dreams go to die, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Handoff is transferring a completed web design from the designer to the developer for implementation. 

When you understand the basics of HTML and CSS, you’ll know what’s possible, what’s tricky, and how to meet halfway to create something that both looks great and works smoothly.

Developers will appreciate it, too, because you’ll be speaking their language   or at least enough of it to avoid miscommunication.

Key Components of Handoff:

Design Files: These typically include:

• PSD, Sketch, or Figma files: Contain the visual elements, layers, and styles of the design.
• Style guides: Document the typography, colors, and other design elements used in the project.
• Wireframes: Provide a basic structure and layout of the pages.

Specifications:

• Measurements: Dimensions of elements, spacing, and padding.
• Typography: Font families, sizes, weights, and line heights.
• Colors: Hex codes or color names for all colors used in the design.
• Interactions: Descriptions of how elements should behave when clicked, hovered over, or focused.

Annotations:

• Notes and comments: Additional information or instructions for developers.
• Placeholders: Indicate where content will be added dynamically.

Design with Implementation in Mind

When designing a responsive navigation bar, knowing that developers can use CSS Grid or Flexbox to make it dynamic can inform your design decisions. You’ll create a flexible layout that adapts to different screen sizes, rather than specifying rigid pixel values for each breakpoint.

This approach streamlines the design-to-development process, reducing the need for back-and-forth revisions. By showing that you’ve considered the build process, you’re more likely to earn the development team’s respect and ensure that your design is implemented as intended.”

Suggest Solutions, Not Just Problems

We’ve all been there – pouring our hearts into a design, only to have it rejected due to technical limitations. But what if you could turn those limitations into opportunities? By having a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, you can collaborate with developers to find alternative solutions that achieve the same visual effect.

For instance, if an animation is deemed too complex, you can suggest using CSS transitions or animations that are easier to implement. This way, you’re not just handing off your design and hoping for the best – you’re actively working with the development team to bring your vision to life.

My favorite places to start learning CSS are: Kevin Powell, and Bro Code.

Web Designer Career opportunities

There are different ways web design can be added as a skill set of other professions like a web developer, freelancer digital marketer and so on but here are the major roles you can embody as a web designer:

• UI or UX Designer
• Web Design Consultant
• UX Researcher
• Product Designer

UI/UX Designers and Product Designers are the most common. I’ve personally worked in these exact roles myself.

I just did a search on LinkedIn for “UI/UX Designer” and just today there are 1000+ offers available. And this is just in the United States.

Taking a peek at Indeed shows another 1000+ results:

The best platforms for finding web design jobs are:

• Company Websites
• Dribbble and Behance
• Toptal
• Linkedin and Upwork
• Traditional Job Boards

Web-designers anywhere between $62K – $112K/yr according to GlassDoor. 

You’d also be well-positioned to explore a wide range of entrepreneurial opportunities. Like freelancing, starting a web design agency, selling products, taking web design courses and workshops, and so on.

Resources and Tools

Resources

• The Guide to UX Design Process & Documentation
• Design Trends Collection
• DesignOps 101: Guide to Design Operations

Courses

• Google UX Design Professional Certificate
• Web Design for Everybody by the University of Michigan
• Ultimate Web Design Course by Webflow
• Fundamentals of UXPin on Udemy

Books

• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• HTML and CSS by Jon Duckett
• The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett
• Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski

Conclusion

Even if you’re focused purely on the visual side of things, web design isn’t just about making things pretty. A site has to work in real-world conditions: it needs to load fast, be responsive, and be accessible. Knowing the pillars helps you think beyond the surface and consider what makes a site functional. That also makes working with developers smoother you’re speaking the same language, and you’re both aiming for a seamless user experience.

The perfect website balances purpose and functionality with beauty and simplicity. It’s easy to navigate, works on any device, loads quickly, and is accessible to all users.

At the end of the day, web design isn’t about you, it’s about the people using your product. 

UXPin empowers teams to create seamless, interactive prototypes of websites and apps with realistic, fully functional components. Try UXPin for free.

The post 7 Pillars of Web Design – A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

The hamburger menu looks as tasty as it sounds. It’s a design-cum-navigation element, now on almost all apps, that comprises three horizontal lines. It looks like a hamburger. Picture something like this:

Bun, patty, bun.

If you squint, it kind of looks like the Spotify logo:

The UX designer’s hamburger menu saves time and space by storing relevant information in a universally recognized format. All that information is there in one place, and everyone knows where it is. Like how a diner learns what food a restaurant serves by reading the menu, a website visitor accesses different linked sections through one navigational element.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway. 

This icon became pervasive in the mid-2010s, and similar to the classic hamburger itself, every UX designer has an opinion about it. For every designer who thinks it frees up screen real estate, another believes it’s a blot on the informational architectural landscape. You might fall somewhere in the middle, but you will change your mind after reading this.

Design apps and websites with a hamburger menu in UXPin. Build prototypes that are responsive and have functional navigation. Test your prototypes with users, hand them over to developers and build your design system without using additional design tools. Try UXPin for free.

Build advanced prototypes

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

Try UXPin

What Is a Hamburger Menu?

A hamburger menu is a UI element consisting of three horizontal lines, resembling a hamburger, typically located in the top corner of a website or app. When clicked or tapped, it reveals a hidden navigation menu or additional options.

The hamburger menu is commonly used in mobile interfaces to save space and keep the layout clean by tucking away less frequently used navigation items. While it’s efficient for mobile screens, some argue it hides important features, leading to lower discoverability.

Those three lines at the top of almost every app or mobile-optimized website? They make up the hamburger menu. Designer Norm Cox cooked up the idea in the early 80s because he thought it was easier to communicate information to people in a list format. 

There’s evidence that backs up this theory:

• Humans remember facts better when presented with a list.
• Fifty-five percent of website users look at lists (seventy percent look at lists with bullet points).
• Lists improve the selection-making process for users. 

Even that short list above improves readability and breaks down content into digestible “chunks.” 

But other research tells a different story. 

It all has to do with discoverability. Some website visitors can’t find the links when they’re hidden in a hamburger menu, which affects click rates. And click rates are even lower when designers place the hamburger menu on the top-left of the screen because of how most people scan their devices (center first, then right).

“The implied message is that things at the top of the screen are to be glanced at, not clicked on,” says UX Planet. 

Perhaps the most shocking statistic is this one: Forty-eight percent of internet users over 45 don’t know what the icon even means. 

So, unless your creative brief is “create a design for only millennials because nobody else must visit our website,” maybe choose something different the next time you consider a hamburger.  

It’s Just a Hamburger Menu. What’s the Problem?

The hamburger menu certainly saves space; some would argue it’s easier on the eye. Instead of links stacked up against each other in the sidebar — or, God forbid, sprawled across the top of the home page like trash bags on a downtown sidewalk — the menu keeps everything hidden from sight, facilitating crisp and creative design. It’s like neatly placing everything in a drawer.

But it’s that drawer comparison that irks some designers.

Despite what IKEA tells you, humans put stuff in drawers for one reason:

There’s nowhere else to put it.

That’s why, for some designers, hamburgers are off the menu. 

Think about the things you keep in drawers. Now think about the things you keep on shelves. Would you keep a framed photo of Mom in your drawer? Or your Master’s in User Experience Design? Probably not, because you want everyone to see it. 

The hamburger menu suggests one thing: The items contained within are of little importance — concealed from public view and brushed under the carpet like a 20-year-old dirty secret that nobody wants to talk about.

Anti-hamburger designers think the menu is little more than an afterthought: There’s nowhere to put it, so let’s put it here. It’s lazy, if not necessarily bad, design.

So what are the alternatives?

A Burger-Free Menu

The most popular alternative to the hamburger menu is probably tabs, especially for app navigation on smaller smartphone screens. Sure, you’re limited to four or five menu items, but the ones featured hold greater importance because you haven’t hidden them away.

“Tabs offer a more modern and useful method to navigate around an app, and the core sections of your application are immediately visible to the user,” says UX designer and software engineer Michael J. Fordham. “If you’re concerned about space, you can implement hide gestures that make the tabs disappear when you scroll down but reappear when you scroll up.”

What else is on the menu?

Floating Hamburger

Again, best served on apps, this alternative provides users with context when they click on the three-line icon. Like tabs, links no longer feel like an afterthought, and they feature more prominently on screens.

Swipes

Think Tinder, where users scroll left or right to navigate apps. Swipes only provide sequential access to pages, though, so won’t suit contexts where users jump to different sections quickly, like store pages.

Ultimately, It’s Your Choice as the Designer

If you’re still hungry for a hamburger, a couple of tips:

• Supersize your burger: Make your menu more recognizable so visitors can see it. The links contained within could be critical for the website owner. Make sure people click on them.
• Create a secondary menu: Couple the hamburger with secondary access to important pages. (Use one of the menu alternatives above.) You’re probably thinking about the c-word (“clutter”), but you can avoid this by incorporating minimalist elements elsewhere in the design infrastructure. Try it.

Last Bite

Mentioning the hamburger menu in UX design is like bringing up politics at a dinner party. Expect some controversial opinions. Despite what some designers think, it’s not a crime to use the hamburger, and it can be an incredibly effective navigational tool. Just realize its potential downfalls, consider the overall context and try out a couple of alternatives with UXPin before your next bite. When’s the next time you’ll serve up a hamburger?

Join the world’s best designers who use UXPin — not your average UI design and prototyping tool. Start your free trial.

The post Does the Hamburger Menu Make Mincemeat of UX Design? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Lists are fundamental components of user interfaces, helping to organize information in a way that’s easy to scan and digest. Whether it’s a simple to-do list or a complex product display, well-designed lists enhance usability and improve the overall user experience. By understanding the principles of list design, designers can create intuitive layouts that streamline navigation and engagement. In this guide, we’ll explore best practices, key principles, and hands-on tips to create visually appealing, functional lists for any UI project.

Optimize your list design process with UXPin Merge. Bring code-backed components to a design editor and create interfaces that are production-ready from the start. Design prototypes that feel like a real product with UI elements that can be shared between design and development. Request access today.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

What is a List in UI Design?

In UI design, a list is a method of organizing information vertically, allowing users to scan and process data quickly. Lists can display a variety of content, from simple text items to more complex layouts that include images, descriptions, and interactive elements.

They improve usability by breaking down information into manageable chunks, ensuring users can navigate effortlessly. Lists are versatile and appear in many forms—such as single-line lists, multi-line lists, and image lists—each tailored to specific content types and design needs.

What is the Difference Between a List and a Data Table?

Designers use data tables to display a dataset to users. Tables have a specific structure, including a header, rows, and columns with sorting and filters to find and manipulate data.

Read this: How to Design a Table UX

Lists don’t have a fixed structure. Each list item is independent rather than part of a structured dataset with rows and columns. The list item could feature a single line of text in a menu dropdown or a complex card component with lots of data.

In summary, the most significant difference between lists and tables is the data structure. Tables have a specific design, while lists can exist in many formats.

Types of List Designs

There are three types of list designs:

• Text lists
• Image lists
• Card lists

Text List Design

There are three types of text lists. These lists typically include text and an image, icon, and other UI elements like a checkbox or radio. 

• Single-line lists: These are the simplest form of lists, displaying only one line of content per item. They work best for short, easily digestible information, like settings or contact lists.
• Two-line lists: These lists include a second line, often used for supplementary information, like subtitles or descriptions. They balance brevity and context, making them ideal for emails or notifications.
• Three-line lists: These lists display more detailed information, such as titles, descriptions, and additional metadata. They’re useful for content-heavy items, like product listings or media files.

Image Lists

Designers use image lists when visuals are the primary content–like an image or video gallery. Sometimes a single line of text will accompany the image to provide detail or context.

Where image lists don’t include text, designers must ensure to use descriptive alt attributes so screen readers can navigate the content accordingly.

Card Lists

Card lists typically include visual content and text and may also include a CTA. We often see these card lists in eCommerce store product lists that feature an image, title, short description, category tags, price, and “Add to cart” button.

How to Design a List UI

Step 1: Think Content First

Designers must decide on the best list item design based on the content they want to display. 

UX designers have three primary ways to structure content lists: horizontally, vertically, and grid layouts.

List Example: Instagram

An excellent example of these lists in action is Instagram:

• Main feed – vertical list
• Story feed – horizontal list
• Search feed – masonry grid list

UX designers have seemingly endless options and variations within these three list structures.

Step 2: Follow Atomic Design Principles

There are three components to a list design:

• The list: All list items together
• List item: An individual item in the list
• List content: The content that makes a list item–image, text, metadata, title, subtitles, and other user interface elements

It’s helpful to use an atomic design approach when deciding how to put these pieces together. 

• Atoms: The content within each list item–individual images and text
• Molecules: The components within each item–a profile image component
• Organisms: Each list item
• Templates: The entire list with a search field, filters, etc.

Step 3: Design with Consistency in Mind

Consistency is key in list UI design. Ensure that list items follow the same layout, including the placement of text, icons, and actions. This not only enhances the visual flow but also improves usability, as users learn to anticipate where to find the information they need. A consistent structure reduces cognitive load, making the interface more intuitive.

Step 4: Optimize for Responsiveness

Always consider how your list will appear across different screen sizes. On mobile devices, a vertical list may work best, while on desktops, a grid layout could be more effective. Adjust font sizes, spacing, and layout to maintain readability and usability regardless of device.

Step 5: Test for Accessibility

Lists must be accessible to all users, including those relying on screen readers. Use proper HTML elements like ordered or unordered lists, and avoid nested lists when possible. Additionally, ensure proper color contrast for readability and include alternative text for images.

Best Practices of List UI Design

1. Prioritize User Needs

Good list UI design follows design thinking and user-centered design principles. The list design must match user needs while providing appropriate fields for the content. UX designers must pay attention to responsiveness and how the list will look across multiple devices and screen sizes.

2. Follow Material Design Principles

Google’s Material Design UI defines three principles for designing lists – lists must be logical, actionable, and consistent. This means that:

• Logical: Organize lists in meaningful ways (alphabetical, numerical, etc.).
• Actionable: Ensure items are easy to identify and act upon.
• Consistent: Use uniform layouts for icons, text, and actions.

3. Make Lists Scannable

One of the keys to designing a great list UI is making it easy for users to scan content to find what they need. The quicker someone can find what they need, the better the user experience and the more likely they are to use and recommend your product.

4. Leverage Visual Hierarchy

Hierarchy plays a vital role in making lists scannable and easier to read. UX designers have several ways to create this visual hierarchy, including typography, color, spacing, images, etc.

List UI Example: eCommerce

For example, this eCommerce list uses color, size, and typography to separate content and create a visual hierarchy:

• Product name: bold black and white typography top center
• Product description: smaller grey text
• Price: Large dark text
• Reviews: Small text with bright star icons
• Image: Large circular product image

This product list is an excellent example of a visual hierarchy that makes it easy for customers to scan products by the content that matters most to them–i.e., by product name, description, price, etc.

List UI Example: Spotify

In a more simplified example, Spotify uses font size and color to create a visual hierarchy between the song title and the artist. The different size and color make it easy for users to scan a playlist accordingly.

5. Ensure Accessibility

Lists can cause problems for screen readers, creating a poor user experience for visually impaired users. For example, screen readers can’t decipher nested lists correctly. So, designers should use a heading with an unordered or ordered list instead.

Further reading on list accessibility:

• Lists in HTML from Penn State
• Lists from NC State
• Lists Accessibility from Oregon State University

List UI Design Patterns and Interactions

Here are some common list design patterns and interactions that you can apply to website and mobile app design projects.

Checkboxes & Radiobuttons

Checkboxes and radiobuttons are essential UI elements to allow users to make selections and actions on list items. As a general rule, designers use checkboxes for selecting multiple list items and radios for a single selection.

Scrolling & Swiping

Scrolling and swiping allow users to perform multiple actions. For example, many apps allow users to swipe list items left or right–one way to delete the other to archive.

Designers must also create scrolling interactions and lazy loading to optimize performance.

Select Lists

Select lists or dropdown menus allow users to select from several options–like choosing which shipping method they want at checkout. UX designers might also include a search feature for long dropdown menus, a feature we often see for state/province or country lists.

Collapsing & Expanding

Designers can use collapsable lists to hide and show details. Reducing the amount of content that’s always visible is crucial for usability and minimizing cognitive load. Collapsable interactions are also useful for nested lists or submenus.

Reordering & Sorting

Reordering list items gives users control over how they prioritize and experience data. Depending on their preference, they can move items manually up or down the list, usually by dragging and dropping. This customization creates a positive user experience because users can arrange content to suit their needs. 

Sorting works similar to reordering, except users choose from predefined categories rather than reorder list items manually. For example, Spotify allows users to sort a playlist by title, artist, album, or recently added.

Filtering

Filtering helps users find what they need much faster. Accommodation booking platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com allow users to apply multiple filters to list properties that suit their needs and preferences.

Dividers

Dividers help create separation between content; however, they can add unnecessary “visual noise.” If your lists get too busy, try testing white space as an alternative content separator. 

List UI Design in UXPin

With UXPin’s code-based design tool, UX designers can build list prototypes that accurately resemble the final product. Our Multilevel Dropdown Navigation example demonstrates how designers can use States and Interactions to build a functioning dropdown list–using only a single frame.

Designing a List with MUI Components in UXPin Merge

With UXPin Merge, you can sync code components like MUI (Material-UI) into UXPin for fully interactive prototyping. Follow this tutorial to create a list using MUI components.

Step 1: Import MUI Components

Ensure you have your MUI components integrated into UXPin using Merge. This will allow you to drag and drop pre-coded components directly into your design.

Step 2: Add a List Component

1. In UXPin, navigate to your MUI component library.
2. Drag the MUI List component into your canvas. This is the container for your list items.

Step 3: Configure List Items

1. Next, drag in ListItem components within the list container. These components will represent individual list items.
2. Use ListItemText to add the main content, such as the title or description for each list item.

Step 4: Customize with MUI Properties

With Merge, you can modify component properties like styling, layout, and behavior. For example:

• Typography: Adjust fonts, colors, and sizes within the ListItemText to create a visual hierarchy.
• Icons: Use ListItemIcon to include interactive icons, such as checkmarks or navigation arrows.

Step 5: Add Interactions

Use UXPin’s interaction panel to add click actions, hover states, or dynamic behaviors. For example, configure the list item to navigate to another page or trigger a modal when clicked.

Step 6: Preview and Test

Use UXPin’s Preview mode to test the list in a fully functional prototype. Check responsiveness and usability across different devices to ensure an optimal experience.

Step 7: Hand-off to Developers

With UXPin Merge, your list UI is code-ready. Developers can directly access the code, ensuring a seamless design-to-development process without discrepancies.

Increase Fidelity and Functionality with UXPin Merge

Take your prototypes to the next level using UXPin’s proprietary Merge technology. Sync your product’s design system or an open-source component library from a repository to UXPin’s editor so designers can build prototypes using fully functioning code components.

You can see Merge in action with our MUI library integration. Using MUI’s React library, designers can build fully functioning list prototypes. MUI’s React components come complete with states and interactions, so designers only have to focus on product design rather than building everything from scratch. Everything you see in MUI’s documentation, designers can replicate in UXPin without writing a single line of code. Request access to UXPin Merge.

The post List Design 101 – A Short Guide for Beginners appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

You may wonder what the difference between UXPin and Merge is. And, which one is right for my design team?

To put it simply, UXPin is an all-in-one design software that covers the entire product design process together, including design handoff, while Merge is a technology that allow you to bring interactive components to UXPin and design prototypes using them.

Ultimately, Merge technology leads to a more collaborative and faster design process in which both designers and developers can share a single source of truth and create consistent UIs. Check more about UXPin Merge here.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

Image-Based vs. Code-Based Design Tools

Before we get into UXPin and Merge, it’s important to understand the difference between image-based and code-based design tools. 

When designers hear code-based design tool, they assume it’s a developer tool or must learn code to use it–both are incorrect.

Code-based refers to how the tool renders what UX designers create on the canvas. Traditional image-based tools produce static vector graphics, whereas code-based tools render code.

Learn more about it: How to Turn Figma Designs into Interactive Prototypes?

For the most part, designers won’t notice much difference when comparing the two interfaces, except that code-based tools generally have more options for interactivity.

For example, if you create an input field using an image-based tool, it’s just a block on the canvas. In UXPin, an input behaves like it would in the final product. When users click the input, a cursor appears, and they can enter text. With UXPin’s various features, designers can then:

• Validate inputs
• Check password criteria (i.e., letters, numbers, symbols, etc.)
• Personalize welcome messages
• Populate a user’s profile page

What is UXPin?

UXPin is an end-to-end code-based design tool for advanced prototyping and testing. Designers can build prototypes that accurately replicate final product interactions and functionality.

UXPin looks and feels like any other design tool but with features that enhance UX workflows, collaboration, prototyping, and testing. 

Some of those key features include:

• Variables
• Interactions and Conditional Interactions
• Expressions
• Auto Layout
• Design Systems
• Comments

Variables

Variables allow designers to capture data from input fields and use it elsewhere in the prototype. This example from our demo sign-up form demonstrates how you can capture a user’s email address to personalize the confirmation page.

Interactions and Conditional Interactions

UXPin makes it easy to add Interactions to your prototypes with a few clicks. Designers have an extensive list of Triggers, Actions, and Animations that accurately mimic final product interactivity.

Conditional Interactions take interactivity to another level with if-then and if-else conditions–similar to what Javascript does for devs. 

Returning to our demo sign-up form, we see how you can use Conditional Interactions to present users with error messages if they leave the email and password fields blank. Only when the user meets the input’s conditions can they proceed to the confirmation page.

Expressions

Expressions take prototyping to the next level, allowing designers to create dynamic user experiences comparable to code. In our sign-up form prototype, we use Expressions to define the email and input field criteria:

• Email: must have the @ symbol and domain extension (.com, .co.uk, etc.)
• Password: must be longer than 8 characters

Designers can add as many Expressions to components and prototypes as they like, achieving results indistinguishable from code.

Auto Layout

Many design tools offer auto layout, but UXPin’s Auto Layout uses Flexbox naming and properties to create realistic expectations and improve designer/developer collaboration.

Designers use Auto Layout to automatically resize, fit, distribute, and fill designs, eliminating the time-consuming task of doing this manually.

Further reading: Bringing Auto Layout to UXPin.

Design Systems

Design Systems allows designers to create a library of reusable components and share these across the organization. It’s a fantastic feature for building a design system from scratch, including documentation and permissions. 

UXPin automatically categorizes Design Systems into:

• Colors
• Typography
• Assets
• UI Patterns

The entire library appears in the left-hand sidebar, so designers simply drag and drop elements to build user interfaces.

UXPin also provides five Built-in Design Libraries, including OS, Material Design, Bootstrap, Foundation, and User Flows, so teams can build prototypes or MVPs fast to test ideas and hypotheses at every stage of the design process.

Comments

Comments allow design teams and stakeholders to collaborate, share feedback, assign tasks, and provide context within design projects and on prototype previews.

UXPin allows anyone to use the Comments on Preview feature, eliminating the need to purchase additional users like stakeholders and developers who don’t need access to UXPin’s canvas. Designers can password-protect designs, so only those authorized can view them.

What is UXPin used for?

Design teams use UXPin at every stage of the design process. While high-fidelity prototyping is UXPin’s strongest feature, its ready-made forms make it an excellent wireframing tool.

Here are some examples of where UXPin outperforms its image-based competitors:

• Interactive prototyping
• API integrations via IFTTT
• Fast design iterations
• Collaborating with design teams, engineers, and stakeholders
• Smoother design handoffs
• Building and scaling design systems from scratch

Further reading:

• UXPin Docs for info and tutorials about UXPin’s features
• Interactive patterns and app examples showing UXPin’s features in action

Ready to see what code-based design is all about? Sign up for a free trial to build your first interactive prototype with UXPin today!

What is UXPin Merge?

UXPin Merge is a technology that syncs code components from a repository to UXPin’s design editor. Organizations can use Merge with open-source libraries or import their product’s design system.

Designers use these code components like building blocks, dragging and dropping to build user interfaces.

Merge components include properties defined by the design system, including interactions, states, colors, typography, sizing, etc. These properties appear in UXPin’s Properties Panel, where designers can make adjustments according to prototyping requirements.

You can change the color, size, variant, and add an icon using properties.

Merge pulls these properties from the repository and automatically syncs any changes. For example, if the design system team changes the primary color from blue to red, Merge will detect the update and notify design teams of the new release.

Version Control allows designers to choose when they want to switch to the latest release and can revert to early versions whenever they want.

Is There a Way to Test UXPin Merge?

Yes, you can test UXPin Merge on trial or you can enjoy its features on Merge AI plan that’s perfect when you want to use leverage popular open-source component libraries such as MUI, Ant Design, and Bootstrap without needing to start from scratch.

When you sign up for UXPin Merge, you gain access to three trial kits—MUI, Ant, and Bootstrap—giving you a starting point to experiment and create interactive prototypes using real React code.

Each trial kit comes fully loaded with reference patterns and example components, such as cards, snack bars, and skeleton loaders, which you can use directly in your projects. Additionally, you can browse full layouts, like dashboards, to jumpstart your designs without the need to build from the ground up.

Here’s how UXPin Merge works:

1. Select a Library: Choose from built-in component libraries like MUI or even custom Tailwind UI components. Simply drag and drop these ready-made components into your design canvas.
2. Edit Variants and Properties: Customize the components with real React code by toggling between different variants and modifying their properties. You’re not just working with static design assets but actual coded components that behave as they would in production.
3. Use Custom Code: If you’re working with custom Tailwind UI components, you can paste code directly into UXPin to generate entire UI sections instantly. This feature allows you to skip designing components from scratch and speeds up your workflow by using existing code.
4. AI-Powered Component Generation: UXPin Merge even integrates AI to help you create code-based components on the fly. For example, you can prompt the system to generate a “Persona Card,” and UXPin will create a fully functional Tailwind CSS-based component directly on the canvas.
5. Effortless Developer Handoff: Once your design is complete, UXPin Merge makes it easy to hand off your work to developers. Share your prototype through a preview link, and developers can access the real JSX code, dependencies, and functions for each component. This ensures that developers receive production-ready code that they can immediately use in their environments.

With UXPin Merge, there’s no need to waste time recreating components for the design team or manually coding every element from scratch. Merge AI allows designers and developers to work more efficiently by tapping into the power of real React components, ensuring consistency between design and development from the very beginning.

How to Sync Your Design System With UXPin Merge

There are three ways to sync a design system with UXPin Merge:

• Git Integration: for React component libraries only
• Storybook Integration: for Storybook libraries (React, Angular, Ember, Vue, and more.)
• npm Integration: for importing components from open-source libraries available in the npm registry

These three integrations each serve different prototyping and team needs. The Git and Storybook integrations require technical knowledge to set up the components and repository for Merge. UXPin provides a boilerplate for engineers, and our technical team is on hand to guide the setup process.

Storybook is probably the best option for private design systems because engineers can build components in isolation, prototype, and test them before pushing them to UXPin for design teams.

The npm integration and Merge Component Manager give designers more control over the components and properties they want to import. Designers can follow the design system’s docs and don’t need engineers to import UI elements.

Key Benefits of UXPin Merge

Merge’s primary benefit is that it creates a single source of truth between design and development. Designers and engineers use the same component library from the same repository–creating a seamless design handoff process.

1. Engineers simply import the component library. 
2. Copy JSX changes UXPin produces from component properties. 
3. And develop the final product according to the design team’s prototype.

This streamlined workflow creates many product development efficiencies, including:

• Faster prototyping (PayPal scaled by 8X)
• Faster time to market
• No designing from scratch
• Little to no front-end coding
• No design drift
• Reduced UX and front-end debt
• Seamless handoffs with less communication and documentation
• Flawless cohesion and consistency
• Higher quality feedback from stakeholders
• Meaningful, actionable results during testing
• High-quality outcomes = better user experience

UXPin to Merge – The Scalable Design Solution

UXPin offers companies a scalable design solution with the tools and features to support your workflow at every stage of maturity.

UXPin Standard is an excellent solution for startups and companies who aren’t using a design system. Designers can build fully-functioning interactive prototypes and MVPs for accurate testing.

UXPin Standard also includes UXPin’s Design Systems feature, so designers can save and share product components, color palettes, typography, and assets.

Scaling With Merge

Whether you’re a fast-growing startup or multinational enterprise, Merge enables companies to scale design operations. 

FinTech giant PayPal and leading software developer Iress have both experienced enhanced workflow optimization and collaboration from switching to UXPin Merge.

At the enterprise level, Merge enables teams to move faster because they have a single source of truth across the entire product development team. There’s less friction and better collaboration because designers and engineers speak the same language while working within the same constraints.

What Merge designers use in UXPin to create a button or any other UI component is exactly the same button or what have you as which engineers pull from the repository to develop the final product.

We’ve also seen how Merge helps companies at the startup stages. Startup TeamPassword doesn’t have a UX team, so engineers use UXPin Merge for prototyping and testing. Because Merge creates a drag-and-drop environment, the learning curve is significantly reduced compared to traditional design tools.

TeamPassword’s engineers use components they’ve programmed to build prototypes in UXPin, so they can test, make changes, and iterate fast!

Take your prototyping and testing to the next level with the power of Merge. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

The post What’s the Difference Between UXPin and Merge Technology? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

User interface design plays a crucial role in shaping how users interact with digital products. A well-designed UI not only enhances usability but also creates a seamless experience that keeps users engaged. Whether you’re working on a SaaS platform, an eCommerce site, or a mobile app, understanding the best UI practices can elevate your design process.

In this article, we’ll explore UI examples from top brands like Slack, Airbnb, and Spotify. These examples will highlight key design elements, interactive features, and responsive layouts to inspire your next project.

With UXPin Merge, you can design using real, code-based components to ensure that your UI matches development from the start, creating a consistent, production-ready user experience across your projects. Request access to UXPin Merge.

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UI Examples by Industry

Different industries have unique challenges and requirements when it comes to UI design. A well-executed user interface must not only look good but also align with the specific needs of users in that sector.

In this section, we’ll explore UI examples from key industries like SaaS platforms, eCommerce, and marketplaces. By analyzing successful interfaces from each, we can uncover design principles that can be applied across projects, helping designers create more intuitive, engaging experiences tailored to each industry’s unique demands.

SaaS UI Examples

Slack: Excellent Navigation and Intuitive Messaging System

Slack is a great example of UI design in the SaaS industry, particularly for its clear navigation and intuitive messaging interface. The platform excels at organizing a large amount of content into manageable, easy-to-access sections. Its left-hand navigation provides quick access to channels, direct messages, and threads, allowing users to efficiently manage their communications.

Icons in Slack are clear and minimalistic, reducing cognitive load while enhancing navigation. The use of subtle animations and microinteractions, such as hover states and status indicators, improve usability without overwhelming the user. Slack’s messaging system integrates clean, responsive layouts that adapt smoothly across devices, offering a consistent experience.

Slack’s emphasis on simplicity, functionality, and visual clarity makes it a strong UI example for SaaS platforms, especially when dealing with complex communication systems.

Notion: A Flexible Workspace with Customizable UI Components

Notion stands out in the SaaS industry for its flexible, modular workspace design that adapts to different user needs. Its clean and minimalistic UI ensures a clutter-free experience while allowing users to organize information in various ways. With drag-and-drop functionality, users can easily customize pages by adding blocks for text, images, databases, and more.

The UI is designed to be highly adaptable, offering a customizable structure that makes it easy for users to create dashboards, wikis, or task managers based on their preferences. This flexibility makes Notion a versatile tool for individuals and teams, offering a streamlined interface without sacrificing functionality.

Dropbox: Easy-to-Use File Management with Minimalistic UI

Dropbox exemplifies simplicity in its file management system, offering a clean, minimalistic UI that prioritizes ease of use. The interface is intuitively designed, allowing users to quickly navigate through folders, upload files, and manage documents with minimal distractions. The straightforward navigation, combined with recognizable icons and well-structured menus, creates a frictionless experience for users managing files across devices.

The UI’s minimalism, combined with responsive design, ensures that Dropbox delivers a consistent, user-friendly experience across web, mobile, and desktop platforms.

eCommerce UI Examples

Amazon: Well-Organized Product Pages and Seamless Checkout Flow

Amazon’s UI exemplifies efficiency and clarity in the eCommerce world. Its product pages are highly structured, with key information—like pricing, reviews, and delivery options—presented upfront, making decision-making easy for users. The use of clear calls to action, such as “Add to Cart” and “Buy Now,” simplifies the purchasing process.

The checkout flow is designed to be frictionless, guiding users through a quick, intuitive sequence that reduces cart abandonment. Amazon’s seamless UI ensures that users can move from product discovery to purchase with minimal effort, enhancing user experience and increasing conversion rates.

Apple: A Visually Stunning Product Showcase with Responsive, Interactive Elements

Apple’s UI is a masterclass in visual storytelling, offering users an immersive product showcase. Each product page features high-quality images and videos that respond to user interactions, allowing users to explore every detail of the product. With its signature clean, minimalist design, Apple’s interface focuses on elevating the product by keeping distractions to a minimum.

Additionally, the UI is fully responsive, ensuring a seamless experience across devices. Interactive elements like smooth scrolling and animations further engage users, creating an intuitive and visually striking journey from product discovery to purchase.

Marketplace UI Examples

Airbnb: User-Friendly Navigation and Intuitive Search Filters

Airbnb offers one of the most intuitive UIs in the marketplace industry, making it easy for users to browse and book accommodations. The clean navigation allows users to search and filter results with minimal effort, thanks to visually prominent filters and well-organized layouts.

Each listing is presented with high-quality images, clear pricing, and reviews, helping users make informed decisions. The UI remains responsive and easy to navigate, whether users are browsing on desktop or mobile, enhancing the overall booking experience.

Booking.com: Data-Driven Design for Optimized User Choices

Booking.com’s UI stands out because of its data-driven design approach. Unlike many other marketplaces, Booking.com prioritizes visual clarity, but the UI is heavily optimized to influence user behavior. The use of urgency cues, such as “Only 2 rooms left” or “Booked 5 times today,” creates a sense of immediacy, driving users to make decisions quickly.

The interface is clean and functional but focuses on leveraging data to increase conversions, from its prominent filters to its organized listing layouts, designed to help users compare options efficiently.

UI Examples by Platform

Different platforms present unique challenges and opportunities for UI design. Whether you’re designing for the web, mobile, or creating cross-platform experiences, it’s essential to adapt to the specific needs of each medium.

In this section, we’ll explore web-based UI examples from websites that prioritize innovation and usability, highlight mobile UIs that excel in user engagement, and showcase cross-platform UIs that maintain consistency across web and mobile interfaces, providing a seamless experience for users on any device.

Mobile UI Examples

Google Maps: Intuitive Interaction and Real-Time Feedback

Google Maps is a prime example of a mobile UI that excels in user engagement and ease of use. The app’s clean and minimalistic interface ensures users can focus on navigating and finding locations without unnecessary distractions. Its responsive map UI allows for smooth zooming and panning, and real-time updates enhance usability.

Google Maps integrates intuitive gestures for mobile, such as pinch-to-zoom and swipe actions, while offering detailed information layers (e.g., traffic, terrain). Its combination of real-time data and smooth interactions ensures a highly engaging, user-friendly experience across devices.

Duolingo: Clean and Engaging UI for Gamified Learning

Duolingo’s mobile UI is designed to provide a fun and visually appealing learning experience. The interface leverages a clean layout with simple, colorful icons and minimal text, ensuring that users can navigate through lessons easily. The progress indicators are clear and visually engaging, with bars and icons that motivate users to keep advancing.

The use of whitespace and clear sections ensures that users aren’t overwhelmed by too much information at once, creating a structured and easy-to-follow experience.

Desktop UI Examples

BBC: An Accessibility-First UI Approach

BBC’s desktop UI exemplifies an accessibility-first approach, ensuring a wide range of users can easily navigate and interact with the website. The UI includes a high-contrast mode for users with visual impairments, enhancing readability and reducing strain.

Additionally, the interface supports full keyboard navigation, making it accessible to users who cannot use a mouse, and is screen reader compatible, ensuring visually impaired users can navigate content effectively.

Asana: Clear Hierarchical Layout for Efficient Task Management

Asana’s desktop UI is designed for efficiency and clarity, offering a clean, hierarchical layout that allows users to easily navigate between projects, tasks, and subtasks. The interface uses clear, visually distinct sections to help users prioritize their tasks and stay organized.

The minimalist design avoids clutter, while icons and color coding are strategically used to highlight important actions and deadlines.

Cross-Platform UI Examples

Gmail: Consistent and Intuitive UI Across Platforms

Gmail provides a consistent user interface across web, mobile, and desktop platforms, offering users a seamless experience when managing emails. The design maintains familiar navigation with its sidebar, action buttons, and labels, ensuring users can switch between devices without any disruption.

The responsive layout adapts efficiently to various screen sizes, ensuring email management remains intuitive on both mobile and desktop devices. Gmail’s clear use of icons, colors, and spacing keeps the interface simple yet powerful for both personal and professional use.

Trello: Unified UI for Task Management

Trello’s UI is designed for simplicity and consistency across web, desktop, and mobile platforms. The drag-and-drop interface allows users to easily organize tasks, cards, and boards with intuitive controls, making task management effortless. Trello’s UI uses a clean, visual structure, with boards and lists that are flexible and easy to customize.

Whether on a desktop or mobile device, Trello ensures a seamless user experience, maintaining the same functionality, layout, and interaction model, enabling users to work fluidly across multiple devices.

UI Design Best Practices from the UI Examples Above

• Use clear, intuitive navigation UI to enhance usability.
• Offer flexible, customizable UI components for personalized experiences.
• Prioritize minimalism and easy navigation across platforms.
• Structure product pages for fast decision-making with clear CTAs.
• Utilize responsive, interactive elements to create engaging visual experiences.
• Implement intuitive filtering systems for better user journeys.
• Use urgency cues to influence user decisions.
• Integrate real-time feedback for interactive elements.
• Keep layouts clean and progress indicators prominent.
• Ensure accessibility with features like high-contrast modes and keyboard navigation.
• Organize content with clear hierarchies and visual cues.
• Maintain consistent design across platforms for seamless user experience.

Tools for UI Design

Creating impactful UIs requires the right tools that support design, prototyping, and development workflows. Here are some essential UI design tools:

• UXPin: A powerful tool for designing with real, code-based components, ensuring seamless collaboration between designers and developers.
• Figma: A collaborative design platform for real-time interface design, wireframing, and prototyping, perfect for team collaboration.
• Sketch: A popular vector-based design tool used for UI design, offering a wide array of plugins for enhanced functionality.
• Framer: A prototyping tool that blends design and code to create highly interactive UIs and animations.

These tools enhance efficiency and collaboration, helping teams create polished, user-friendly interfaces.

Summary

Effective UI design is crucial for usability and engagement across digital products. Whether for SaaS platforms, eCommerce, or marketplaces, understanding industry-specific UI principles can elevate your design process.

This article explores UI examples from top brands like Slack, Notion, Airbnb, and Trello, highlighting how clear navigation, customization, and responsiveness improve user experience across web, mobile, and desktop platforms. With UXPin Merge, designers can create consistent, production-ready UIs using real, code-based components. Request access to UXPin Merge.

The post 13 UI Examples to Get Inspired by in 2024 appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Where does the empathy map come in?

UX designers know better than anyone — it’s what’s inside that counts. As in, the user’s thoughts and feelings, and how those affect what they say and do.

When created correctly, empathy maps serve as the perfect lean user persona:

• They quickly visualize user needs (especially to non-designers)
• They fit perfectly into a Lean UX workflow as a starting point for user knowledge (you’ll build more as you prototype and test)
• Because they’re quick to create, they’re easy to iterate as you revise assumptions based on real data
• They prime stakeholders for your design ideas since they’ve thought beyond their own experiences

Photo credit: “How to Use Persona Empathy Mapping.” Nikki Knox (UX Magazine).

That’s what this article is about: a clear-cut, all-inclusive guide on empathy maps, answering why, when, and how to use them.

Let’s get started.

UXPin as a comprehensive design tool that facilitates empathetic design decisions by enabling real-time collaboration and feedback. With UXPin, teams can seamlessly integrate empathy maps into their design process, ensuring that user insights are effectively translated into actionable design solutions. Try UXPin for free.

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What Are Empathy Maps?

An empathy map in UX design is a collaborative tool that helps teams better understand and visualize the user’s perspective. It typically consists of four quadrants that explore what a user thinks, feels, says, and does. By filling out these sections, designers can develop a deeper understanding of user motivations, pain points, and behaviors, which helps guide more user-centered product decisions.

Empathy maps are especially useful during the early stages of the design process to align teams on user insights and drive empathetic design solutions.

When to Use Empathy Maps

Empathy maps are most useful at the beginning of the design process.

Try to complete empathy maps before the product requirements, but after the initial user research. Product strategy is about solving problems, and empathy maps shed light on which problems to solve, and how. This also makes them a great tool for redesigns as well.

When done well, empathy maps create a “UX domino effect” that affects the entire project. Empathy maps affect the product requirements, which affect the product strategy, which affects the wireframes, mockups, prototypes, etc.

However, empathy maps work better if they’re drawn from real data, so they should be made after user research like user interviews. But in a pinch, empathy maps can still be built on your existing knowledge and stakeholder feedback. Quick basic empathy maps offer valuable insight in any meeting — hence the “10-minute persona” nickname.

Empathy Map Format

A common UX empathy map is divided into four quadrants, outlining notes on four different aspects of the user’s internal experience. The quadrants can vary based on needs and preferences, but almost always contain:

• Thoughts — Quotes of what the user is thinking, i.e., “I wonder if there’s an example?” or “I hope this doesn’t take long.”
• Feelings — The user’s emotional state, i.e. “is confused by the navigation and blames themselves.”
• Actions — The user’s behaviors, whether in general or in response to a specific instigator, i.e., “returns to the home page every time they don’t know where to go.”

Photo credit: “Adapting empathy maps for UX design.” Paul Boag (boagworld).

Some common variants include:

• Sights — Where the user’s eyes go, i.e., “loves the colorful mascot.”
• Quotes — Things the user says, similar to thoughts. Can be pulled word-for-word from user interviews, or based on existing knowledge.
• Influences — What the user has heard from third parties that might influence how they act, i.e., “They say this is easier to use than Photoshop.”

In addition, at the bottom in some empty space, it’s always a good idea to include:

• Problems (“Pains”) — Any obstacles worth considering, i.e., an unfamiliarity with technology, or a short attention span.
• Goals (“Gains”) — What the user hopes to accomplish, i.e., complete the task within 5 minutes.  

Alternatively, you can summarize the above two areas by filling in the simple statement, “The user needs a way to ________________ because ________________.” Pay attention to the second blank, since user motivation is the real raw material for feature ideas.

Last, you may want to leave a space for general notes, such as the type of device the user is accessing your product from.

Optionally, it may help to include a picture of the user to make the document feel more real.

Empathy Map – The Creation Process 

It’s important to note that empathy maps can be created for a general understanding, or for specific tasks and situations. Broad empathy maps are more useful as quick user personas because they are not based on a single user scenario. If you can spare the time, you could create several task-based empathy maps to feed into more detailed personas.

For example, if you’re working on a web app redesign and notice users having difficulty logging in, you can center around the user’s mind as they complete (or ignore) this task. But this information is most relevant to this particular context (logging in). You won’t understand why a user would want to use your web app in the first place.

Let’s examine how to create a broad empathy map as a 10-minute user persona. Before you start the exercise, you will need at least basic understanding of your user segments (e.g. Sally the College Student, Sean the Young Professional).   

1. Find a whiteboard, a large flip chart, or print out this free template.

2. Set aside 30 minutes to 1 hour for the session.

3. Invite the core product team members: product manager, developers, marketers, and of course other designers.

4. Ask a broad question to help unpack everyone’s thoughts and assumptions, e.g. “Why would somebody buy a new iPhone?”

5. Set aside sheets of paper or space on the whiteboard according to the user segments (e.g. one for Sally, one for Sean).

6. Hand out sticky notes and encourage everyone to write down their thoughts regarding each of the empathy map’s four quadrants.

7. Review the completed empathy map and discuss any patterns and outliers.

As you might expect, sometimes it’s difficult to get the creative juices flowing and/or really pinpoint the issues at hand. If your team is stuck, Demian Farnworth of the Copyblogger recommends a moderator posing questions like these to help team members better visualize their users:

• What environment are the users in when using your product?
• Are they having fun, or do they want to get it over with?
• What’s their life like outside of using the product?
• What kind of day are they having?

If all else fails, try a bit of role-playing, where one person “plays” the user, and ask them questions or play the role of the product, eliciting responses.

At the end of the session, wrap up what was learned. Did anyone’s opinions change? Is there a better direction to go with the product design? Were any of the responses based on data, or pure assumption? These answers are partly why you made an empathy map in the first place.

Remember that the benefit of empathy maps are their convenience. They’re designed to be a quick collaborative exercise rather than exhaustively thorough. You’ll gather more important insights once you’ve started prototyping and testing your designs with at least 5 users.

What to Do With Finished Empathy Maps

While a large part of empathy maps’ utility are the process of making them, they are still quite useful as documentation.

Share the results of the empathy map with anyone on the product team who wasn’t able to join the exercise. Executive stakeholders, too, might be interested in the more actionable takeaways from the exercise — although you should explain the bottom line upfront, and the reasoning afterward.

If you happen to be using UXPin, you can also upload a picture of the empathy map into your UX project so that others can comment on it as needed.

Next Steps

While broad empathy maps aren’t the most thorough personas, they certainly help everyone think more like a user while checking their own assumptions. Certainly not a bad result for a single 30-60 minute workshop.

If you’re looking for a way to integrate empathy maps into your UX design process seamlessly, consider using UXPin. It offers powerful collaboration tools that allow teams to work together in real-time, making it easier to incorporate user insights into your designs. With UXPin’s interactive prototyping and design system features, you can bring empathy-driven design to life while maintaining consistency and functionality. Try UXPin for free.

The post The Practical Guide to Empathy Maps: 10-Minute User Personas appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Image-rich content drives website engagement, and making sure those images display properly is a crucial part of good UX design. Whether you’re working with photographs, illustrations, or video, an image that’s stretched, squashed, or poorly cropped makes a poor impression for on-site visitors and affects their overall experience on the site.

Determining aspect ratios for optimal viewing on all kinds of devices can be both a chore and a challenge for designers, but today’s responsive design tools and an array of free aspect ratio calculators can make sure that images and video files are displayed in the best light everywhere.

Designing a website or app full of images? Create prototypes of it with UXPin! It’s an end-to-end solution that will cover your full design process and it doesn’t require any plugins for design handoff. See how easy it is. Sign up for a free trial.

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What is Aspect Ratio?

In the most basic way, aspect ratio is the relationship between an image’s width and height.  Because aspect ratio reflects an image’s proportions, not its size, the aspect ratio remains the same regardless of size. For example, a square image has an aspect ratio of 1:1, since its height and width are the same. That ratio will hold no matter how large the image is. An image that’s 320x320px will have the same aspect ratio as one that’s 1080x1080px – 1:1.

For images that are not square- that is, horizontal or vertical rectangles of various sizes… Aspect ratio can vary. Common aspect ratios used in photography, video, and other image-based design work include 4:3, 3:2 or 16:9, the basic ratio for many widescreen devices such as televisions and desktop computers. 

Although the aspect ratio of an image comes from the relationship of its height and width, multiple subsets of this ratio also help to define image proportions.  

Pixel aspect ratio

Pixel aspect ratio (PAR) refers to the proportion of the individual pixels that make up an image.  Pixels are typically square, which results in a pixel aspect ratio of 1:1. But images that are optimized for certain types of displays can also have rectangular pixels with an aspect ratio of 4:3 or similar.  

Display aspect ratio

Display aspect ratio (DAR) is the most relevant kind of aspect ratio for designers, and it’s the one that’s most commonly associated with the general term.  As the name suggests, display aspect ratio refers to the proportions of an image as it appears on screens of various kinds.  

Some devices, such as cameras and televisions, have a fixed DAR, so for images to display well on these devices, they need to be optimized for their particular aspect ratio. For example, a typical display aspect ratio for widescreen video to be displayed on a monitor or television screen is 16:9. When images with a different aspect ratio are displayed on these devices, they appear distorted.  Digital SLR camera sensors also have a fixed display aspect ratio, which controls how images captured by the camera will be saved and displayed.  

Storage aspect ratio

Storage aspect ratio (SAR) is an aspect ratio formula that pertains specifically to encoded digital video files. SAR refers to the width and height relationship in video frame size, and it needs to be consistent across all individual frames in order for the complete video to display properly. In a commonly used formula, SAR x PAR = DAR for most widescreen videos.

Aspect Ratios Affect UI/UX Design

Aspect ratios play an important part in any kind of project that involves capturing and displaying photographs, videos, or other kinds of image-based files in the correct way.  For photographers, the camera’s fixed aspect ratio can have a considerable impact on composing a photograph as well as displaying it later on other devices. And for videographers and anyone working with slideshows, animations, and other motion projects, aspect ratio is a key factor for correct display on widescreen and mobile devices.

The shift to responsive web design, which ensures that content displays properly across all devices, helps to resolve a number of problems with setting aspect ratios for individual images.  But even in these environments, problems can arise, such as when an image can’t be adjusted for display without compromising either its content or its quality.  A simple example is when a square image with a 1:1 aspect ratio needs to fit into a rectangular box on a website page. To accommodate varying image size requirements, proportions, as well as size, may have to be adjusted.

In an increasingly image-driven digital world, videos and images that look even slightly out of proportion contribute to a visitor’s negative impression of a website – and those that are clearly forced into the wrong configurations can even interfere with a site’s usability.  

Poorly proportioned product images or a user guide video that’s too stretched to see clearly can affect both a visitor’s willingness and their ability to use the site.  Designers, developers and anyone working with images will need to know how aspect ratios work and how to manipulate them for the best visual effect.  To streamline the process, a number of aspect ratio calculators, both free and paid, have popped up on the web.

Aspect Ratio Best Practices for Responsive Design

In responsive design, maintaining the correct aspect ratio for images, videos, and UI elements is critical to ensure that your content looks clean and professional across different screen sizes. A well-maintained aspect ratio not only preserves the integrity of your visuals but also enhances the user experience by preventing distortion and awkward cropping on various devices. Here are the best practices to follow when dealing with aspect ratios in responsive design:

1. Use CSS for Maintaining Aspect Ratio

CSS provides tools that make it easy to ensure consistent aspect ratios across different viewports. For instance, the aspect-ratio property (introduced in CSS Level 4) allows you to define the aspect ratio for containers, images, or videos, helping you maintain the correct proportions regardless of screen size. Before this property was widely supported, developers often used the padding-top trick (where padding percentage is based on the width) to preserve the ratio of containers or media elements.

2. Maintain Aspect Ratio for Key Media Elements

Images, videos, and interactive elements are key to a user’s experience, so it’s essential that they are not distorted or cropped when viewed on different devices. Stretching or squishing images can lead to unprofessional-looking designs and frustrate users, especially if the distortion impacts how users interact with visual content.

By preserving the correct aspect ratio, your images and videos will maintain their intended dimensions and scale properly with the screen size. To achieve this, make sure that media queries in your CSS accommodate different viewports while keeping the aspect ratio intact.

3. Use Responsive Images for Performance Optimization

Performance plays a significant role in responsive design, especially on mobile devices where slower connections are common. Using responsive images is key to balancing performance with visual quality. You can use the srcset attribute in your HTML, which provides different image resolutions based on the user’s screen size.

4. Test Across Devices

One of the core principles of responsive design is thorough testing across different devices. What looks great on a desktop might be misaligned on a mobile phone if the aspect ratio isn’t preserved. Use tools like Chrome Developer Tools or online responsive design testers to emulate different devices and screen sizes.

For images and videos with fixed aspect ratios (like 16:9 or 4:3), ensure that the design adapts well across all screen sizes without distortion. Ensure that all dynamic resizing respects the original proportions.

5. Handle Aspect Ratios in Fluid Layouts

Responsive design often involves fluid layouts, where elements resize dynamically based on the screen width. In these cases, setting the aspect ratio is essential to prevent issues like images and containers becoming too narrow or tall. By using percentage-based widths and heights, you can ensure that your content scales properly without disrupting its aspect ratio.

For example, a 16:9 video container might be scaled down to fit a mobile screen, but it should always retain the 16:9 ratio, no matter how much the overall layout changes. Fluid layouts combined with flexible aspect ratios ensure that your design remains consistent and visually appealing on all devices.

Aspect Ratio Calculators

It’s certainly possible to calculate an image’s aspect ratio and resize it manually with the help of some simple mathematics.  But that becomes tedious when dealing with many images from multiple sources. With the help of one of the many online aspect ratio calculators, though, you can determine the optimal aspect ratio for any image in a number of different formats, allowing designers to fully optimize each image for optimal viewing.

To use a basic aspect ratio calculator, you’ll need to know the image resolution in pixels and select the type of environment where the image will appear, such as HDTV.  The calculator then returns the result as an optimal aspect ratio. This can be especially helpful for video editing, where the video might include slides or images of varying sizes from different sources.  

Tools for Aspect Ratios in UX/UI

Other image management tools can also help with getting the aspect ratio right. Image editors such as Photoshop and Canva provide templates designed with optimal aspect ratios in mind, suitable for use in typical situations such as designing website banners, headlines, or social media profiles.  Most standard video editing software also allows users to determine and adjust aspect ratios of images to be included as individual frames in the video.  

Correctly proportioned images that display well and perform properly are a powerful tool for businesses of all kinds. Getting aspect ratios right makes images look good wherever they’re displayed.  Whether you’re selling a product, offering a service, creating an online course or something else, photographs, illustrations or video can attract visitors and keep them engaged.  

UXPin’s features make it easy to make sure images are sized and proportioned correctly. With Image Fill, you can choose from a variety of settings that allow you to adjust image size or crop the image while preserving its aspect ratio for perfect positioning.

UXPin can help bring designers and developers together for faster, better product development. Sign up for for a free trial today.

The post Aspect Ratios in UX/UI Design – Best Practices for Perfect Proportions. appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

As web development increasingly moves toward component-based architecture, two powerful technologies often dominate the conversation: React and Web Components. But when it comes to deciding between React vs Web Components, how do you know which is the best fit for your project?

React is widely used for building dynamic, interactive user interfaces, thanks to its extensive ecosystem and developer-friendly tools. Meanwhile, Web Components offer a framework-agnostic, native approach to creating reusable UI elements that work seamlessly across various platforms.

Supercharge your design and development process with UXPin Merge—an advanced drag-and-drop React UI builder that allows you to design with fully interactive React components, straight from the codebase. Enable live, functional prototypes and closing the gap between design and development. Request access to UXPin Merge.

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What are Web Components?

Web Components are a set of standardized web platform APIs that enable developers to create reusable, encapsulated, and self-contained custom elements. These elements can be integrated across various frameworks or even in standalone projects, making them highly versatile.

At their core, Web Components rely on three main technologies:

• Custom Elements: Allow you to define new HTML tags with their own behavior.
• Shadow DOM: Provides strict encapsulation of styles and content, ensuring components don’t interfere with other elements on the page.
• HTML Templates: Allow developers to pre-define reusable content structures, rendered only when activated by JavaScript.

Native Browser Support

One of Web Components’ greatest advantages is their native support in modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. Because they are part of the web standard, Web Components don’t require additional frameworks or libraries to function. They are ideal for projects that require cross-browser compatibility and reusable components across different environments.

Key Benefits of Web Components

• Reusability: Create once, reuse anywhere. Custom elements are perfect for building consistent UI components across multiple projects or teams.
• Encapsulation: Thanks to the Shadow DOM, Web Components ensure that styles and scripts are self-contained and don’t interfere with the broader application.
• Framework-Agnostic: Web Components work in any framework or even standalone projects, making them a flexible choice for long-term scalability.

What is React?

React is a popular JavaScript library developed by Facebook in 2013. It is used to build dynamic user interfaces, especially for single-page applications (SPAs). React’s component-based structure, combined with its Virtual DOM, makes it an excellent choice for applications where the user interface frequently changes.

React allows developers to create reusable components that manage their own state, making UI development simpler and more efficient.

Virtual DOM and Component-Based Architecture

React’s Virtual DOM optimizes UI performance by only re-rendering parts of the DOM that have changed, making it highly efficient in dynamic environments. React’s component-based architecture allows developers to create self-contained UI elements that can be easily reused and scaled across large projects.

Key Benefits of React

• Vast Ecosystem: With a huge range of libraries and tools, React’s ecosystem offers solutions for routing, state management, and more.
• Developer Tools: React comes with powerful debugging tools like React DevTools, making it easier to inspect components and track state changes.
• Community Support: React’s large community ensures a wealth of resources, plugins, and tutorials, keeping it on the cutting edge of front-end development.

Key Differences Between React vs Web Components

When comparing React vs Web Components, several factors come into play, such as how each technology functions, their architecture, and ease of use.

Native vs Library-Driven

Web Components are built into the browser as native APIs, meaning they work out of the box without requiring third-party libraries. In contrast, React is a JavaScript library that needs to be installed and imported into the project. While React offers more control and features, Web Components provide a more lightweight, framework-independent solution.

Encapsulation

Web Components leverage the Shadow DOM for strict encapsulation, ensuring that styles and content remain isolated from the rest of the application. In contrast, React uses CSS-in-JS or scoped CSS for styling, offering flexibility but sometimes leading to more complex styling systems in large applications.

Learning Curve

Web Components have a lower learning curve for developers familiar with standard web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. React, however, requires developers to learn new concepts such as JSX, component lifecycle methods, and state management libraries, making its learning curve steeper, especially for newcomers.

Performance

React uses the Virtual DOM, which improves performance by optimizing UI updates. This makes it ideal for applications that require frequent interface changes. Web Components, by contrast, interact directly with the native DOM, which can be slower for dynamic updates but is excellent for reusable, self-contained elements.

Ecosystem and Support

React’s extensive ecosystem and large community make it easy to find solutions for common development challenges. While Web Components have a smaller, growing community, React currently offers more resources, libraries, and plugins, making it a better choice for larger-scale projects.

When to Use Web Components vs React

Best for Web Components

Web Components are perfect for reusable elements that need to work across multiple projects and frameworks. For instance, if you’re building a design system or want to create UI elements that can be reused in different environments (React, Angular, or plain JavaScript), Web Components are the ideal solution.

They are also a great choice when you want to minimize dependencies and avoid locking into a specific framework.

Best for React

React excels in dynamic, data-driven applications like social media platforms, dashboards, and e-commerce sites. Its Virtual DOM ensures optimal performance for applications with frequent updates. Additionally, React’s vast ecosystem provides out-of-the-box solutions for tasks like state management (Redux) and routing (React Router).

Can You Use Web Components and React Together?

Yes! Web Components can be seamlessly integrated into React applications. Since Web Components are framework-agnostic, they can be treated like native HTML elements in a React project. This allows you to leverage the power of Web Components within a React-based UI, creating reusable, consistent elements across different platforms.

Conversely, while using React components inside Web Components is less common, it can be done with extra configuration.

Leverage Both React and Web Components with UXPin Merge

Whether you’re working with React or Web Components, UXPin Merge allows you to integrate real, functional components directly into your design environment. Designers can use a drag-and-drop interface to work with fully interactive React components, bridging the gap between design and development.

UXPin Merge ensures that your design system, whether built with Web Components or React, remains in sync with the codebase, making collaboration smoother and more efficient.

FAQs: React vs Web Components

Can Web Components be used with React?

Yes, Web Components are framework-agnostic and can be easily used in React applications as custom HTML elements.

What is the key difference between React and Web Components?

The key difference is that React is a JavaScript library requiring installation, while Web Components are native browser technologies.

Which is better for performance: React or Web Components?

React’s Virtual DOM optimizes performance for dynamic interfaces, while Web Components offer native browser interaction, making them better for reusable UI elements.

Choosing Between React vs Web Components

In the battle of React vs Web Components, the right choice depends on your project’s needs. Web Components are ideal for framework-agnostic, reusable elements, while React excels in dynamic, single-page applications with frequent updates.

However, combining both technologies is also possible, giving you the flexibility to build scalable, maintainable applications. To further streamline your process, try UXPin Merge, where you can design using real, interactive components from React or Web Components—supercharging collaboration between designers and developers. Request access to UXPin Merge.

The post React vs Web Components – Which Is Best for Your Project? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

npm is a package manager for JavaScript that helps developers install, share, and manage libraries or pieces of code that are commonly used in applications. These packages can range from small utility functions to full-fledged UI components like buttons, form elements, or even complex layouts.

npm is also a key enabler of the design-development collaboration that UXPin Merge facilitates. By packaging React components through npm, developers can hand off real, functioning UI components to designers, who can then integrate them into their designs effortlessly. This results in a more consistent and efficient workflow, ensuring that your design system and the final product are perfectly aligned.. Discover UXPin Merge.

Design UI with code-backed components.

Use the same components in design as in development. Keep UI consistency at scale.

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What is NPM (Node Package Manager)?

npm or Node Package Manager is an open-source repository of tools engineers use to develop applications and websites.

npm is two things:

1. A repository for publishing open-source projects.
   Simplified version: a digital storage and retrieval facility.
2. A command-line interface (CLI) for interacting with the repository.
   Simplified version: a tool to communicate with the storage facility.

What is a Package Manager?

Before we can explain what npm package is, it’s essential to understand the idea of a package manager. Think of a package manager as a toolkit for developers.

Let’s say you’re building an application that uses Stripe for payments. A package manager installs all the code your product will need to communicate with Stripe and process payments.

Instead of writing all that code or copy/pasting it from Stripe’s docs, engineers simply enter a command, and the package manager installs the code dependencies they need from Stripe.

There are millions of these packages for everything you can think of to develop an application–like different types of search functionality, APIs, payments, authentication tools, maps, icons, hosting, and more.

You get public open-source repositories (like npm) where anyone can upload and install packages, as well as private package repositories with restricted access.

What is a Command Line Interface?

A command-line interface (CLI) is a text interface developers use to interact with computer programs. This CLI allows you to execute commands to run background operations necessary for software development.

In the case of npm, the CLI allows you to interact with the package registry. For example, engineers can use commands like npm install followed by the package name to install a specific package.

The npm Registry

The npm website is where engineers can search and learn about packages. This website is just a registry and doesn’t host the packages. Instead, engineers use platforms like GitHub, Packagecloud, AWS CodeArtifact, and others to host and distribute packages.

For example, if we look at the UXPin Merge CLI on NPM, it has displays GitHub as the repository and relevant link. Above that is the command to install the UXPin Merge CLI and its dependencies: npm i @uxpin/merge-cli. The “i” after npm is an abbreviation for “install.” So, typing npm install @uxpin/merge-cli would render the same result.

What are Dependencies?

Packages consist of other packages that engineers call dependencies–we know, confusing, right! These dependencies are packages of code that perform different tasks within the project.

For example, the UXPin Merge CLI uses Typescript and therefore requires the typescript package as a dependency. Typescript is just one of the 41 dependencies UXPin Merge CLI requires. 

What are Devdependencies?

Looking at the UXPin Merge CLI’s dependencies, you’ll notice 41 Dependencies and 41 Dev Dependencies (also referred to as devDependencies–one word).

• Dependencies: The packages required to run a piece of software
• Dev Dependencies: The packages needed during the development phase only

Dependencies and devDependencies reside in a separate folder called node_modules, so your packages.json file and project code know where to find them.

What is the package.json File?

There’s a package.json file that provides its metadata and dependencies. When installing the project on your computer, npm will reference the package.json file to install the dependencies and devDependencies.

Instead of installing each dependency individually, you simply type npm install in the command line.

Hosting providers also use the package.json file to install the dependencies (excluding devDependencies) needed to run the project on its servers.

What is package-lock.json?

The package-lock.json specifies the exact version of the package used to build the project. This file locks the dependencies so that when the project is installed, it references the versions used during development rather than the latest release.

Engineers update packages regularly, often changing the way the package works. So, locking your dependencies ensures the project operates as intended.

How to use npm

Here are some common npm commands and what they do:

• npm init: Creates a package.json file for your project. If you’re building an application from scratch, npm init will be one of the first commands you use to include key project information. NPM will automatically update your package.json file whenever you install or remove packages.
• npm install: Installs all of the project dependencies in a package.json file.
• npm install <package-name>: Installs a specific package from the NPM registry and saves it to your node_modules folder. For example, npm install @uxpin/merge-cli will install the Merge CLI.
• npm install <package-name> –save: Installs an NPM package and adds it to the dependencies in your package.json file.
• npm install <package-name> –save-dev: installs an NPM package and adds it to the devDependencies 
• npm uninstall <package-name>: Uninstalls a specific package from your project.
• npm doctor: Runs diagnostics on your npm installation to check if it has everything it needs to manage your packages.
• npm update <package-name>: Updates a specific package to the latest version.

These are just a few of the most common npm commands. You can find the complete list in the npm documentation.

Understanding npm as a Designer

npm is simply a toolkit comparable to plugins or app extensions for design tools. You don’t need to know the ins-and-outs of how packages are created, but it may be useful to know a thing or two about it.

First of all, some of code component libraries are shared as npm packages, such as MUI, Ant Design, etc.

How to find component libraries that are distributed as npm packages? Let’s say you search through Adele, UXPin’s library of publicly available Design Systems, for a component library that you can bring in to UXPin. You pick Shopify’s Polaris and notice that it is distributed via npm.

So, you go to the NPM site, look for Shopify’s Polaris, and find it.

UXPin with Merge technology allows you to import UI elements from component libraries via NPM packages. Then, you can use those elements to put together fully-functional prototypes.

UXPin Merge is usually being set up by a developer. But if you lack the development support, you can use our new tool – Merge Component Manager and manage UI components by yourself.

However, if you want to enhance your programming knowledge to collaborate with devs better, then learning about basic code principles (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and component libraries is far more valuable for designers.

What Can You Do with npm Integration?

Even though npm is typically a tool developers use, it plays a crucial role in enabling powerful design workflows—like bringing React components into UXPin for seamless drag-and-drop UI building.

Here’s why npm is important for technical designers working with tools like UXPin Merge:

1. Access to React Components: If your design system is built using React, npm allows you to package these components and make them accessible for use in other applications or tools—like UXPin Merge. React components that are available as npm packages can be directly imported into UXPin, giving designers the ability to drag and drop real code components into their designs without writing code.
2. Easily Manage Updates: npm simplifies version control. When a developer updates a package (such as a new version of a button component), npm can automatically manage this update in UXPin Merge, ensuring that designers always work with the latest components from the development team. This ensures consistency between design and development without the need for manual updates.
3. Collaborate Seamlessly with Developers: npm helps technical designers and developers work from the same source of truth. Developers use npm to publish the components they create, while designers can easily import those components into UXPin using Merge. This ensures that the components designers use for prototyping are exactly the same as the ones developers will implement in the final product.

Improve Collaboration With UXPin Merge

Merge enhances collaboration between design and development because designers and engineers work with the same component library. 

Instead of having a UI kit for designers and code for devs, Merge syncs a repository to UXPin’s editor so design teams can build fully functioning prototypes using code components.

You can sync your company’s design system or a component library like MUI so that you only have to drag and drop UI elements to build interfaces. Request access to Merge.

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

Design system naming conventions are the standardized rules and guidelines used to name elements within a design system. This includes naming design tokens, components, patterns, styles, and any other elements that are part of the design system. A well-defined naming convention is crucial for maintaining clarity, consistency, and ease of use across both design and development teams.

If you’re looking to elevate your design system and create a more consistent, efficient workflow, UXPin Merge is the solution for you. By integrating design and development into a unified process, Merge helps you build a robust design system that scales with your organization and meets the highest standards of quality and consistency. Request access to UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

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What is the Naming Convention for Design Systems?

Design system naming conventions are a set of rules for naming the different parts of a design system, like colors, fonts, buttons, and other components. These rules help keep names clear and consistent, making it easy for everyone on the team to understand and use the design system.

Design system naming conventions are typically set by the team responsible for creating and maintaining the design system. It can be governed by a dedicated group of designers and developers who focus on building and managing the design system or design leaders at a company. They establish naming conventions to ensure consistency and ease of use across the system.

Why Are Naming Conventions Important in a Design System?

By following these naming conventions, teams can work together more smoothly and keep the design system organized and easy to update. Design system naming systems help in:

1. Clarity and Readability: A good naming convention helps team members easily understand what each element is and how it should be used. This is especially important as the design system grows and more people across different teams start using it.
2. Consistency: Consistent naming reduces confusion and helps ensure that everyone on the team uses the design system in the same way. This is essential for maintaining a cohesive and unified user experience across all products and platforms.
3. Scalability: As your design system expands to include more components and tokens, a well-structured naming convention makes it easier to organize and manage these elements. It provides a scalable framework that can accommodate new additions without causing confusion or requiring significant restructuring.
4. Collaboration: Clear and consistent naming conventions improve collaboration between designers and developers by reducing miscommunication. When both teams use the same language and terms, it’s easier to maintain alignment throughout the development process.

9 Key Elements of Design System Naming Conventions

Design Tokens

Design tokens are the core variables that define a design system’s visual properties, such as colors, typography, spacing, and shadows. Naming conventions for tokens should reflect their purpose and usage rather than specific values, ensuring flexibility and scalability. Examples include color-primary, font-size-heading, or spacing-small.

Components

Components are the building blocks of a design system, representing reusable UI elements like buttons, forms, cards, and navigation bars. Consistent naming for components ensures they are easily identifiable and logically grouped, enhancing usability and collaboration. Examples include ButtonPrimary, FormInputText, or CardWithImage.

Patterns

Patterns are reusable combinations of components that address specific design problems or create common UI layouts. Naming conventions for patterns should describe their function clearly, such as LoginForm, NavbarSticky, or ErrorMessageModal.

Modifiers

Modifiers represent variations or states of a base component or token, such as different sizes, colors, or behaviors. Consistent naming for modifiers typically indicates the relationship between the base element and the variation, using a pattern like BaseComponent–Modifier. Examples include ButtonPrimary–Large, ColorPrimary–Dark, or Card–WithShadow.

Utilities

Utility classes or styles are often used for quick, specific adjustments that apply common design tokens, such as margin or padding. Naming conventions for utilities are typically short and descriptive, indicating the property they affect. Examples include u-margin-small, u-padding-large, or u-text-center.

States

States define different conditions of a component, such as active, disabled, focused, or error states. Clear naming for states helps communicate these conditions within the design system. Examples include Button–Disabled, Input–Error, or Link–Active.

Responsive Variants

These are variations of components or styles that adjust based on screen size or device type. Naming conventions for responsive variants typically follow a pattern that indicates the screen size they target. Examples include Button–SmallScreen, Grid–Desktop, or Image–Responsive.

Accessibility Features

Elements or tokens that enhance accessibility might have specific naming conventions to denote their purpose. For example, Button–AriaLabel or Text–HighContrast indicate elements tailored for accessibility.

Brand-Specific Elements

In some design systems, elements may be specific to different brands or themes. Naming conventions for these elements should clearly indicate their association. Examples include Button–BrandA, Navbar–BrandB, or Typography–Corporate.

Top 10 Best Practices for Naming Conventions in Design Systems

A well-organized design system is the backbone of consistent and scalable design work. Naming conventions play a crucial role in this organization by making your design system intuitive and easy to use. Here are ten essential best practices to help you establish effective naming conventions for your design system:

1. Be Descriptive but Concise

Why It Matters: Clear and concise names help everyone on your team quickly understand what each element is for. Long or vague names can lead to confusion and mistakes, slowing down the design and development process.

How to Implement: Choose names that clearly describe the element’s purpose or function without being overly detailed. For example, instead of naming a primary action button btnSubmitActionPrimary, use ButtonPrimary. This name is direct, easy to remember, and effectively communicates the button’s role.

2. Use Consistent Patterns Across the System

Why It Matters: Consistency in naming makes your design system predictable and easy to navigate. When team members know what to expect from the naming structure, they can find and use elements more efficiently.

How to Implement: Establish a naming pattern like [Category]-[Modifier] for design tokens (color-primary, spacing-small) and ComponentName–Modifier for components (Button–Large, Card–WithShadow). Stick to these patterns throughout your design system to maintain consistency.

3. Avoid Specific Values in Names

Why It Matters: Naming tokens with specific values like 16px or #FFFFFF limits flexibility. If the values change, you would need to rename tokens throughout the system, which is time-consuming and error-prone.

How to Implement: Focus on naming tokens based on their function rather than specific values. For instance, use font-size-base instead of font-size-16px. This approach allows you to adjust the value without changing the name, making your system more adaptable.

4. Reflect the Design Intent, Not Just Implementation

Why It Matters: Names should convey how and when an element should be used, rather than just describing what it is. This helps designers and developers understand the intent behind each element, promoting consistent usage across different contexts.

How to Implement: Use names that indicate the purpose of the element. For example, instead of a generic name like color-red, use color-error to specify that the color is intended for error messages. This provides clarity and reduces the risk of misapplication.

5. Document Your Naming Conventions Clearly

Why It Matters: Clear documentation ensures that everyone on your team understands and follows the naming conventions. This is particularly important as new team members join or as the design system evolves.

How to Implement: Create a comprehensive section in your design system documentation dedicated to naming conventions. Include the reasoning behind each rule, along with examples of correct and incorrect naming. Update this documentation regularly to reflect any changes or additions.

6. Use Readable Naming Formats like Camel Case or Kebab Case

Why It Matters: Readable formats such as camel case (ButtonPrimary) or kebab case (button-primary) make it easy to distinguish different parts of a name at a glance, improving clarity and reducing errors.

How to Implement: Decide on a naming format that aligns with your team’s coding standards or design practices. For instance, use camel case for component names (ButtonPrimary, CardWithImage) and kebab case for CSS class names (button-primary, card-with-image). Apply this format consistently.

7. Include Context in Names When Necessary

Why It Matters: Elements that could be used in multiple contexts should have names that specify their intended use. This prevents confusion and ensures elements are applied correctly across different parts of the design.

How to Implement: When naming tokens or components that serve specific functions, include contextual information in the name. For example, use spacing-card-small instead of just spacing-small to indicate that the spacing value is intended for card components.

8. Plan for Scalability from the Start

Why It Matters: A scalable naming convention allows your design system to grow without needing significant changes to existing names. This is crucial as your system evolves to include more components, tokens, and patterns.

How to Implement: Anticipate future needs by choosing flexible naming conventions. For example, if you might add different button types, start with names like ButtonPrimary, ButtonSecondary, and ButtonTertiary. This approach leaves room for expansion without causing confusion.

9. Minimize the Use of Abbreviations

Why It Matters: Abbreviations can make names shorter, but they also risk making them unclear, especially for new team members or collaborators. Only use abbreviations that are universally understood within your team.

How to Implement: Stick to full words unless an abbreviation is commonly accepted and widely recognized. For instance, btn for button is standard, but using fs for font-size might not be immediately clear to everyone.

10. Regularly Review and Update Naming Conventions

Why It Matters: As your design system grows and changes, your naming conventions might need to evolve. Regular reviews help ensure your system remains intuitive and efficient for all users.

How to Implement: Set up periodic reviews of your naming conventions with key stakeholders. Gather feedback from designers and developers to identify any issues or areas for improvement. Be open to making changes that enhance clarity, consistency, or scalability.

Build Prototypes that Are in Line with Your Design System

Establishing effective naming conventions is crucial for any design system’s success. By being descriptive but concise, maintaining consistent patterns, and regularly reviewing your conventions, you can ensure that your design system remains organized, scalable, and easy to use.

Consistency is key to any successful design system. It ensures that your UI components are cohesive, scalable, and easy to maintain across different teams and projects. But achieving this level of consistency can be challenging, especially when it comes to bridging the gap between design and development. That’s where UXPin Merge comes in.

UXPin Merge is a powerful design technology that allows you to integrate real, production-ready code components from your React-based design system directly into your design tool. This integration creates a unified source of truth for both designers and developers, ensuring that everyone is working with the exact same components and styles. Request access to UXPin Merge.

The post Design System Naming Conventions – How to Set Them appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Some team members despise design system governance. They see it as a roadblock to rapid growth, creativity, and flexibility. However, design system governance can foster scalability and creativity if properly implemented while maintaining design and usability consistency.

Good design system governance prioritizes users before growth and profits. Company culture also plays a significant role in how a company implements a governance process that team members follow and embrace.

The tools UX and engineering teams also have an impact on design system governance. UX teams must update design tools to match changes to the final product, exposing the process to human error!

With UXPin Merge, teams don’t need to worry about updating two different design systems. UXPin Merge syncs our editor tool with code components from your Git repo or Storybook integration (allowing you to connect with React, Revue, Angular, Ember, and many more), eliminating the need for separate design systems and mitigating human error.

See how UXPin can enhance your design system governance!

What is Design System Governance?

Design system governance is the process and protocols for maintaining and updating a product’s design system.

Even minor changes, like changing an app’s close icon from an X to a — must go through a multi-step approval and implementation process.

Design system governance fulfills several purposes:

• Maintain’s design and brand consistency
• Prevents poor design decisions—leading to usability issues
• Encourages team members to think creatively and try to solve problems with the tools on hand before attempting to make changes
• Ensures updates consider accessibility
• Keeps the entire organization informed of changes
• Updates digital product and design documentation

Without effective design system governance, editing and updating new components is a free-for-all that could create usability issues, inconsistencies and ruin the product’s reputation.

The Challenges of Maintaining a Design System

There are many challenges to maintaining a design system. Every organization must have a dedicated individual or team to manage its design system. 

Here are six common challenges to maintaining a design system and why an effective governance model is essential!

Company Political Forces

Sadly, even successful design systems aren’t safe from power struggles within an organization. Team members might call on executive power to either push or block design changes, overriding the initial decision of a design system team.

Conversely, governance keeps executives and other stakeholders well informed on design changes and the reasoning, making it easier to get buy-in and approval.

Managing Input From Multiple Teams and Departments

A design system is not only for UX and engineering teams. Product teams and other stakeholders share ownership of the organization’s design system. 

Managing all of this input can be challenging without a proper system of governance.

Design Systems are Often an Afterthought or Side Project

In many organizations, especially fledgling startups, the product’s design system isn’t a priority. It’s a side project a UX designer maintains in their spare time or over the weekend—feebly trying to maintain consistency with the demand for growth!

In this environment, a design system is prone to abuse and poor design decisions. Often UX teams have to undo changes to fix usability issues due to poor governance.

Poor Communication

Without proper communication between departments, teams, and individuals, a design system falls apart. For example, two teams might unknowingly work on the same task separately, or worse, crucial usability changes go forgotten because everyone thought “someone else was working on it.”

Design system governance fosters organization-wide communication, so everyone is updated and informed!

Reluctance from Team Members

When teams are reluctant to adopt the product’s design system, they choose the parts they like and develop a “better way” to design the rest. New team members or those not involved in creating the design system believe they can do better—thus undermining the hard work of others.

This reluctance can not only affect the product’s usability and consistency but create unnecessary conflict.

A governance model with multiple checks and balances prevents team members from hijacking a design system.

Reluctance to Change

Sometimes the opposite is true. Design system managers believe the system is fine the way it is, blocking any changes. A design system is never complete. It’s a work in progress that must evolve for the organization to grow.

The Single Source of Truth Dilemma

Many companies struggle with the single source of truth dilemma—working with a single dataset between all departments, primarily UX design, product, and engineering.

The UX team works with design tools, engineers with code, and the product team (often with limited technical know-how) uses all sorts of tools, including powerpoints, PDFs, and paper, to name a few. 

With this scattered workflow, maintaining a single source of truth is challenging. Often requiring additional staff and resources to ensure everyone is up-to-date. Even with good systems of governance, the single source of truth dilemma is a constant challenge.

Global payment giant PayPal solved its single source of truth dilemma with UXPin Merge. PayPal uses UXPin Merge to build and maintain its design system for internal user interfaces with code components from a Git repository.

When developers implement new changes, UXPin’s design editor’s components update simultaneously, so designers and engineers always work with the same design system. 

Establishing Design System Governance Standards

There are four primary scenarios where a design system requires changes or updates. These scenarios require a submission process where teams must ask a series of questions and tests before prototyping or requesting amendments.

• Introducing new elements – Establishing a workflow for adding new elements ensures design system integrity while providing every team member with an equal opportunity to make additions. 
• Promoting patterns – Patterns fall into two categories: one-off or best new practice. Teams must test these new patterns against what’s currently available before promoting them.
• Reviewing and adapting patterns – Every design system must have a team (at least two members) to review patterns before release. This review process ensures new elements meet the standards and practices of the current design system.
• Releasing design system updates – Rather than releasing new updates when they’re ready, teams must establish a release schedule for updates. A strict release schedule ensures teams follow quality assurance and documentation processes correctly.

An effective way to manage this submission process is through a simple decision tree that maps every step a change must follow.

This excellent example from Inayaili de León shows how Canonical’s team adds new patterns to their design system following a simple decision tree—from concept to release.

Inayaili admits that, like their design system, the decision tree is a work-in-progress that they update and refine as the product evolves.

5 Different Design System Governance Models

Design system governance models refer to the frameworks and practices that organizations use to manage, maintain, and evolve their design systems. Effective governance is crucial to ensure consistency, scalability, and collaboration across teams, especially as design systems grow and evolve over time. Here are some common design system governance models:

1. Centralized Governance Model

In a centralized governance model, a single, dedicated team (often called the design system team or design system core team) is responsible for the development, maintenance, and updates of the design system. This team typically includes designers, developers, and product managers who collaborate closely to ensure the design system is aligned with the organization’s brand and user experience goals.

Key Characteristics:

• Unified Control: The design system team has full control over the design system’s direction, updates, and maintenance.
• Consistency: Centralized control helps maintain a high level of consistency across all components and design tokens.
• Streamlined Decision-Making: With a single team making decisions, changes and updates can be implemented quickly and efficiently.

Pros:

• Clear ownership and accountability.
• High consistency and quality control.
• Efficient decision-making and streamlined processes.

Cons:

• Can become a bottleneck if the team is small or overburdened.
• May lack input from various product teams, potentially leading to a less flexible or adaptable system.

2. Federated Governance Model

A federated governance model, also known as a decentralized or hybrid model, involves multiple teams contributing to the design system under a set of shared guidelines and standards. In this model, the design system team still exists, but other product or feature teams also have the ability to contribute components, patterns, or updates.

Key Characteristics:

• Shared Responsibility: Different teams contribute to the design system, fostering a sense of ownership and collaboration.
• Guidelines and Standards: The design system team provides overarching guidelines, but individual teams have flexibility within those guidelines.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Encourages collaboration across teams, promoting innovation and diverse perspectives.

Pros:

• Increased flexibility and adaptability.
• Encourages innovation and input from various teams.
• Reduces bottlenecks by distributing the workload.

Cons:

• Potential for inconsistencies if guidelines are not strictly followed.
• Requires strong communication and coordination among teams.

3. Community-Driven Governance Model

In a community-driven governance model, the design system is managed in a more open, collaborative manner, often with contributions coming from across the organization, including designers, developers, product managers, and other stakeholders. This model relies heavily on community involvement and collective decision-making.

Key Characteristics:

• Open Contribution: Anyone in the organization can propose changes, updates, or new components.
• Community Moderation: A committee or group of maintainers oversees contributions, ensuring they meet quality and consistency standards.
• Collaborative Decision-Making: Decisions are often made collectively through discussions, voting, or consensus.

Pros:

• Highly inclusive and democratic.
• Promotes widespread adoption and engagement.
• Encourages diverse perspectives and innovation.

Cons:

• Can be challenging to maintain consistency and quality.
• Decision-making can be slower and more complex.
• Requires a strong governance framework to manage contributions effectively.

4. Mixed Governance Model

The mixed governance model combines elements of the centralized, federated, and community-driven models, depending on the needs of the organization and the maturity of the design system. This model provides a flexible approach to governance, allowing teams to adapt based on specific circumstances, project requirements, or organizational culture.

Key Characteristics:

• Flexible Approach: Different governance styles are applied to different parts of the design system, based on complexity, importance, or other factors.
• Balanced Control: Centralized control is maintained for core components, while more flexibility is allowed for less critical elements.
• Adaptive Governance: The governance model can evolve over time as the design system and organization grow.

Pros:

• Balances consistency and flexibility.
• Can adapt to changing needs and contexts.
• Allows for experimentation and innovation.

Cons:

• Can be complex to manage and communicate.
• Requires clear guidelines to prevent confusion and maintain coherence.

5. Open Source Governance Model

The open source governance model is similar to the community-driven model but typically involves an external community beyond the organization. In this model, the design system is open to contributions from anyone, and the community helps drive its development and evolution.

Key Characteristics:

• External Contributions: Contributions come from a wide range of external developers, designers, and other community members.
• Open Development: The design system’s development process is transparent and open to public scrutiny.
• Community-Driven Decision-Making: The community plays a significant role in shaping the direction of the design system.

Pros:

• Leverages a broad pool of talent and ideas.
• Encourages rapid innovation and evolution.
• Promotes transparency and inclusivity.

Cons:

• More challenging to maintain quality and consistency.
• Requires robust community management and governance structures.
• Risk of diverging goals and priorities among contributors.

Choosing the Right Governance Model

Selecting the right governance model for your design system depends on several factors, including the size and structure of your organization, the maturity of your design system, and the level of collaboration and flexibility you want to promote. Some organizations may start with a centralized model and evolve to a federated or community-driven approach as their design system matures and adoption grows.

Ultimately, effective design system governance should align with your organization’s goals and culture, fostering collaboration, maintaining consistency, and ensuring scalability as your design system evolves.

A Step-by-Step Governance Model Example

There are many ways to approach design system governance, but here is a 10-step process inspired by design system guru Brad Frost:

1. Use what’s available – Product teams must exhaust every effort to find a solution using the current component library. This means a design system must be well documented and accessible to everyone. If the current design system does not fulfill the new requirement, teams can proceed to step two.
2. Contact design system (DS) team – Product teams contact the DS team to discuss the problem and the proposed changes. Again, the DS team and product team will work together to find an existing solution. With intimate knowledge of the design system, the DS team might uncover something the product team missed. If there is still no solution, teams proceed to step three.
3. Determine if the change is one-off or part of the design system – The product team and DS team decide whether the amendment is a one-off (snowflake) or part of the design system. One-off changes usually fall on the product team, while the DS team handles design system changes. Either way, teams must prioritize and schedule the changes.
4. Initial Prototyping – Teams prototype and test product changes.
5. Initial Review Process – The DS team and product team review the results from prototyping and testing. If both teams are satisfied, they proceed to the next step. If they determine the changes are lacking, teams return to prototyping and testing.
6. UX & Dev Testing – Once designs pass the initial review, they go to UX and development teams for further testing to ensure the changes meet user experience and technical requirements.
7. Final review – The product team and DS team meet again to review the results of UX and dev testing. If both teams are satisfied, they proceed to the next step. If not, they iterate.
8. Documentation and schedule release – Teams document the new changes, update the changelog (e.g., Github), and schedule the release.
9. Changes released – Changes are released, product version bump according to versioning guidelines, all teams notified (Slack, Asana, Trello, Github, etc.).
10. Quality assurance – Product teams review the final changes for quality assurance.

You can see how this 10-step process will mitigate all of the six common design system challenges we outlined earlier. With multiple checks and balances, a design system maintains its integrity while communicating changes to the entire organization.

While this process solves many design system challenges, checks and balances don’t eliminate human error. Teams need a tool to provide a single source of truth!

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Popular vector-based design tools don’t solve the problem. Designers and engineers must update and sync identical systems separately—an ineffective workflow prone to error.

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The post Design System Governance – Scale Your Design appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Modern websites and apps rely on front-end frameworks to develop, maintain, and scale user interfaces. React’s Javascript library is arguably the most popular front-end framework with many component libraries to build digital products.

We’re going to explore the top React UI libraries and how to choose the right one for your next project.

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What is React Component library?

A React component library is a collection of pre-built UI components specifically designed for use with React applications. These libraries contain reusable components that cover a wide range of UI elements, such as buttons, forms, modals, navigation bars, cards, and more.

React component libraries aim to streamline the development process by providing ready-made components that adhere to best practices in terms of design, accessibility, and functionality.

What to consider when choosing a React component library

Below are six things to consider when choosing a React library for your next project. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and some of these factors may not apply to the product you’re building. 

1. Popularity

GitHub’s star rating allows you to quickly compare each React UI library’s popularity. The weekly downloads on npm also show how many people use the component library. Generally speaking, a React library’s popularity means it’s well established and serves its purpose.

2. Issues

Like star rating, a library’s GitHub issues can tell you a lot about its popularity and how well it’s maintained. Even if the library has minimal issues, do any of these affect the product you’re trying to build? 

3. Documentation & Support

Documentation is an important consideration when choosing a React UI library. You want to avoid running to Stack Overflow every time you run into trouble or want to know how to use specific components. Good documentation is updated regularly and gives you a comprehensive understanding of the library.

You also want to know if the React library has support directly from the creators or via a dedicated community forum. There are times when you need expert advice to overcome challenges. The ability to reach out for help (even if that means paying) is crucial to get issues sorted quickly and keep the project moving.

4. Customization

One of the downsides to using a component library is its constraints and lack of customization. For some projects, customization isn’t a factor, but if you’re looking to develop a unique UI, the ability to build your own design system is vital.

Explore the library’s documentation to see if they offer instructions for customizing the components and how easily you can achieve your desired results.

5. Browser or Device Compatibility

Depending on the app you’re designing, you’ll want to know the component library’s browser and mobile compatibility. The quickest way to research browser/device compatibility is by searching GitHub’s issues or Stack Overflow.

6. Accessibility

Accessibility is a time-consuming but necessary consideration for digital product design. If a React library hasn’t considered accessibility when designing components, then it’s something you’re going to have to do yourself, which takes us back to points 3 and 4–documentation and customization.

Which is the best React component library?

The best React component library for your project depends on your specific needs and preferences. It’s recommended to evaluate each library based on factors such as documentation quality, community support, active development, and alignment with your project requirements before making a decision.

Comparing the libraries involves assessing various aspects such as design philosophy, component offerings, theming capabilities, documentation, community support, and ecosystem. Take Material-UI (MUI) and Ant Design as examples.

Material-UI provides a comprehensive set of React components following the Material Design system. It includes components like buttons, cards, forms, navigation, and more, with a wide range of customization options.

Ant Design offers a rich collection of components tailored for enterprise applications, including layouts, forms, navigation, data display, and more. It provides components specific to data visualization and business logic.

5 React Component Libraries

These are our five best React UI libraries for 2024.

Note: Information regarding GitHub stars and NPM downloads are accurate as of March 2024.

MUI (Material-UI)

• GitHub Stars: 91.3k
• Weekly NPM Downloads: 3.4M
• Official website: mui.com

MUI is one of the most comprehensive and widely used React component libraries. The library is built on Google’s Material Design UI, one of the most extensive UI kits in the world.

MUI – Components

MUI has a massive component library for designers to build everything from mobile and web applications, websites, and even wearable apps. 

MUI Core features fundamental UI components you see in everyday digital products, while MUI X offers a list of advanced React components for building complex user interfaces, like data tables, data pickers, charts, and more.

For those of you who would like to try design with MUI code components, sign up for a UXPin trial and get 14-day access to UXPin. Read more about MUI 5 Kit in UXPin.

MUI – Theming & Customization

One of MUI’s biggest appeals is the ability to theme and customize components. Designers can use MUI as a foundation to scale designs fast but also adapt the library to build a custom design system for their product or organization.

Designers can also take advantage of Material Design and MUI’s comprehensive guidelines to avoid usability issues when customizing components.

MUI also has a template marketplace to purchase React theme templates for dashboards, eCommerce websites, landing pages, and more.

MUI – Documentation

MUI’s documentation is as detailed and comprehensive as its component library. Its curators have taken great care to provide designers and developers with step-by-step instructions and guidelines for installation, usage, customization, accessibility, and more.

There are also tons of videos on YouTube from MUI’s large community of users and contributors offering best practices, tutorials, tips and tricks, how-to guides, and more.

React-Bootstrap

• GitHub Stars: 22.2k
• Weekly NPM Downloads: 1.3M
• Official website: react-bootstrap.github.io

Founded in 2011, Bootstrap is one of the oldest and most popular open-source CSS frameworks for websites and web applications. Bootstrap was one of the first CSS frameworks to prioritize mobile-first web development, allowing designers to build and scale responsive websites quickly.

React-Bootstrap replaced Bootstrap Javascript while ditching resource-heavy dependencies like JQuery to build a comprehensive but simplistic React component library.

React-Bootstrap – Components

If you’re familiar with Bootstrap, then you’ll instantly recognize React-Bootstrap’s generic-looking component library. Like its CSS predecessor, React-Bootstrap features UI components that favor web design rather than mobile applications.

React-Bootstrap – Theming & Customization

React-Bootstrap is very generic with minimal styling, making it easy for designers to tweak and customize. Bootstrap’s defined classes and variants make it easy to select and customize components using CSS.

Due to Bootstrap’s long history and wide usage, you can find tons of free and premium React-Bootstrap themes and templates for everything from admin dashboards to multiple purpose websites, eCommerce, landing pages, and more.

React-Bootstrap – Documentation

React-Bootstrap has excellent documentation, albeit not as detailed and comprehensive as MUI. React-Bootstrap’s simplicity and naming convention make it one of the easiest React libraries to understand, use, and customize.

Bootstrap is also featured extensively on Stack Overflow, so you’ll likely find answers to most issues. There are also loads of blogs and YouTube videos offering advice, tutorials, design projects, and more.

Semantic UI React

• GitHub Stars: 13.2k
• Weekly NPM Downloads: 253k
• Official website: react.semantic-ui.com

Semantic UI React is a popular alternative to React-Bootstrap. Like React-Bootstrap, Semantic UI started as an open-source CSS framework that its contributors used to build React components.

Semantic UI React – Components

Semantic UI React offers an extensive range of UI components for websites and web applications. The components provide cleaner, more modern styling than Bootstrap while remaining minimalist and simplistic.

Semantic UI React uses the FontAwesome icon set, including over 1,600 free icons and 7,864 Pro (paid).

Semantic UI React – Theming & Customization

Semantic UI uses an intuitive, straightforward naming convention that makes it easy to customize components. The documentation also provides a step-by-step guide for theming with Semantic UI React. Unlike MUI and React-Bootstrap, Semantic has very few template options. 

Semantic UI React – Documentation

Semantic UI React’s interactive documentation provides you with CodeSandbox examples to inspect the code and play around with components. 

The docs also allow you to switch between an example, code, and props to visualize the component from multiple angles.

Ant Design (AntD)

• GitHub Stars: 89.9k
• Weekly NPM Downloads: 1.2M
• Official website: ant.design/docs/react/introduce

Ant Design (AntD) is another popular, widely used React component library developed by Ant Group–parent company to Alibaba, China’s biggest online marketplace. Like MUI, AntD offers a vast component library for both web and mobile applications.

AntD is the only React library featured in this article that uses TypeScript – a form of Javascript.

Ant Design – Components

AntD has a massive component library for desktop and mobile, including UI patterns like infinite scroll and pull-to-refresh for mobile devices. Ant Design ProComponents offers a range of advanced React UI elements ( similar to MUI X) for building complex interfaces.

You can also find a vast library of pre-made templates and scaffolds to kick start your project and build UIs much faster.

Ant Design – Theming & Customization

AntD uses design tokens or variables for devs to customize and theme components. The UI library uses Less and provides a complete list of all AntD variables in GitHub.

Ant Design – Documentation

AntD’s comprehensive documentation provides step-by-step instructions for using and customizing. You can also inspect each component in CodeSandBox, CodePen, or StackBlitz.

Chakra UI

• GitHub Stars: 36.4k
• Weekly NPM Downloads: 523K
• Official website: chakra-ui.com

Chakra UI is a Nigerian-based React component library founded by Segun Adebayo. You can choose between Chakra’s free component library or Chakra UI Pro, which offers pre-made complex UI components to build interfaces faster.

Chakra UI – Components

Chakra UI’s component library caters to web-based applications and websites. The library offers the choice between TypeScript or Javascript React components, depending on your preference. Chakra’s designers follow WAI-ARIA standards, so every element is accessible.

The stylish UI components look similar to Semantic UI, with dark and light options available.

Chakra UI – Theming & Customization

Chakra’s designers created the UI library to be fully customized using variables to meet product and brand requirements. Charka also integrates with Create React App, Framer Motion, React Hook Form, and React Table to extend the library’s usage and customization.

Chakra UI – Documentation

Chakra UI has excellent documentation with guides, video tutorials, examples, FAQs, links to connect with core team members, and an active Discord community. 

Chakra’s users are extremely passionate and enthusiastic about the React library, and there’s always someone to connect with to ask questions.

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The post 5 Best React Component Libraries of 2024 appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

The design system revolution of the last decade has brought with it all sorts of tools and strategies to enhance product development workflows.

Design tokens are one of those tools many design systems, including Google’s Material Design 3 and MUI, have adopted to make UI elements easier to implement, manage, and update.

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What is a Design Token?

Design tokens contain UI data like colors, fonts, spacing, animations, assets, etc. for styling and building cross-platform user interfaces. Instead of hard-coding static values for every operating system, a design token contains multiple formats, allowing front-end developers to use the same variable, whether they’re building an iOS or Android, and even web application.

One of the challenges with cross-platform product development is that operating systems use different style properties and formats. For example, UXPin’s website uses yellow for CTAs. The hex code for this yellow is #FCC821, which you can represent in several ways:

• RGB (CSS): rgb(252, 200, 33)
• RGBA: rgba(252, 200, 33, 1)
• Octal (Android/Flutter): 77144041

Instead of using these static properties, designers and engineers reference a token like “uxpin.cta.primary,” representing all four color codes. The color will always be the same regardless of the platform or programming language.

Design tokens within CSS

To implement design tokens in CSS, they are often converted into CSS variables (also known as custom properties). CSS variables allow you to define reusable values that can be applied throughout your stylesheet, making it easier to maintain and update styles consistently.

Example of Design Tokens as CSS Variables

/* Define Design Tokens as CSS Variables */
:root {
  --color-primary: #007bff;
  --color-secondary: #6c757d;
  --font-size-base: 16px;
  --font-family-base: 'Arial, sans-serif';
  --spacing-small: 8px;
  --spacing-medium: 16px;
}

/* Applying Design Tokens in CSS */
body {
  font-size: var(--font-size-base);
  font-family: var(--font-family-base);
  color: var(--color-primary);
  padding: var(--spacing-medium);
}

button {
  background-color: var(--color-primary);
  color: var(--color-secondary);
  padding: var(--spacing-small) var(--spacing-medium);
}

Here’s a section you can add to your blog post about Design Tokens within CSS:

Design Tokens within CSS

Design tokens are a crucial part of modern design systems, helping to maintain consistency and scalability across digital products. When used within CSS, design tokens ensure that your styles are cohesive and easy to manage, allowing for a more efficient and streamlined development process.

What are Design Tokens?

Design tokens are the smallest, repeatable elements of a design system that store visual properties such as colors, typography, spacing, and shadows. They act as a bridge between design and code, providing a single source of truth that can be used across various platforms and technologies.

Using Design Tokens in CSS

To implement design tokens in CSS, they are often converted into CSS variables (also known as custom properties). CSS variables allow you to define reusable values that can be applied throughout your stylesheet, making it easier to maintain and update styles consistently.

Example of Design Tokens as CSS Variables

/* Define Design Tokens as CSS Variables */
:root {
  --color-primary: #007bff;
  --color-secondary: #6c757d;
  --font-size-base: 16px;
  --font-family-base: 'Arial, sans-serif';
  --spacing-small: 8px;
  --spacing-medium: 16px;
}

/* Applying Design Tokens in CSS */
body {
  font-size: var(--font-size-base);
  font-family: var(--font-family-base);
  color: var(--color-primary);
  padding: var(--spacing-medium);
}

button {
  background-color: var(--color-primary);
  color: var(--color-secondary);
  padding: var(--spacing-small) var(--spacing-medium);
}

In this example, design tokens for colors, typography, and spacing are defined as CSS variables. These tokens are then applied throughout the CSS to style elements consistently. If you need to update a style, such as changing the primary color, you only need to update the variable definition, and the change will automatically apply everywhere the token is used.

Types of Design Tokens

Organizations use these design tokens for many style properties, including color palette, size, spacing, assets, and drop shadows, to name a few. When we’re at it – here are the primary types of design tokens:

1. Color Tokens: Define the color palette used in a design system. Examples include primary colors, secondary colors, background colors, text colors, border colors, etc.
   • Examples:
     • color-primary: #007bff
     • color-background: #f8f9fa
2. Typography Tokens: Specify text-related properties. These include font families, font sizes, line heights, letter spacing, and font weights.
   • Examples:
     • font-family-body: 'Roboto', sans-serif
     • font-size-heading: 24px
3. Spacing Tokens: Govern the spacing system, including margins, paddings, and gaps. They ensure consistent spacing throughout the design.
   • Examples:
     • spacing-small: 4px
     • spacing-large: 16px
4. Sizing Tokens: Define sizes for components and elements. These can include widths, heights, and maximum and minimum sizes.
   • Examples:
     • size-button-height: 48px
     • size-avatar-small: 32px
5. Border Tokens: Specify border properties, such as width, style, and radius.
   • Examples:
     • border-width-thin: 1px
     • border-radius-medium: 8px
6. Shadow Tokens: Describe the shadow effects used in the design system, including color, offset, blur, and spread.
   • Examples:
     • shadow-small: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1)
     • shadow-large: 0 4px 8px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2)
7. Opacity Tokens: Define the opacity levels for elements.
   • Examples:
     • opacity-low: 0.3
     • opacity-high: 0.9
8. Breakpoints Tokens: Specify the breakpoints for responsive design, dictating how the design adapts to different screen sizes.
   • Examples:
     • breakpoint-mobile: 480px
     • breakpoint-desktop: 1024px
9. Duration Tokens: Govern the timing of animations and transitions.
   • Examples:
     • duration-short: 200ms
     • duration-long: 600ms
10. Easing Tokens: Define the easing functions for animations and transitions.
    • Examples:
      • easing-in-out: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1)
      • easing-bounce: cubic-bezier(0.68, -0.55, 0.27, 1.55)

Where did Design Tokens Come from?

It is said that design tokens were pioneered by Salesforce. In a 2014 article published in Salesforce Designer, Salesforce UX VP Sönke Rohde described how the company uses design tokens to apply the same design principles across multiple platforms and software.

“At Salesforce, we face this very challenge, and we came up with an agnostic solution: we define our design in a single location and use a system to cascade it down to all platforms. We call it our Single Source of Truth. It’s basically a set of JSON files which contain name-value pairs describing our design tokens.” excerpt from Living Design System by Sönke Rohde.

Instead of using static style properties, engineers reference the design token, which pulls the correct value, depending on the platform, from a JSON file. To automate this process, Salesforce developed Theo–“an abstraction for transforming and formatting design tokens.”

What is the Difference between Atomic Design and Tokens?

Atomic design and design tokens are both concepts used in design systems, but they address different aspects of design consistency and scalability.

Atomic design is a methodology for creating design systems developed by Brad Frost. It breaks down user interfaces into smaller, reusable components called atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages (in ascending order of complexity). Atoms are the basic building blocks like buttons, input fields, icons, etc. Molecules are combinations of atoms, organisms are combinations of molecules, and so on.

Design tokens are a set of variables that define design properties such as colors, typography, spacing, etc., in a design system. They are abstract representations of visual design decisions. Rather than hardcoding specific values (like a hex code for a color) directly into UI components, design tokens provide a centralized way to manage and update design properties across an entire design system.

Design tokens deal with the abstraction and management of design properties. They abstract design decisions into variables, allowing for easier maintenance, scalability, and consistency. They provide a single source of truth for design-related values.

3 Design Tokens Examples

Here are three examples of design tokens for typography. These tokens help ensure that typography styles are consistent across different components and platforms.

Design Token Example #1: Font Family

{
  "font-family": {
    "base": "Roboto, Arial, sans-serif",
    "heading": "Montserrat, Arial, sans-serif",
    "monospace": "'Courier New', Courier, monospace"
  }
}

Design Token Example #2: Font Size

{
  "font-size": {
    "base": "16px",
    "small": "14px",
    "large": "24px",
    "heading": {
      "h1": "32px",
      "h2": "28px",
      "h3": "24px"
    }
  }
}

Design Token Example #3: Line Hight

{
  "line-height": {
    "base": "1.5",
    "tight": "1.25",
    "loose": "1.75",
    "heading": {
      "h1": "1.2",
      "h2": "1.3",
      "h3": "1.4"
    }
  }
}

Are Design Tokens Right for You?

Google’s Material Design 3 documentation offers a list of scenarios where design tokens are most helpful:

• You use a design system for more than one platform or product
• You want an easy way to maintain and update your product’s styles
• You plan to update your product design or build new products and features

Material Design also lists two instances where design tokens might be “less helpful:”

• You don’t plan to change your product in the next few years
• Your product does not have a design system

Benefits of Using Design Tokens

We’ve identified three key benefits to using design tokens.

1. Having a Single Source of Truth

Design tokens are most beneficial for creating a single source of truth–which is what drove Salesforce to start using them. Everyone must speak the same design language when multiple product teams, engineers, and UX designers work on the same product.

Design tokens allow teams to speak the same language, no matter their role, platform, programming language, or responsibilities.

2. Maintaining UI Consistency

UI consistency is a significant challenge when designing at scale. It’s not uncommon for designers to accidentally use slightly different sizing, brand colors, and spacing for a single product! These inconsistencies cause usability issues, increasing engineering and UX debt with every release.

Design tokens eliminate these inconsistencies so that every designer uses the same styles and properties–another single source of truth benefit!

3. Getting Flexibility to Scale

Design tokens give products and design systems flexibility to make changes and scale. If teams need to add platform-specific properties, they simply update the design token.

For example, Android uses octal color codes instead of HEX or RGB. To adapt a design system to accommodate Android, the DS team can add octal codes to each design token to maintain a single source of truth.

These tokens allow engineers to deliver new projects significantly faster with fewer errors or inconsistencies.

This flexibility is also helpful when making changes. For example, if a product changes its typeface from Montserrat to Roboto, the team only has to update the typography token to implement a product-wide change.

How to define a design token structure

While there are no rules for defining your design token structure, this example from Amazon’s Style Dictionary makes the most sense. Many organizations use a similar format for their design tokens.

Amazon’s Style Dictionary uses a hierarchical design token structure:

1. Category (color, time, line-height, size, asset, content, etc.)
2. Type
3. Item
4. Sub-Item
5. State

If we wanted to create a design token for a primary active button using this structure, it might look like color_background_button_primary_active or perhaps shortened color-bg-btn-primary-active. This token will contain every type of color code necessary for cross-platform implementation.

The key to a design token structure is consistency. It must use a predictable naming convention so users can easily find tokens and scale the system.

Architecting Tokens with Options and Decisions

UX expert and founder of eightshapes, Nathan Curtis, wrote an excellent article on architecting tokens. Nathan says the first step is to segment your design tokens into Options (or choices) and Decisions.

• Options: Creates the base token values. Tokens define what Style Dictionary describes above as categories–color, time, asset, content, etc.

• Decisions: Decisions use your Options to create properties for components. For example, interactive color, background color, text color, etc.

The benefit of this system is that if you want to change your white to a different shade, replacing the HEX code under the color Option will automatically sync to every design token and associated UI element. 

Nathan’s methodology also makes it easy to scale because you simply use your Options to create more Decisions. You can read Nathan’s full article for detailed instructions on architecting tokens.

Tips on Design Token Naming Conventions

Naming conventions are a crucial aspect of any design system, ensuring clarity, consistency, and ease of use across design and development teams. A well-thought-out naming convention helps communicate the purpose and function of design tokens, components, and styles, making it easier for team members to understand and use the system effectively. Here are some tips for creating effective naming conventions for your design system:

1. Be Descriptive and Concise

Names should clearly describe the element’s purpose or function without being overly verbose. Aim for a balance between specificity and brevity to ensure names are easy to read and understand.

Example:

• Use color-primary instead of main-blue-color.

2. Use Consistent Patterns

Establish a consistent naming pattern or structure that applies across all elements in your design system. This uniformity helps users quickly recognize the type of element they are working with and understand its role in the system.

Example:

• Use a pattern like [category]-[modifier], such as color-primary, spacing-small, or font-heading-large.

3. Avoid Ambiguity

Names should be clear and unambiguous, avoiding terms that could be interpreted in multiple ways. This helps prevent confusion and ensures that everyone on the team understands what each token or component represents.

Example:

• Instead of button-color, use button-background-color to clarify that the token refers to the button’s background color, not its text or border.

4. Reflect the Design Intent

Names should reflect the design intent rather than specific values. This approach allows for more flexibility and scalability, as the underlying values can change without requiring renaming.

Example:

• Use spacing-medium instead of spacing-16px. This way, if you decide to change the medium spacing from 16px to 20px, you don’t have to rename the token.

5. Align with Your Brand and Language

Ensure that your naming conventions align with your brand’s voice and the terminology used within your organization. This alignment creates a cohesive experience for both the design and development teams and ensures consistency in communication.

Example:

• If your brand uses specific terminology for sizes (e.g., compact, regular, spacious), incorporate these terms into your token names, like spacing-compact or button-size-regular.

6. Include Context When Necessary

When tokens or components could be used in multiple contexts, include contextual information in the name to clarify their use. This is particularly important for tokens that might have different values or meanings depending on the context.

Example:

• Use card-background-color instead of just background-color to specify that the token is for card components.

7. Use Common Abbreviations Sparingly

While abbreviations can save space, overusing them can make your names cryptic and harder to understand. Use common abbreviations where they add clarity and avoid using less common or internal jargon that might confuse new team members.

Example:

• bg for background is a common abbreviation and widely understood, so bg-color-primary is acceptable. However, avoid using abbreviations like clr for color.

8. Document Naming Conventions

Document your naming conventions and provide examples in your design system documentation. This helps ensure that everyone on your team understands the rules and follows them consistently.

Example Documentation Excerpt:

• “All color tokens should follow the pattern color-[modifier], where [modifier] describes the usage (e.g., primary, secondary, error). Example: color-primary, color-error.”

9. Plan for Scalability

As your design system evolves, new components and tokens will be added. Choose naming conventions that can easily accommodate growth and changes without requiring extensive renaming or restructuring.

Example:

• Instead of naming a token button-small, which might be limiting, use button-size-small to leave room for adding other size-related tokens, like button-size-large.

How Design Tokens Work in Practice

In an informative article, Design Tokens for Dummies, Louis Chenais outlines a typical design change workflow with vs. without design tokens.

The Traditional Workflow–Without Design Tokens

1. Designer updates a style in a design tool
2. Designer documents the changes for the design handoff
3. Engineer updates the component’s properties (CSS, LESS, SASS, etc.)
4. The design team confirms the changes during quality assurance (QA)

There are several problems with this workflow:

• It creates more work and attention to detail during the design handoff.
• It’s prone to errors and miscommunication.
• Creates more tickets, thus increasing technical debt.
• It costs unnecessary time and money making the changes and fixing any corresponding errors.

The Design Token Way

1. Designer updates a syle in a design tool.
2. A design tokens generator updates a centralized repository creating platform-specific files (JSON/YAML).
3. Engineers pull the new repo, add any new tokens, and automatically update the project’s styles.

Using design tokens reduces documentation for design handoffs and saves programming time for engineers. This automated system significantly reduces human error, streamlining the development and QA process.

A Single Source of Truth With UXPin Merge

As digital products get more complex, designers and engineers must find solutions to integrate workflows–a problem UXPin has solved with our revolutionary Merge technology.

Merge allows you to import a component library from a repository to UXPin’s design editor so designers can use the same UI elements engineers use to develop the final product.

Merge components have the same fidelity and functionality as those in the repository. The design system team can use React props (or Args for our Storybook integration) to restrict changes or provide designers with the flexibility to make design decisions.

Whenever engineers make changes to the repository, they automatically sync to UXPin, notifying designers of the update. Merge comes with version control, allowing designers to switch to an earlier version–helpful for updating older projects.

Take your product development to new heights and create a single source of truth with UXPin Merge. Visit our Merge page for more information and details to request access.

The post What Are Design Tokens? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Design systems provide you with a complete set of standards to enhance and manage your design efforts – from beginning to end. But in order to build and maintain a functional design system, first, you’ll have to commit time and effort before enjoying the benefits of a well-oiled design machine.

Looking for a design system management tool? UXPin Merge is a technology for bringing design library’s components to UXPin and using them in prototyping. Read more about UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

What is design system documentation? 

Design system documentation is a comprehensive guide on using a design system. It contains UI elements, components, and design language together with an explanation of how to use them. It helps share, consume, and execute these rules. This ultimately helps designers and developers to model their efforts around delivering a more predictable UI.

Design system documentation plays a crucial role in facilitating the adoption and implementation of a design system. It helps ensure consistency, efficiency, and predictability in UI design and development efforts, ultimately leading to a better user experience across products and platforms.

Two types of structuring design system documentation

A typical design system comprises a component library encompassing UI design elements and other components along with workflows. Design systems thus work to unify pattern libraries and style guides into a single cohesive experience.

Task-specific design system documentation

According to Heidi Adkisson, Principal UX Designer & Partner at Blink UX, while there are many different design documentation variants, some of the more task-specific types include:

• User Stories – allow designers to base their approach on the user needs perspective.
• Screen Flow Diagrams – are great for showing how a user might navigate between screens. 
• Use Cases – offer longer, more objective narratives which hold enormous benefits down the line. 
• Page-Level Documentation – describes an overview of a page’s function, purpose, and instructions for demos. 
• Scenario Narratives – outline descriptive narratives around how to perform specific tasks. 

Structural design system documentation

Other design documentation types related to docs from a structural perspective and often include:

• Object Model – which provides a structural view of a system.
• Architecture Map – communicates how the app or site is structured in general.
• Standardized Components – talk about standardized elements which are shared across the system. 
• System Vocabulary – lists the specific words, phrases, and other relevant system-specific language. 
• Navigational Framework – describes menu items, navigation elements, and control mechanisms. 

Why do you need to document your design system? 

Design documentation is today an essential component of any design system. From providing context to describing team coordination efforts and maintaining a clear record of the system’s component library, component documentation is fundamental to successful design. 

Design system documentation was once considered “non-critical” and was often overlooked. Without ever being exposed to the potential of design system documentation, stakeholders had no idea of the value that documentation could bring. 

Following the emergence of Google’s Material Design, it quickly became clear that design documentation was critical. Most design documentation consisted of disorganized notes and bullet points, leaving most of the vital information out of the system. Material Design changed all that, adding the necessary structure and warranting the need to document.

Documenting a design system comes with a raft of benefits as well:

• It provides a vision for the team to buy into – By creating design documentation that focuses on people, instead of black and white technical directives, you’re able to establish a clear vision that teams can refer back to when they lose focus. 
•  It gives the design system a clear, material structure – By keeping ahold of processes, designers and developers can better rely on a plan which has been laid out in front of them, instead of existing as an idea or general objective. 
•  It helps you to save resources – A good, high-quality document design infrastructure will save on costly trial-and-error mistakes, allow teams to optimize their time and effort, and ensure that reusable design patterns get recorded and later replicated. 
•  It drives engagement and satisfaction – Big projects can take a hefty toll on teams. Effective design documentation gives them something real to work towards – something they can count on when the going gets tough. 
•  It improves efficiency and productivity – With everything the team needs documented and made available, things get done faster, while keeping everyone on the same page. 

Without effective design documentation, successfully designing and delivering a product to market is near-impossible. Design system documentation has become essential by providing the rationale behind specific design decisions and helping users understand and interact with the model. 

9 steps to creating design system documentation

Step 1: Understand who is going to use the documentation

The very first step in design system documentation is to kick things off by looking at the market you’re doing all this work for – your users. Without understanding what they want, you’ll likely get your design goals and results very wrong. 

Think about categorizing your documentation as a product and your team as the consumers of that product. Focus on who will be using this documentation, what you’ll need to include to give them the context they’re looking for and how to structure it in a way that it’ll be easy to consume. 

Step 2: Outline the documentation needs of each component

Next, you’ll need to establish an outline covering the needs of each component and should include design guidelines on:

• Patterns
• Code snippets
• Colours
• Images
• Fonts 
• ADA compliance guidelines and more.

Component documentation should consider the needs of your organization first and foremost before considering the outline in the context of other design elements. 

Step 3: Create a style guide

Style guides help to establish the basis for the visual presentations of the documentation and offer a guideline for the visual and content elements of a design system. Style guides begin by looking at the other design documentation elements and describe the colors, logo prominence, and overall language tone. Ultimately, they serve as the template for others to use.  

Step 4: Create a reusable template that you can share with your team

Then, you’ll need to draft a template your team can reuse over and over while sharing it with one another. Having a recyclable documentation template saves your team time, keeps things consistent and ensures that everyone understands what they’re looking at.

Step 5: Develop a single source of truth

Establishing, articulating, and documenting a single source of truth is probably one of the most important product design components. This universally approved agreement centers on everything your design team will be working on. From icons and color schemes to type scales and buttons – if everyone knows and understands what things need to look like, things will flow far more smoothly. 

Start either with basic design components, found in your component library – created with tools like UXPin – or commence with the development phase, with React components defining the origins. UXPin, for example, allows you to ensure consistency throughout the company with UXPin Merge’s design system versioning. 

Keep creating a single source of truth for your team to design from when working on projects. UXPin Merge offers a design system versioning, allowing you to optimize your single source of truth design approach and to manage code-driven prototyping with it. With tools like UXPin, you can make use of baked-in open-source libraries or import your own design system via Git, Storybook or NPM integration.

Step 6: Include a starter’s kit

Design kits are a sometimes-overlooked component of good design system documentation. However, these necessary resources represent the “starting point” elements that are so essential for good user experience. Starter kits are the perfect onboarding tools and are flexible enough to range from step-by-step guidelines to advanced user manuals.   

Step 7: Collect feedback

Feedback lets you know when a design system is working well, and when it isn’t. Some organizations, for example, limit their feedback collection mechanisms to GitHub issues, creating challenges for designers and less-technical role players in giving their thoughts. 

Alternative feedback collection methods like website feedback boxes on documentation sites allow users to describe and submit the issue. A streamlined feedback channel without the need to open a GitHub issue allows anyone looking to provide any feedback the ability to do so quickly and via the documentation platform.

Step 8: Distribute the responsibility

Documenting can be a labor-intensive task for which people aren’t always willing to volunteer. But sharing its importance with the team helps them to understand the value of taking care of it. Instead of burdening one person with this challenge, consider sharing the responsibility of doing so across the team. This way, you’ll get a variety of insights as well as make the task easier to accomplish. 

Step 9: Update it regularly

Design systems need to be maintained, kept clean, and relevant. Continually keep an eye on identifying potential problem areas, reducing discrepancies, and streamlining the number of active systems. 

A good example here would be to establish a single source of truth for your React story code examples for your documentation site and design system components, updated regularly to ensure they align with each other. 

UXPin also boasts a regular update feature. Whenever making changes to a master component from a design system, UXPin allows you to update it in the system immediately, ensuring everything stays completely aligned.

Design System Documentation Template

Here is a template that you can use when writing your own design system documentation. Use it as a reference.

1. Introduction

• Overview: Provide a brief introduction to your design system. Explain its purpose, key goals, and the value it brings to your organization.
• Principles: List the core principles or guidelines that underpin your design system. These might include consistency, accessibility, responsiveness, and scalability.

2. Getting Started

• Quick Start Guide: Include a step-by-step guide on how to get started with the design system. This should cover how to access the system, what tools or resources are needed, and any initial setup required.
• Installation: Provide detailed instructions for installing any necessary software or dependencies, including commands for installing packages or setting up development environments.
• Contributing: Outline the process for contributing to the design system. This might include a guide on submitting changes, creating new components, or reporting issues.

3. Design Tokens

• What are Design Tokens?: Briefly explain what design tokens are and why they are important. Design tokens are the visual design atoms of the design system — specifically, they are named entities that store visual design attributes.
• Token Categories: List and describe the different categories of design tokens used in your design system. Common categories might include color, typography, spacing, and shadows.
• Usage Guidelines: Provide guidelines on how to use design tokens in both design and code. Include examples for clarity.

4. UI Kit

• Color: Document your color palette, including primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. Include color codes and usage examples for background, text, and UI elements.
• Typography: Define your typography styles, including font families, sizes, weights, and line heights. Provide examples of how to apply these styles in various contexts.
• Spacing: Detail your spacing system, including values for margins, padding, and grid spacing. Provide examples of consistent spacing usage.
• Icons and Imagery: Describe the guidelines for using icons and imagery within the design system. Include icon libraries, image dimensions, and file formats.

5. UI Components

• Component Library: List all available UI components, such as buttons, forms, modals, and navigation elements. Provide a brief description of each component.
• Component Usage: For each component, include the following details:
  • Description: A brief explanation of the component and its purpose.
  • Anatomy: A breakdown of the component’s structure, including any variants or states.
  • Usage Guidelines: Best practices for when and how to use the component effectively.
  • Code Examples: Include code snippets in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (or React, Angular, etc.) to demonstrate how to implement the component.
  • Accessibility Considerations: Guidelines for ensuring the component is accessible to all users, including keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and contrast ratios.

6. Patterns

• Design Patterns: Document common design patterns used across your product or website. Examples might include forms, navigation, authentication flows, or error handling.
• Pattern Usage: For each pattern, provide a description, usage guidelines, and code examples. Explain how patterns can be combined with components to create a cohesive user experience.

7. Brand Guidelines

• Voice and Tone: Outline the brand’s voice and tone, including guidelines for writing style, terminology, and messaging.
• Logo Usage: Provide rules for logo usage, including minimum sizes, clear space requirements, and acceptable variations.
• Brand Assets: Include links to downloadable brand assets, such as logos, fonts, and color palettes.

8. Accessibility

• Accessibility Standards: Detail the accessibility standards your design system adheres to, such as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).
• Best Practices: Provide guidelines for creating accessible designs and components, including considerations for screen readers, keyboard navigation, and color contrast.
• Testing Tools: Recommend tools and techniques for testing accessibility in both design and development.

9. Changelog

• Versioning: Explain your versioning system and how changes to the design system are documented.
• Recent Updates: Include a log of recent changes, updates, and additions to the design system. Provide links to specific updates or new components for easy reference.

10. Resources

• Tools and Plugins: List any tools or plugins that support your design system, such as Figma libraries, Sketch files, or browser extensions.
• Training and Tutorials: Provide links to training materials, tutorials, or webinars that help users understand and use the design system effectively.
• Support and Community: Include information on how to get support, report issues, or connect with other users of the design system.

Build Prototypes with your Design System

A sound design system needs to be supported by clear, unambiguous component documentation that enriches your component library and revolves around a single source of truth. 

As a general good practice rule – documentation is everything. It keeps track of progress, milestones, wins, and losses, lets you go back, review and learn, and – most importantly – allows people to understand and follow the design system itself. 

Do you need to ensure that your design system is being implemented? UXPin with Merge technology allows you to use UI components from your design system in prototyping. Simply import them to UXPin, drag and drop them in design editor and create consistent prototypes that look like a finished product. Read more about UXPin Merge.

The post Design System Documentation in 9 Easy Steps appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

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

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

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

Design UI with code-backed components.

Use the same components in design as in development. Keep UI consistency at scale.

Try UXPin Merge

What is Storybook?

Storybook is an open-source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, Angular, and other frameworks. It allows developers to build, test, and document components in a standalone environment outside of the main application, promoting better modularity and reusability.

It enhances the efficiency of UI development by providing a focused environment for creating, testing, and documenting UI components, making it easier for developers to build consistent and robust user interfaces.

BBC iPlayer Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The design system includes everything from iconography to navigation.

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

Related reading: Top 9 Design System Examples

The Guardian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IBM‘s Carbon Design System in Storybook

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

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

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

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

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

Three interactions with the select button:

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

Salesforce Lightning Design System for React

You can also find a Storybook with components of one of the best design systems – Salesforce Lightning. This design system is based in React, a JavaScript library, which is commonly used for building user interfaces. React is a popular front-end library developed by Facebook that allows developers to create interactive and dynamic UI components.

When we talk about React in the context of design systems, it usually means using React to implement the components and design guidelines provided by the design system.

By leveraging the Salesforce Design System, developers and designers can create applications that not only look great but also provide a consistent and intuitive user experience, ultimately leading to increased user satisfaction and productivity. Additionally, adherence to the design system ensures compatibility and seamless integration with other Salesforce products and services.

Salesforce Lightning Design System was created to be framework agnostic, yet it is still compatible with other front-end frameworks, and developers have the flexibility to choose the technology stack that best suits their needs and preferences.

This Storybook example is based on React and it has UI components such as a data table, checkbox, button, card, carousel, and more.

Audi UI React

Another React-based Storybook is a design system by Audi. Crafted with precision, the Audi Design System serves as the ultimate beacon of truth for our global teams dedicated to crafting Audi’s finest offerings.

From insightful Getting Started guides to indispensable Core Components, this Storybook example empowers every team member, ensuring a unified approach across all Audi products worldwide. The Audi Design System embodies the essence of precision, innovation, and seamless collaboration that the design team at Audi chose as its defining qualities.

It sets the standard for design systems in the automotive industry and beyond. Check out its Storybook to see for yourself. It has navigational, input, text, and many other useful components.

FAQ

1. What is Storybook used for?

Storybook is an open-source tool used for developing, testing, and documenting UI components in isolation. It provides a sandbox environment where developers can create and showcase components independently from the main application. This helps in building components that are reusable, consistent, and well-documented.

Storybook is particularly useful in the development of design systems and component libraries, as it allows developers to visualize and interact with components outside the context of the application, ensuring they function correctly and look as expected. It also supports a range of add-ons for accessibility, responsive design, and performance testing, making it a versatile tool for front-end development.

2. What are some advanced Storybook examples?

Advanced Storybook examples demonstrate the tool’s capability to handle more complex scenarios and enhance the development experience. Here are a few examples:

• Component Interactions: Using Storybook’s Controls add-on, you can create interactive components that respond to user input directly in the Storybook UI. This is useful for testing props and states dynamically.
• Composite Components: Showcase components that are composed of multiple child components, such as a form with inputs, buttons, and validation messages. This helps in understanding how components work together in a real-world context.
• Data Fetching and Mocking: Demonstrate how components behave with data fetching by using tools like MSW (Mock Service Worker) to mock API requests within Storybook. This is particularly useful for testing components that depend on external data sources.
• Theming and Styling: Create stories that demonstrate how components adapt to different themes or styles. This is especially useful for design systems that support dark and light modes or multiple branding themes.
• Accessibility Testing: Use the a11y add-on to automatically check for accessibility issues in your components and display the results directly in Storybook. This ensures your components are usable for all users, including those with disabilities.

3. What are public Storybooks?

Public Storybooks are Storybook instances that are accessible to the public over the internet. They are typically hosted on platforms like GitHub Pages, Netlify, or Vercel, allowing anyone to view and interact with the documented UI components. Public Storybooks are often used by companies and open-source projects to showcase their component libraries or design systems, providing developers and designers with a comprehensive reference for how each component should look and behave.

By sharing a public Storybook, teams can improve collaboration, provide clear documentation, and promote consistency across different projects. Public Storybooks are also valuable for onboarding new team members and for providing external contributors or users with insights into the UI components available within a project.

4. What is the difference between Storybook for React and Storybook for Angular?

Storybook is a versatile tool that supports multiple frameworks, including React and Angular, but the way it integrates and functions with each framework can differ slightly due to the inherent differences between React and Angular themselves.

Nevertheless, the core purpose of Storybook remains the same across both frameworks: to provide a powerful environment for developing, testing, and documenting UI components in isolation. Both Storybook for React and Storybook for Angular offer robust features that cater to the unique needs of their respective frameworks, ensuring that developers can maintain a consistent and efficient workflow.

5. How can I use Storybook with UXPin Merge?

Using Storybook with UXPin Merge allows you to import your React components directly from Storybook into UXPin, enabling a seamless integration between design and development. This integration ensures that designers are working with the exact same components that developers are using in production, leading to more accurate and efficient design processes. Here’s how you can use Storybook with UXPin Merge:

1. Set Up Storybook: Ensure that your React components are documented and organized in Storybook. You should have a well-structured Storybook instance with all the components you want to use in UXPin.
2. Sync Components: Integrate Storybook with UXPin and use UI components in your UXPin design projects, allowing designers to drag and drop components into their prototypes while maintaining full functionality and interactivity.
3. Design and Iterate: With the components imported from Storybook, designers can create high-fidelity prototypes in UXPin that are consistent with the development environment. This integration helps streamline the design-to-development workflow, reducing the risk of inconsistencies and ensuring that both teams are aligned.

Using Storybook with UXPin Merge is a powerful way to bridge the gap between design and development, ensuring that your UI components are consistent, reusable, and accurately represented across all stages of product development.

Try UXPin Merge and Storybook integration for fast prototyping

Use Storybook components to build interactive prototypes 8.6x faster than with vector-based tools like Figma. Import them to UXPin via our integration with Storybook and build products quickly. UXPin Merge’s Storybook integration lets you import your components within one minute. It doesn’t even require any technical knowledge, especially when you maintain a public Storybook design system. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post These Storybook Examples Will Inspire Your Component Library appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

A prototype is an early model or simulation of a product used to test and validate ideas before full-scale production. Prototypes vary in fidelity from simple sketches of a user interface to fully interactive digital models that resemble the final product. They serve to gather user feedback, identify usability issues, and refine design concepts, helping ensure that the final product meets user needs effectively.

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

Key takeaways:

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

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

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

What is a Prototype?

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Elementor’s Director of UX, the website building platform’s designer – there should be an average of four to five prototyping sessions, depending on the complexity of a given UI design.

Teams should create a prototype of every possible iteration of the design—even your early basic ideas for solving a user need. Prototyping shouldn’t be reserved only for beta tests of the final version; you should test basic and more complex versions of the end-product.

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

Prototyping Tools

A variety of tools and methods are available for creating prototypes in UX design, each offering different features and capabilities. Tools like UXPin, Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD are popular for creating both low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes. These tools allow designers to build interactive prototypes with dynamic elements, transitions, and animations, enhancing the ability to test and refine designs.

Read about top prototyping tools for designers and developers.

Prototype in UX Design

In UX design, a prototype serves as a preliminary version of a product, allowing designers, developers, and stakeholders to explore and validate design concepts before full-scale development. Prototyping is a critical step in the UX design process because it bridges the gap between a concept and its final execution, ensuring that the end product meets user needs and expectations.

Qualities of Effective Prototypes in UX Design

Prototypes are crucial tools in the UX design process, embodying several key qualities that make them indispensable for creating successful, user-centered designs:

1. Visualizing and Testing Ideas

Prototypes allow designers to bring their ideas to life in a tangible format, making it easier to explore and test different concepts. This hands-on approach provides a clearer picture of how a design will function in real-world scenarios, enabling designers to make more informed decisions and iterate quickly based on what works best.

2. Enhancing User Experience

An effective prototype goes beyond static visuals by simulating interactive user experiences. This enables designers to identify usability issues early on, ensuring the design is intuitive and user-friendly. By testing these interactions in a prototype, designers can refine the user journey and enhance the overall quality of the final product.

3. Facilitating Feedback and Collaboration

Prototypes serve as a concrete representation of design ideas, making them an excellent tool for gathering feedback and fostering collaboration among team members and stakeholders. By providing a visual and interactive reference, prototypes ensure that everyone involved in the project can review, discuss, and align on the design direction, fostering a more collaborative and consensus-driven development process.

4. Reducing Development Costs

One of the most valuable qualities of prototypes is their ability to catch design flaws and usability issues early. By identifying and resolving these problems before full-scale development begins, teams can avoid costly changes later in the process. This proactive approach reduces the risk of expensive rework and helps maintain project timelines and budgets.

5. Enabling Rapid Iteration

Prototypes are inherently flexible, allowing for quick changes and adjustments based on feedback, testing, and analysis. This quality is vital for refining the design to meet user needs and achieve project goals. The ability to iterate rapidly ensures that the design evolves in response to real user insights, making it more effective and aligned with the intended user experience.

Types of Prototypes

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

Paper Prototypes

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

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

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

A low visual/low functional paper prototype.

Advantages of Paper Prototypes

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

Disadvantages

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

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

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

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

Digital Prototyping

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

There are two types of digital prototypes:

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

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

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

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

Advantages of Digital Prototyping

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

Disadvantages

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

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

Here are some helpful resources for creating digital prototypes:

• A 10-Minute Rapid Prototyping Lesson by Marek Bowers

HTML & JavaScript Prototyping

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

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

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

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

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

Advantages

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

Disadvantages

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

Here are some helpful resources on HTML prototyping:

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

The Prototyping Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paper => Lo-fi Digital => Code

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

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

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

Low fidelity prototype created during a Yelp redesign exercise. 

High fidelity prototype created during a Yelp redesign exercise.

HTML Prototyping => Code

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

React, the popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces, has revolutionized web development. Most of you are no stranger to its power and flexibility. But, how can you elevate your React game and ensure your projects are easy to maintain and scale? That’s where this article with React best practices comes into play.

In this guide, we’ll delve into ten essential React best practices to help you create efficient, maintainable, and error-free code. From mastering React components to employing the latest techniques, we’ll equip you with the knowledge you need to excel in building new features for your React projects.

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10 React Best Practices

Master Component Nesting and the Parent-Child Relationships

The first React best practice that we recommend implementing is practicing nesting and parent-child relationship.

If you’ve been building React applications for a while, you’re no stranger to component nesting. But have you ever explored just how deep this rabbit hole goes? Understanding the intricate parent-child relationships within React components is essential.

Parent components, also known as container components, are at the top of the component hierarchy in React. They act as the guardians of state and serve as the glue that binds together smaller components called child components. While child components handle specific functionalities or UI elements, parent components manage the overall structure and data flow of your application.

Example of Parent and Child Components in React

To better understand parent-child relationships, let’s look at a simple example involving a parent component called ParentComponent and a child component called ChildComponent.

ParentComponent.jsx

import React, { useState } from 'react';
import ChildComponent from './ChildComponent';

const ParentComponent = () => {
  const [message, setMessage] = useState('Hello from Parent!');

  const handleChildClick = () => {
    setMessage('Child component clicked!');
  };

  return (
    <div>
      <h1>{message}</h1>
      {/* Passing handleChildClick as a prop to ChildComponent */}
      <ChildComponent onButtonClick={handleChildClick} />
    </div>
  );
};

export default ParentComponent;

This is the parent or container component. It holds the state (message) and a function (handleChildClick) that updates this state. The state is used to manage the data that might be passed down to the child components or used within the parent component itself.

ChildComponent.jsx

import React from 'react';

const ChildComponent = ({ onButtonClick }) => {
  return (
    <div>
      <button onClick={onButtonClick}>Click Me</button>
    </div>
  );
};

export default ChildComponent;

This is the child component. It receives a function (onButtonClick) as a prop from the parent component. When the button in the ChildComponent is clicked, it calls this function, which in turn updates the state in the ParentComponent.

By diving deep into this structure, you gain the power to design applications that are not just functional but elegant in their architecture.

Optimize Re-Renders

In React, optimizing re-renders is crucial for enhancing performance. Two key components, PureComponent and React.memo, aid in this optimization process by preventing unnecessary re-renders.

Both PureComponent and React.memo are powerful tools for optimizing re-renders in React applications. While they differ in their implementation—PureComponent for class components and React.memo for functional components—they both aim to prevent unnecessary re-renders by efficiently comparing props and state. Understanding their nuances and considering the nature of your data can significantly contribute to a smoother and more performant React application.

Using PureComponent

PureComponent is a class component that comes with a built-in shouldComponentUpdate method, automatically performing a shallow comparison of props and state before deciding to re-render. If there’s no change detected in the props or state, it prevents the component from re-rendering, thus optimizing performance.

However, it’s important to note that PureComponent performs a shallow comparison, so for deeply nested data structures or complex objects, it might not efficiently detect changes, potentially leading to unexpected re-renders.

Using React.memo

React.memo is a higher-order component (HOC) in functional components, offering similar optimization capabilities. It works by memoizing the rendered output of a component based on its props. When the component is re-rendered, React.memo compares the previous and new props. If they remain the same, it avoids re-rendering, optimizing performance.

Like PureComponent, React.memo also uses a shallow comparison, so caution is necessary when dealing with deeply nested objects or complex data structures to ensure accurate optimization.

Master Prop Drilling and Context API

Prop drilling is a common technique in React. But to truly master it, you need to explore the nuances. Learn how to pass data efficiently between deeply nested components without making your code unwieldy. And when it comes to state management, don’t stop at basic state or prop passing – take the leap into the world of Context API. Unlock its potential to streamline state management and make your codebase more elegant and maintainable.

Employ React Hooks

React hooks have changed the game when it comes to managing state and side effects in functional components. As an experienced software developer, you should embrace this modern approach.

useState

Use case: for managing component state

While class components have been the traditional home for managing state, functional components with hooks have proven to be more concise and readable. The useState hook is your gateway to efficient state management. It allows you to declare state variables and set their initial values, all within the function body. Gone are the days of constructor methods and this.setState() calls.

With useState, you not only simplify your code but also gain a deeper understanding of the state’s lifecycle, ensuring that your components behave predictably. Whether you’re working on a small project or a large-scale application, the useState hook becomes your go-to tool for handling component state.

useEffect

Use case: for handling side effects, like data fetching and DOM manipulation

Managing side effects, such as data fetching and DOM manipulation, is a fundamental part of many React applications. The useEffect hook provides an elegant solution to this common challenge. It allows you to perform these actions within your functional components without compromising on readability or maintainability.

Dive into the power of useEffect by understanding its lifecycle and dependencies. With it, you can orchestrate a symphony of asynchronous requests and fine-tuned updates, ensuring that your application responds seamlessly to user interactions. As an experienced developer, your ability to wield useEffect effectively is your ticket to crafting smooth, responsive user experiences.

useContext and useReducer

Use case: to simplify complex state management

For complex state management, React hooks like useContext and useReducer offer a lifeline. These hooks simplify the management of shared state and the handling of intricate application logic.

useContext empowers you to access context values from a higher-level component without the need for prop drilling. This results in cleaner, more maintainable code. As an experienced developer, you can harness the full potential of useContext to create a more intuitive and collaborative development process.

When faced with complex state transitions, useReducer comes to the rescue. It streamlines state updates and provides a structured approach to managing more intricate application logic. By implementing useReducer, you enhance your ability to manage complex state flows and improve the predictability and reliability of your applications.

Maintain a Consistent Code Style

In the world of React development, code consistency stands as a guiding principle that experienced developers understand is not to be taken lightly. Whether you’re working on a solo project or collaborating within a team, adhering to a uniform code style is more than just a best practice – it’s a cornerstone of efficient collaboration and enhanced code readability.

Why is Code Consistency Important in React?

Imagine you’re part of a team working on a complex React project. In this scenario, code consistency acts as the unifying force that keeps everyone on the same page. It ensures that no matter who is working on which part of the codebase, the overall structure and formatting remain consistent.

As your React project grows, consistent coding standards facilitate easier maintenance and debugging. It means you can confidently navigate through the codebase, swiftly locate issues, and make changes without constantly adjusting to different coding styles.

Embrace Automation with Prettier and ESLint

For the experienced developer, two indispensable tools come to the forefront: Prettier and ESLint. These tools automate the process of code formatting and style checking, respectively. Prettier, with its ability to automatically format your code, eliminates the need for debates on code formatting during code reviews. It’s your virtual code stylist, ensuring that your code looks clean and polished.

ESLint, on the other hand, is your code quality guardian. It enforces coding standards, identifies potential issues, and helps maintain a consistent coding style. These tools work in harmony to not only enhance your code quality but also make the entire development process more streamlined.

Establish Coding Standards for Consistency

In a team environment, the establishment and enforcement of coding standards are paramount. Experienced developers recognize that creating and adhering to a set of coding guidelines is a fundamental aspect of maintaining consistency throughout the project.

These standards encompass everything from naming conventions for component names and indentation to how to handle comments and spacing. It’s a collective agreement that ensures all team members are speaking the same coding language.

Keep a Clear Folder Structure

Complexity often goes hand in hand with the number of components involved. As a seasoned developer, you understand that managing numerous components within your project requires a systematic approach. The cornerstone of this approach lies in a well-structured component hierarchy, which greatly enhances the manageability of your codebase.

Clear Folder Structure for Improved Organization

The first step in achieving a well-organized React project is to define a clear folder structure. Picture your project as a library, and these folders as neatly arranged bookshelves. Each folder serves as a dedicated space for specific categories of components, ensuring that you can swiftly locate and keep clean code.

Efficient Grouping of Related Components

Within these folders, the grouping of related components is where the magic happens. By categorizing your components logically, you create an easily navigable code landscape. This approach allows you to access, modify, and extend different parts of your React project with ease, even when dealing with a multitude of React components. This systematic grouping not only simplifies your component management but also provides a clear framework for your development team, promoting effective collaboration.

Component Management for Large-Scale Applications

Now, consider the impact of this organization, especially in the context of large-scale applications. With a well-structured component hierarchy and a clear folder structure, you can seamlessly handle the complexities of expansive projects. The ability to maintain, troubleshoot, and scale your application becomes not just achievable but straightforward.

For the experienced developer, the practice of organizing components isn’t a mere technicality; it’s a strategic move. It’s a commitment to efficient code management and collaboration within your team. By maintaining an organized component hierarchy and implementing a systematic folder structure, you’re ensuring that your complex React projects are not just functional but also elegantly structured and highly maintainable.

Agree on Naming Conventions

Consistency in naming conventions is more than just a formality in React development – it’s the keystone of code readability and collaboration. To ensure your React projects are easy to understand and work on, follow the naming guidelines listed below.

Explore Common Naming Conventions

Start by exploring the most prevalent naming conventions used in the React community. Commonly, you’ll encounter conventions for components, variables, and files. Understanding these conventions provides a foundation for creating code that others can easily comprehend.

Learn When and How to Use Different Casing Styles

Naming conventions often involve casing styles, including camelCase, PascalCase, and kebab-case. Each of these styles has a distinct purpose and use case. Dive into when and how to employ each style:

• camelCase: Typically used for variable and function names. It starts with a lowercase letter and uses uppercase for subsequent words (e.g., myVariableName).
• PascalCase: Commonly used for naming React components and classes. It starts with an uppercase letter and capitalizes the first letter of each subsequent word (e.g., MyComponent).
• kebab-case: Frequently used for file and directory names. It employs hyphens to separate words (e.g., my-component.js).

Prioritize Self-Explanatory Names for Clarity

While adhering to conventions is essential, it’s equally crucial to prioritize names that convey the purpose and function of the component, variable, or file. The goal is to make your code as self-explanatory as possible, reducing the need for extensive comments or documentation.

Optimize Component Loading

In the dynamic realm of React development, performance optimization is key, and lazy loading emerges as a valuable technique to achieve just that. Lazy loading, a concept that experienced developers embrace, involves deferring the loading of components until they’re actually needed. This approach holds a myriad of benefits for React applications, from improved initial load times to efficient resource allocation.

Experienced React developers recognize that one of the primary advantages of lazy loading is its ability to optimize initial load times. By loading only the most critical components required for the initial view, your application can start faster and provide users with a more responsive experience. This strategic resource allocation ensures that your application conserves bandwidth and minimizes the initial page load, particularly beneficial for applications with extensive component hierarchies.

To implement lazy loading in your React applications, the combination of React’s Suspense and React.lazy() proves to be a powerful duo. By suspending the rendering of specific components until they’re actually needed, you can significantly enhance the efficiency of your application, reducing the load on the client-side and improving the overall user experience. As a seasoned developer, incorporating lazy loading into your React projects is a step toward building applications that are not just functional but exceptionally responsive and resource-efficient, catering to the demands of modern web development.

Make Use of Functional Components

Functional components have gained prominence in React development. They have numerous advantages over class components.

Class components, which were the conventional way of building React applications, can become verbose and harder to follow as a project grows. They often require more boilerplate code, making it challenging to quickly grasp the core functionality of a component.

In contrast, functional components with hooks offer a cleaner and more straightforward approach. Learn when and how to refactor class components into functional components. Also, choose the right component type based on your project requirements.

Set up Error Boundaries

Handling errors gracefully is essential for creating robust applications. Experienced frontend developers understand that while preventing errors is ideal, preparing for them is equally essential. This preparation involves exploring the concept of error boundaries in React, a practice that not only safeguards your application from unexpected crashes but also ensures a seamless user experience.

To begin, delving into the realm of error boundaries is crucial. It involves understanding the architecture of React components that can gracefully intercept errors and prevent them from affecting the entire application. This level of control allows you to implement error boundaries strategically, enhancing your application’s stability.

Experienced developers recognize that this process involves wrapping specific components or sections of your application in error boundary components. By doing so, you gain the ability to capture and handle errors gracefully, preventing them from cascading throughout the entire application and potentially crashing it.

As you progress in your React development journey, implementing error boundaries in various components becomes second nature. These boundaries act as safety nets, ensuring that even if an error occurs, your application can continue to function and provide valuable feedback to users. Beyond safeguarding your application, well-implemented error boundaries offer valuable insights into the root causes of errors, enabling you to troubleshoot and fine-tune your code for even greater reliability. This approach extends to not only the React code itself but also to other crucial elements of your application, such as CSS and JavaScript, ensuring a comprehensive and robust solution.

What are other React tips?

Here’s a list of lesser-known React tips that can help improve your development workflow and code quality:

1. Use React Fragments for Cleaner JSX:
   • React Fragments (<React.Fragment> or the shorthand <>...</>) allow you to group multiple elements without adding extra nodes to the DOM. They are useful for rendering lists or components without unnecessary wrapper divs.
2. Use Memoization for Expensive Calculations:
   • React provides the React.memo() higher-order component and useMemo() hook for memoizing the results of expensive calculations. This can improve performance by preventing unnecessary re-renders of components.
3. Avoid Arrow Functions in JSX Props:
   • Avoid using arrow functions directly in JSX props, as this can create a new function instance on each render. Instead, define the function outside of the render method and pass it as a prop.
4. Use the React DevTools Extension:
   • Install the React DevTools browser extension for Chrome or Firefox. It provides a set of debugging tools specifically designed for React applications, allowing you to inspect component hierarchies, view props and state, and analyze performance.
5. Use Conditional Rendering with Null or Fragment:
   • Instead of using ternary operators for conditional rendering, you can use null or React Fragments to conditionally render components. This can result in cleaner and more readable code.
6. Optimize Component Re-renders with PureComponent:
   • Use React’s PureComponent class for components that only re-render when their props or state change. PureComponent performs a shallow comparison of props and state to determine if a re-render is necessary, potentially improving performance.
7. Avoid Using Index as Key in Lists:
   • Avoid using the array index as the key prop when rendering lists of components. Instead, use a unique identifier from your data, such as an ID or slug. Using the index as a key can lead to unexpected behavior when reordering or modifying the list.
8. Use React.forwardRef for Higher-Order Components:
   • When creating higher-order components that need to pass refs to their wrapped components, use the React.forwardRef() function. This allows the higher-order component to forward refs to the underlying DOM elements.
9. Leverage Context API for Global State Management:
   • Instead of using prop drilling to pass data down through multiple layers of components, consider using React’s Context API for global state management. Context allows you to share data across components without explicitly passing props.
10. Use React.memo() for Functional Components:
    • Similar to PureComponent for class components, React.memo() can be used to memoize functional components and prevent unnecessary re-renders. Wrap your functional components with React.memo() to optimize performance.

Build React Applications with our Best Practices

By deepening your understanding of React components, employing hooks, maintaining code consistency, and following best practices, you’ll be better equipped to tackle any React project with confidence. Combine these practices with a well-structured component hierarchy, naming conventions, lazy loading, functional components, and error boundaries, and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a React virtuoso.

Ready to build apps with React? Before you jump into development, create your app’s layout with UXPin Merge, a drag-and-drop UI builder that will help you design a responsive layout 10x faster. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post React Best Practices – A 10-Point Guide appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

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

Key takeaways:

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

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

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What is Interaction Design?

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

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

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

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

Interaction Design in HCI

Interaction design in HCI, which stands for Human-Computer Interaction, is designing the interactive elements of a product, such as buttons, menus, and other interface components, to ensure they are intuitive, user-friendly, and responsive to user actions, and facilitate good communication between the user and the system.

The goal of interaction design is to create an engaging user experience that facilitates seamless interaction with the technology. It encompasses understanding user needs, behaviors, and expectations to design interfaces that are not only functional but also enjoyable to use.

By focusing on how users interact with technology, interaction design in HCI aims to enhance usability, accessibility, and overall satisfaction.

Interaction Design vs UI Design

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

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

To summarize:

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

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

Interaction Design vs UX Design

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

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

Interaction Design Principles

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

Visibility

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

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

Feedback

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

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

Constraints

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

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

Mapping

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

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

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

Consistency

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

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

Affordance

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

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

Cognition

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

Cognition deals with several design psychology principles, including:

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

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

Interaction Design Checklist

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

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

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

Interaction Design Resources

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

UXPin–The Ultimate Interaction Design Tool

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

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

States

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

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

Interactions

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

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

Variables

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

Expressions

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

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

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

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

Designing an effective product page is essential for any eCommerce site or online store. It’s where customers make their purchasing decisions, so every element needs to be thoughtfully crafted to ensure a seamless user experience. A well-designed product page can significantly impact conversion rates, helping turn casual browsers into loyal buyers.

In this quick tutorial, we’ll guide you through the process of designing a compelling product page using UXPin’s built-in MUIv5 library components. With the power of UXPin and the versatility of MUIv5, you can create intuitive and visually appealing product pages that provide all the necessary information while maintaining a clean, user-friendly layout. Discover UXPin Merge.

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What is a Product Page?

A product page is a specific webpage on an eCommerce or company website dedicated to a single product. Its primary purpose is to provide detailed information about the product to help potential customers make an informed purchasing decision. Product pages are a crucial step in the online shopping customer journey, as they aim to convert visitors into buyers by highlighting the benefits and features of the product.

Key Elements of a Product Page

1. Product Title: Clearly states the name of the product, often including key attributes like brand, model, or size.
2. Product Images and Videos: High-quality images from various angles, sometimes accompanied by videos, to give a clear visual representation of the product.
3. Product Description: Detailed text that provides information about the product’s features, specifications, usage, benefits, and any other relevant details.
4. Pricing Information: Displays the price of the product, including any discounts, sales, or promotional offers.
5. Call to Action: A prominent button or link, such as “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now,” that encourages the customer to take the next step towards purchasing the product.
6. Customer Reviews and Ratings: User-generated reviews and ratings that provide social proof and help potential buyers understand others’ experiences with the product.
7. Availability and Stock Information: Indicates whether the product is in stock or if there are any shipping delays or limitations.
8. Additional Details: This may include information about shipping, returns, warranties, and customer support.
9. Related Products or Recommendations: Suggests other products that might be of interest to the customer based on the product they are viewing.

What is the Purpose of a Product Page?

The main goal of a product page is to provide all the necessary information a customer might need to decide whether or not to purchase the product.

It serves as a virtual salesperson, guiding the customer through the features, benefits, and purchasing process. Effective product pages are designed to be user-friendly, informative, and persuasive, aiming to convert site visitors into paying customers.

How to Design a Product Page in UXPin

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through the process of designing a product page using UXPin’s built-in MUIv5 library components. With these powerful design elements, you’ll be able to create a professional and conversion-focused product page in under 15 minutes.

Step 1: Start a New Project in UXPin

Begin by logging into your UXPin account and starting a new project. Once you’re in the editor, select a Page 1 and name it “Product Page.”

Step 2: Set Up Your Layout

To establish a strong visual hierarchy and ensure your product page is user-friendly, start by setting up a grid layout. You can easily do this by selecting the “Layout” tool from the top menu and choosing a grid that suits your design needs—typically, a 12-column grid is ideal for most eCommerce layouts.

Step 3: Add a Product Image Component

A high-quality product image is essential for any product page. To add an image component:

1. Go to the MUIv5 library in UXPin.
2. Drag and drop the ImageList component onto your canvas.
3. Adjust the size and placement to make the image a prominent feature of the page.

Make sure to use high-resolution images and include multiple angles or variations if available. You can customize the ImageList component to display a gallery of product images, allowing users to swipe through different views.

Step 4: Insert Product Details

Next, you’ll want to add the product title, description, and price. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Product Title: Drag a Typography component from the MUIv5 library. Set the variant to “h5” for a prominent headline, and type in your product name.
2. Product Description: Below the title, drag another Typography component and set the variant to “body1.” Here, you can provide a detailed description of the product, highlighting its features, benefits, and specifications.
3. Price: Finally, use another Typography component for the price. Set it to a slightly larger variant like “h6” to make it stand out. You can also use a different color to draw attention.

Step 5: Add a Call to Action

Your product page needs a clear and compelling call to action. For most e-commerce sites, this is the “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button. To add this:

1. Drag the Button component from the MUIv5 library onto the canvas.
2. Place it below the product details and adjust its size and position.
3. Set the button’s variant to “contained” for a solid, noticeable look. You can customize the color to match your brand’s theme.

Make sure your CTA is prominent and easy to find—this is key to driving conversions.

Step 6: Include Customer Reviews and Ratings

Customer reviews and ratings build trust and provide social proof. To add a review section:

1. Use the Grid component from MUIv5 to create a structured layout.
2. Inside the grid, use the Rating component for displaying stars and Typography components for review text.
3. You can also add an IconButton with a “thumbs up” icon to allow users to like reviews, enhancing engagement.

Step 7: Add Related Products or Recommendations

To encourage cross-selling, add a section for related products or recommendations:

1. Use a Card component from the MUIv5 library.
2. Add an image, title, and price to each card, mimicking your primary product layout but on a smaller scale.
3. Arrange these cards horizontally or in a grid layout below the main product information.

Step 8: Finalize and Preview

Once all components are in place, fine-tune the alignment, spacing, and visual hierarchy to ensure a cohesive and polished design. Use UXPin’s Preview Mode to test your design and make any necessary adjustments.

Check out UXPin’s example page to see how Preview mode works at UXPin.

Step 9: Share and Collaborate

After finalizing your product page design, share it with your team or stakeholders for feedback. UXPin allows for easy collaboration, so you can quickly iterate on the design based on their input.

Create Your Own Product Page Design in UXPin

And there you have it—a fully functional and visually appealing product page designed in under 15 minutes using MUI components. With these steps, you’ve created a user-friendly product page that not only looks great but is also optimized for conversions.

Give it a try and see how quickly you can design a product page that will impress your customers and drive sales. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post How to Design a Product Page – A Quick Tutorial appeared first on Studio by UXPin.