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.

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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.

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!

Improving Design System Governance with UXPin

UXPin Merge bridges the gap between design and code, creating a single source of truth, so designers and engineers always work with the same tools.

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.

UXPin is a code-based design editor syncing code components via Git or Storybook to allow product teams, UX designers, and developers to work with the same components—no need to update systems separately!

Lastly, because prototypes are code-based, product updates and design system changes are significantly quicker to engineer.

Ready to switch to the only design tool that fosters good design system governance? Discover UXPin Merge to get the most of your design system and keep all the design and code components up to date.

The post Design System Governance – Scale Your Design 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.

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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.

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.

Prompt engineering involves designing and refining prompts to elicit desired responses from artificial intelligence models. It entails crafting specific inputs to guide the AI’s output towards useful, relevant, and accurate results, aiming to maximize effectiveness and reliability.

With the development and widespread use of advanced language models like GPT-3 and GPT-4 from OpenAI, prompt engineering has become a critical skill. To be successful in it, It requires an understanding of both the AI’s capabilities and the nuances of natural language. Despite its challenges, effective prompt engineering can significantly enhance the performance and usefulness of AI systems.

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What is Prompt Engineering?

Prompt engineering is the art of crafting specific inputs, called “prompts,” to guide AI models to produce desired and useful outputs. Think of it as giving clear instructions to a very smart assistant so that it understands exactly what you need.

While the general idea of crafting inputs for desired outputs in computing has been around for much longer, the specific practice of prompt engineering tailored to large language models is only a few years old. The rapid advancement in AI technology has made this a critical area of focus for maximizing the utility and accuracy of AI-generated responses.

5 Components of Prompt Engineering

Here are key components of prompt engineering that come in handy when you as a designer write prompts. Use them as quality checks everytime you write a prompt. This may come in handy when using UXPin’s AI Component Creator, a feature that creates code-backed UI components for you. There are 5 key components of engineering prompts.

1. Clarity: Ensuring the prompt is clear and unambiguous so the AI understands the request accurately. Instead of requesting, “Design a car interface,” say, “Design a minimalistic electric car interface, focusing on sustainability aspects.”
2. Context: Providing sufficient context to help the AI generate relevant responses. Instead of writing, “Design a website,” say, “Design a modern, user-friendly e-commerce website for a fashion brand, featuring a clean layout, easy navigation, and vibrant colors.”
3. Specificity: Being specific about the information or format needed. First prompt: “Create a MedTech logo.” Refined prompt: “Create a minimalist logo for a MedTech startup, using blue and white colors and incorporating a geometric shape.”
4. Iterative Refinement: Continuously testing and refining prompts to improve results. Instead of saying, “Suggest some fonts,” say, “Suggest some modern, sans-serif fonts suitable for a tech company’s website.”
5. Constraints: Adding constraints or guidelines to narrow down the AI’s responses. Instead of saying, “Design a poster,” say, “Design a poster for a music festival, featuring vibrant colors, bold typography, and a central image of a guitar, but feel free to add other musical elements.”

What are the Challenges of Prompt Engineering in 2024?

1. Ambiguity in Language: Natural language is often ambiguous, and crafting prompts that remove this ambiguity can be difficult.
2. Model Limitations: AI models have limitations and biases, which can affect the quality of the response regardless of how well the prompt is designed.
3. Context Management: Ensuring the AI understands and maintains the context throughout the conversation or task can be challenging.
4. Unexpected Outputs: Even well-crafted prompts can sometimes produce unexpected or irrelevant responses.
5. Balancing Specificity and Flexibility: Creating prompts that are specific enough to get useful responses but flexible enough to handle a variety of inputs is a delicate balance.
6. Complexity of Requests: For more complex tasks, it can be challenging to break down the request into a prompt that the AI can handle effectively.
7. Evaluating Responses: Determining the quality and accuracy of AI responses can be subjective and context-dependent, making it difficult to measure the success of a prompt.

How Can Designers Write Prompts?

Andrej Karpathy, Former Director of AI at Tesla and a key figure in the AI community, is quoted saying, “The hottest programming language is English.” For prompt engineering, you don’t need much but inquisitiveness, imagination, and refinements. Let’s see how to write a good prompt as a designer.

Anthropomorphize your prompts

Another notable figure in the AI community, Gwern Branwen, has shared insights on what constitutes a good prompt in the context of prompt engineering. According to Gwern, a well-crafted prompt is essential for eliciting the best possible responses from AI models.

Gwern suggests that a good strategy is to make prompts more relatable by framing them in a human-like manner. This involves testing various prompts to see how the AI interprets them and adjusting accordingly to align with the intended output. For instance, if a prompt leads to an irrelevant or off-topic response, it may need rephrasing or additional context.

Start simple and refine your prompts

Gwern also emphasizes the importance of iteratively refining prompts. This involves experimenting with different wordings and structures to see which ones produce the desired output. For example, converting a problem into a dialogue format or breaking down a task into smaller steps can significantly improve the AI’s performance​​.

Break down complex tasks

When working with AI models, it’s beneficial to break down complex tasks into simpler, manageable subtasks. This approach is similar to how designers tackle intricate projects by dividing them into modular components.

Complex tasks can lead to higher error rates, so redefining them as a series of simpler steps can improve accuracy and efficiency. Each subtask’s output can serve as the input for the next, creating a smooth workflow that ensures better results from the AI.

This method not only simplifies the process but also helps in maintaining the quality and consistency of the final output.

Provide references and examples

According to Rachel Thomas, a leader in AI education, giving clear and structured prompts, along with examples, is crucial. This involves specifying the steps required for a task, using delimiters to demarcate sections of text, and providing examples to guide the AI in following a specific style or format. By doing so, prompt engineers can enhance the accuracy and relevance of AI-generated outputs​.

Ask ChatGPT to adopt a persona

Asking the AI model to adopt a persona is a powerful strategy in prompt engineering that enhances relevance and accuracy, making the AI’s responses more effective and aligned with user expectations.

Plus, when an AI model adopts a specific persona, it maintains a consistent tone and style throughout its responses. This is especially important for tasks requiring a particular voice or character, such as customer service interactions, educational content, or UX writing.

Ask ChatGPT if it missed anything

This tactic involves prompting the AI model to review its previous responses to identify any potential gaps or missing information. Essentially, it acts as a form of quality control, encouraging the model to self-check and ensure that all relevant aspects of a task or question have been addressed.

After generating initial design suggestions or critiques, a designer can prompt the model with, “Have you missed any important design principles or best practices in your previous feedback?” This can help catch any overlooked elements, ensuring that the feedback is thorough and complete.

This ensures that all critical aspects of a design are considered, leading to more robust and well-rounded design solutions.

Practice Prompt Engineering as a UX/UI Designer

By understanding and applying prompt engineering, designers can harness the power of AI to enhance their creativity, streamline their workflow, and produce high-quality, relevant designs more efficiently.

Quickly assemble fully functional prototypes with the help of AI, code-backed components, and templates. Move from design to production 10x faster. Try UXPin Merge for free.

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Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb has been around since 2004 and is still a highly relevant design framework for modern product development projects. The framework forces design teams to evaluate a product through seven facets of user experience to identify areas for improvement.

This article provides an overview of the UX Honeycomb and the circumstances where it’s most effective. We highly recommend checking out our design frameworks article for more UX models that solve problems and improve project delivery.

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What is the User Experience Honeycomb? 

The UX Honeycomb is a design framework developed by Peter Morville in 2004. The framework uses seven facets of UX to guide design teams in delivering a good customer experience. The UX Honeycomb is also a fantastic educational tool for educating junior designers about user-centered design and how to design products customers will love.

Who is Peter Morville, the author of UX Honeycomb?

Peter Morville is an information architect and user experience designer from Scottsville, Virginia, USA. His bestselling books include Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Intertwingled, Search Patterns, and Ambient Findability.

Peter has spoken on information architecture and user experience at conferences and workshops worldwide and consulted for many Fortune500 companies through his company Semantic Studios.

Peter Morville has won several awards, including from the University of Michigan, AIIP, Society for Technical Communication, and the National Cancer Institute, to name a few.

You can follow Peter’s blog Intertwingled where he shares his valuable knowledge and insights.

7 Facets of UX Honeycomb

Peter’s UX Honeycomb identifies seven facets of user experience designers must fulfill to deliver a product that successfully meets user needs. Let’s explore those seven facets in greater detail.

Useful

The useful component asks, “Is this product or feature valuable to users?” “Is there a want or need?” “Does your product solve a problem for users?”

If a product or feature isn’t useful, it has no purpose, and there’s no reason to build it in the first place. Whether something is useful comes from thorough user research and understanding end-users.

Usable

Usability is a significant part of user experience design. A product might be useful, but if it frustrates users, then it isn’t usable.

Designers must create intuitive user interfaces and information architecture to minimize any learning curve while making it easy to complete tasks or use features.

Prototyping and testing are crucial in identifying pain points and improving the user experience. Designers must also conduct UX audits to ensure new releases meet a project’s requirements while fulfilling user needs.

Desirable

Aesthetics and desirability make digital products enjoyable to use. Designers must consider layouts, visual design, interaction design, and other UI design elements that engage and excite users.

During usability testing and interviews, designers must carefully consider users’ feelings and emotions to determine a product’s desirability. The goal is to delight users with products and features that solve problems effortlessly.

Findable

Findable is about making content and features easy to find. Information architecture, search, and navigation are vital for making a product “findable.” Designers must prioritize navigation according to user needs and business goals. 

For example, when designing a mobile app, designers must decide which menu items live on the tab bar vs. behind a navigational drawer.

Findable also includes alerts and error messages. Designers must guide users to solve problems as quickly as possible–like helpful, actionable error messages for form fields.

Accessible

Designing accessible products is essential for modern product development. Designers and engineers must ensure everyone can navigate a site effectively and digest its content, regardless of physical or mental ability.

Accessibility extends beyond these physical and mental limitations to situational and environmental constraints. For example, a voice user interface (VUI) helps blind users use an application, but it’s also essential for someone driving a vehicle.

Designers must consider who will use their products and what situational and environmental challenges they might encounter. It’s also imperative to think about people with disabilities and how to design comparable experiences for assistive technologies.

Credible

Trust and credibility are essential for acquiring and retaining customers. Users expect a consistent product they can rely on to live up to expectations and doesn’t deceive. 

For example, how easy is it for someone to downgrade or cancel a paid service? Making these tasks easy creates trust, increasing the likelihood of someone returning as a paying customer. A difficult experience frustrates people, damaging the product and brand’s credibility.

Designers must also ensure CTAs and instructions do what they say. Using ambiguous language or tricking users into completing a task is a quick strategy for losing customers!

Valuable

Users must want or need to use your product. A valuable product solves problems and delivers a return on investment. The return doesn’t have to be monetary; it could be time-saving, help achieve something the user can’t do otherwise, a mindless distraction while waiting in a queue, or even bring joy.

For example, food delivery apps became extremely valuable to people in many countries during lockdowns. These products kept many restaurants open while providing customers with meals.

Understanding users and delivering services that satisfy their wants and needs makes a product valuable.

How to Use the UX Honeycomb

The UX Honeycomb is an excellent framework for evaluation. It’s most effective for existing products rather than designing from scratch. Here are some scenarios where design teams might use the UX Honeycomb framework:

• Erasing design debt: Some design debt is easy to fix, but other usability issues require a systematic approach to identify the core issue(s). The UX Honeycomb lets designers look at problems from multiple angles to pinpoint the root cause.
• UX checklist: The UX Honeycomb provides designers with a foundational user experience checklist during UX audits and other design evaluations.
• Educational tool: Designers can use the UX Honeycomb as a framework for educating junior designers, clients, stakeholders, and cross-functional teams about user experience and how usability issues impact users.
• Redesigns: Designers can use the UX Honeycomb to identify user experience flaws in an existing product before a redesign. 

What is an Example of Using UX Honeycomb?

Let’s see how user experience designers can use UX Honeycomb to build a banking app for mobile designers.

1. Useful

• Objective: Ensure the app meets users’ needs effectively.
• Implementation: Conduct user research to identify the most needed features such as balance checking, money transfer, bill payments, and account alerts.
• Outcome: Features prioritized based on user needs ensure the app is relevant and valuable.

2. Usable

• Objective: Make the app easy and efficient to use.
• Implementation: Design intuitive navigation, simple workflows, and clear instructions. Conduct usability testing to identify and fix issues.
• Outcome: Users can complete tasks quickly and with minimal effort, reducing frustration and improving satisfaction.

3. Desirable

• Objective: Create an aesthetically pleasing and emotionally engaging experience.
• Implementation: Use appealing visuals, engaging animations, and a consistent design language that reflects the brand’s identity.
• Outcome: The app not only functions well but also delights users, encouraging continued use and brand loyalty.

4. Findable

• Objective: Ensure users can easily find the information and features they need.
• Implementation: Implement a logical information architecture and effective search functionality. Use clear labels and a well-organized menu.
• Outcome: Users can quickly locate features like transaction history, settings, or customer support, enhancing the overall user experience.

5. Accessible

• Objective: Make the app usable by as many people as possible, including those with disabilities.
• Implementation: Follow accessibility guidelines such as WCAG. Implement features like screen reader support, high-contrast modes, and adjustable text sizes.
• Outcome: The app is inclusive, allowing users with diverse abilities to interact with it effectively.

6. Credible

• Objective: Build trust and reliability in the app’s functionality and security.
• Implementation: Display clear privacy policies, use secure authentication methods, and provide transparent customer support options.
• Outcome: Users feel confident that their personal and financial information is safe, which is crucial for a banking app.

7. Valuable

• Objective: Ensure the app delivers value to both the business and the users.
• Implementation: Align app features with business goals such as increasing user engagement and reducing operational costs. Continuously gather user feedback and analytics to improve the app.
• Outcome: The app helps users manage their finances effectively while achieving business objectives like customer retention and satisfaction.

Practical Steps

1. User Research: Conduct surveys, interviews, and focus groups to understand user needs and preferences.
2. Usability Testing: Perform tests with real users to identify usability issues and gather feedback.
3. Design and Prototyping: Create wireframes and prototypes, focusing on usability and aesthetics.
4. Accessibility Testing: Use tools and guidelines to ensure the app is accessible to all users.
5. Iterative Improvements: Continuously gather user feedback and update the app to enhance its usefulness, usability, and desirability.

By applying the UX Honeycomb framework throughout the design process, the resulting mobile banking app can provide a comprehensive, user-centered experience that addresses all aspects of user satisfaction and engagement.

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The post UX Honeycomb – 7-Factor Design Framework for Great User Experience appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

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

It was introduced by the British Council so that designers could follow a standardized design process and make that process super clear, with visual representation that outlines distinct phases: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver.

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What is the Double Diamond?

The Double Diamond model is a framework for innovation and design developed by the British Design Council in 2005. The Design Council wanted a simple design process for delivering projects, no matter the methods and tools used.

The design framework features two diamonds:

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

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

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

Why Are There Diamonds in this Process?

The Double Diamond design model was developed as a response to the need for a standardized design process description that could be universally applied across various design disciplines. Before its introduction, there was a lack of a cohesive framework that could describe the entire design process from start to finish, which led to inconsistencies and inefficiencies in design practices.

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

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

Diamond One – Discovering and Defining the Problem

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

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

In phase two, designers use discovery phase research to define the problem and how it impacts users. Design teams may iterate over phases one and two a few times until they get to the core issue. Next, they synthetize all the insights together.

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

Diamond Two – Developing and Delivering the Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who follows Double Diamond Design Framework?

The Double Diamond design framework is widely adopted by various organizations and professionals across different industries.

1. IDEO: As a pioneer in design thinking, IDEO incorporates the Double Diamond framework to structure its innovation processes. Tim Brown, co-chair at IDEO, has often highlighted the framework’s value in understanding problems before jumping to solutions​.
2. Design Council: The British Design Council, which developed the Double Diamond model, extensively uses and promotes this framework as a standard for best practices in design​.
3. Google: Google’s design sprints and product development processes often reflect the principles of the Double Diamond, focusing on deep problem understanding and iterative solution development.
4. Microsoft: Microsoft integrates the Double Diamond framework in its user experience and product design processes, particularly in teams focused on user-centered design and innovation.
5. University Design Programs: Many university programs, such as those at Stanford’s d.school and the Royal College of Art, teach the Double Diamond framework as part of their design thinking and innovation curricula. It provides students with a structured approach to tackling complex design challenges.
6. Charities and NGOs: Organizations like the Red Cross and UNICEF use the Double Diamond framework to design and implement programs that effectively address the needs of the communities they serve, ensuring a deep understanding of problems.

4 Phases of the Double Diamond Design Process

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

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

Discover

Objective: To understand the problem space thoroughly by gathering insights and exploring the broader context of the design challenge.

• Activities: This phase involves extensive research, both qualitative and quantitative. Techniques include desk research, field studies, user interviews, focus groups, and observations. The goal is to gather as much relevant information as possible about the problem, the users, and the context in which the problem exists​.
• Outcome: A deep understanding of the problem space, including user needs, pain points, and opportunities for innovation. This phase aims to challenge assumptions and uncover insights that will inform the next phase​.

Define

Objective: To synthesize the insights gathered during the Discover phase into a clear and actionable problem statement.

• Activities: In this phase, designers analyze and organize the data collected. Techniques such as affinity diagrams, root-cause analysis, and the “5 Whys” method are used to identify the core issues and refine the problem definition. Design synthesis helps in distilling complex information into clear insights​.
• Outcome: A well-defined problem statement or design brief that provides a focused direction for developing solutions. This phase sets the stage for ideation and prototyping by clearly articulating what needs to be addressed​.

Develop

Objective: To ideate and prototype multiple potential solutions to the defined problem.

• Activities: This phase involves brainstorming, sketching, and creating prototypes. Tools like personas, wireframes, and Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) are used to visualize and test ideas. The development phase encourages divergent thinking, allowing for the exploration of various solutions and approaches​.
• Outcome: A range of prototypes or preliminary solutions that can be tested and iterated upon. The goal is to explore different ideas and refine them through feedback and testing, ensuring that the solutions are viable and effective​.

Deliver

Objective: To finalize and implement the best solution, and to evaluate its impact.

• Activities: In this phase, the most promising prototypes are refined and developed into final products or solutions. This involves extensive testing, validation, and iteration based on user feedback. Surveys, usability testing, and pilot programs are common methods used to gather final insights before launch.
• Outcome: A polished, user-validated product or solution that addresses the initial problem effectively. The Deliver phase also includes post-launch evaluation and gathering feedback to inform future improvements and iterations​.

How to use Double Diamond Design Process

Here’s a practical example of using a double diamon design process in your workflow.

Phase 1: Discover

1. User Research: Conduct interviews and surveys with target users.
2. Market Research: Study competitors and industry trends.
3. Stakeholder Interviews: Gather insights from stakeholders.
4. Empathy Mapping: Create empathy maps to understand user emotions and motivations.

Phase 2: Define

1. Synthesize Data: Use affinity diagrams to identify patterns.
2. Problem Statement: Develop a clear and concise problem statement.
3. User Journey Mapping: Map user journeys to pinpoint pain points.
4. Design Brief: Draft a brief outlining project goals and constraints.

Phase 3: Develop

1. Ideation: Brainstorm solutions through collaborative workshops.
2. Prototyping: Create wireframes and sketches.
3. User Testing: Test prototypes with real users.
4. Iteration: Refine designs based on feedback.

Phase 4: Deliver

1. High-Fidelity Prototypes: Finalize design details in high-fidelity mockups.
2. Development: Build the site with close collaboration between designers and developers.
3. Quality Assurance: Conduct extensive testing.
4. Launch and Monitor: Launch the site and continuously monitor performance for further improvements.

By following the double diamond design process, you ensure a thorough and user-centered approach to designing a new site, maximizing the chances of its success by deeply understanding user needs, exploring and refining solutions, and effectively implementing and launching the final product.

Try End-to-End UX Design With UXPin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build prototypes with UI components that are backed with code and never let pixels derail your UX design process ever again. Then, copy production-ready code off your UI design. Meet tight deadlines and release quality products. Discover UXPin Merge.

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What is UX Design?

UX design is a digital product design methodology to solve a human problem. “UX” stands for user experience. This human-centered design approach ensures design teams make decisions based on user feedback rather than assumptions.

Empathy is at the core of this human-centered approach. UX designers must understand the user problems, as well as what target users want to achieve with a digital product and the pain points they might encounter along the way.

What is a UX Design Process?

A UX design process is an iterative, step-by-step methodology UX design teams use to complete projects. While specific methods and steps can vary between projects and organizations, a typical UX design process often includes applying various research methods, defining project scope, using prototyping tools to create a solution and iterate on it until UX teams perfect it for real world scenarios.

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

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

A UX design process is derivative from a design thinking process. As in design thinking process, UX designers spend time empathizing with the user, learning about the business, context, and defining problem scope.

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

Why is a UX Design Process Important?

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

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

What Are the 7 Steps of UX Design Process?

1. Define project and scope
2. Perform UX research
3. Create a rough draft of a solution
4. Design mockups and prototypes
5. Arrange design handoff
6. Launch the product

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

Step 1: Define project & scope

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

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

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

Step 2: Perform UX Research

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

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

Step 3: Create a rough draft of a solution

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

Some of these low-fidelity techniques include:

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

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

Step 4: Design high-fidelity mockups and prototypes

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

Step 5: Conduct usability testing

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

• Validate ideas
• Identify usability issues
• Test accessibility

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

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

Step 6: Arrange Design Handoff

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

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

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

Step 7: Launch your Product

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

Best Practices for a Great UX Design Process

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

Apply User-Centric Thinking

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

Practice Empathy

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

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

Build a Design System

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

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

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

Communicate and Collaborate with Devs

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

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

Enhancing the UX Design Process With UXPin

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

Fully Interactive Prototypes

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

Quality User Testing

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

Insightful Stakeholder Feedback

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

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

Speed up your UX design process

Instead of designing from scratch, use drag and drop components to build fully functioning prototypes that look and work like the final product. Leverage ready layouts, patterns, and AI in your workflow. Discover UXPin Merge.

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

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

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

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What is Mobile-First Approach?

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

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

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

Mobile-first design is also a response to the realities of modern user behavior and technological advancements, such as increasing mobile usage, future-proofing the design, and more. By prioritizing mobile, designers can ensure a more effective and efficient design process that meets the needs of the majority of users.

Who uses Mobile-First Design?

Mobile-first design has been adopted by numerous organizations across various industries. Here are some notable examples and case studies of companies that successfully implemented mobile-first design.

1. Google

• Context: As a leading technology company, Google recognized the shift toward mobile usage early on.
• Implementation: Google began encouraging a mobile-first approach through initiatives like AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and mobile-first indexing.
• Outcome: Websites adopting Google’s mobile-first guidelines generally experienced improved mobile performance and search rankings. Google’s emphasis on mobile-friendly designs helped shape industry standards and practices .

2. Dropbox

• Context: Dropbox transitioned from a desktop-centric service to a mobile-friendly platform to meet user demands for accessibility on-the-go.
• Implementation: They adopted a mobile-first approach in redesigning their app, focusing on a simplified, intuitive interface for mobile users first and then scaling up for desktop users.
• Outcome: The redesign led to a more consistent user experience across devices and contributed to increased mobile engagement and user satisfaction .

3. BBC

• Context: The BBC needed to reach a global audience on various devices, particularly mobile phones, given the increasing consumption of news on the go.
• Implementation: They adopted a mobile-first strategy for their website and apps, ensuring content was accessible and optimized for mobile devices.
• Outcome: The BBC saw a significant improvement in mobile traffic and user engagement. Their responsive design approach also made it easier to manage content across multiple platforms .

4. Flipkart

• Context: Flipkart, a major e-commerce company in India, recognized the growing trend of mobile commerce in the region.
• Implementation: They adopted a mobile-first approach to design their app and website, focusing on fast load times, simplified navigation, and a user-friendly interface.
• Outcome: This approach contributed to a surge in mobile transactions, with Flipkart reporting that a large majority of their sales came from mobile devices .

5. Airbnb

• Context: Airbnb aimed to create a seamless experience for travelers and hosts who increasingly relied on mobile devices.
• Implementation: They redesigned their platform with a mobile-first mindset, prioritizing mobile usability and a responsive design that adapted to various screen sizes.
• Outcome: The mobile-first design contributed to higher user satisfaction, increased mobile bookings, and a more consistent user experience across devices .

6. Spotify

• Context: Spotify needed a mobile-friendly design to cater to users who accessed music primarily through mobile devices.
• Implementation: Spotify embraced mobile-first design principles to ensure a seamless, intuitive user interface on mobile devices before adapting it for desktop users.
• Outcome: This approach enhanced user engagement and satisfaction, with the majority of Spotify’s user base accessing the service via mobile devices .

Mobile-First means Content-First

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

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

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

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

What is mobile-first design framework?

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

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

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

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

Source: Maadmob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Create Mobile-First Design

We prepared for you a tutorial that will explain how to create a mobile-first design. Our mobile-first design tutorial has four steps.

• Step 1: Set your content priorities.
• Step 2: Design smartphone view.
• Step 3: Work on tablet view.
• Step 4: Create desktop view.

Step 1: Set your content priorities

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

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

1. The newest model bike

2. The best-selling bike

3. “Find your perfect ride” CTA

4. Company name and hero image

5. Navigation

6. Search

7. The second-best-selling bike

8. Gift certificates

9. A testimonial

10. The latest blog post

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

Step 2: Design smartphone view

How much do users need?

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

Step 3: Work on tablet view

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

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

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

Step 4: Create desktop view

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

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

Design device-appropriate layouts yourself

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

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

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

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

In the high-tech digital UX design world, pen and paper can still be the preferred choices for fast low-fidelity prototyping. Contrary to assumptions, UX teams spend a lot of time away from the computer, writing on sticky notes, whiteboards, notepads, and adding annotations to paper prototypes.

The more planning and preparation designers can do before sitting down at the computer, the quicker they can design wireframes, mockups, and prototypes. Paper prototyping is a crucial part of the early UX design thinking process because it fosters collaboration, allowing designers to explore lots of ideas at a minimal cost.

With UXPin, design and development teams can jump straight from paper prototypes to high-fidelity prototyping, significantly accelerating the design process. Build consistent, high-quality digital experiences. Sign up for a free trial and explore UXPin’s prototyping features today!

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

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What is Paper Prototyping?

Paper prototyping is the process of developing ideas and designing user flows using hand-sketched “screens” that represent a digital product. Paper prototypes test on a high-level user experience rather than interaction design.

Paper prototypes are low-fidelity because they don’t have any functionality. For this reason, paper prototypes designers rarely share paper prototypes outside of the department.

The primary goal of paper prototyping is to map our information architecture and visualize user flows.

Design teams often lay paper screens on a desk or flow and imagine how real users would navigate to reach an end goal. The designs are rudimentary and usually sketched in black and white. Content is limited, with only headlines and call to action links displaying any legible text.

Sometimes, teams will build a mock iPhone or Android device using a piece of cardboard to simulate swipes, scrolls, and other basic functionality. These mock devices also allow designers to see how their designs might look within the confines of a mobile phone—especially useful if you’re designing a mobile app.

While the main benefit of paper prototyping is speed, some designers use tools like UI Stencils to design accurate, aesthetically pleasing screen layouts—vital if you plan to present paper prototypes to stakeholders or testing participants.

UXPin’s journey started with a similar paper prototyping product called Web Kit. A paper pad paired with a design tool that automatically turns paper prototypes into wireframes. UXPin has evolved into an end-to-end prototyping solution, allowing you to create prototypes that are production-ready from the start. Try UXPin for free.

Paper Prototyping Digitally

With tools like reMarkable and Apple Pencil, teams can collaborate remotely while enjoying the speed and versatility of the physical paper experience.

Using digital sketch tools can accelerate the paper prototyping process. Designers can make changes faster (without needing to redraw a screen), attach detailed notes, and upload finished prototypes instantly to design tools like UXPin to build high-fidelity prototypes or go with wireframing.

Paper prototyping digitally also reduces paper and plastic waste, which is better for the environment :)

Advantages and Disadvantages of Paper Prototyping

Aside from speed and flexibility, there are several advantages and disadvantages to paper prototyping. 

Here are some of the pros and cons of paper prototyping from our free eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Prototyping.

Advantages:

• Rapid iteration — It’s easier to discard a paper design that took 5 minutes vs. a digital mockup that you spent more than an hour perfecting. 
• Low cost — Paper is cheap, and even additional tools and kits won’t break the bank. 
• Increased creativity — The freedom of pencil and paper fosters experimentation and new ideas. Design tools have their place in the design process but can stifle creativity in the early design stages.
• Team-building — Paper prototyping is a rare opportunity where teams get together in a creative environment. Working with pen and paper brings out child-like energy, which can help form bonds and strengthen coworker relationships. 
• Minimal learning curve — Everyone can sketch ideas, making paper prototyping a great way to involve other departments like marketing, development, and stakeholders.
• Documentation — Paper prototypes serve as excellent documentation. Designers can make notes and outline ideas to reference throughout the project. They’re excellent UX artifacts.

Disadvantages:

• No user reactions — With no user feedback, it’s difficult to know whether or not your ideas will work. Even if you test your paper prototypes with participants, the feedback will be limited.
• Inaccurate feedback — Outside of UX teams, paper prototypes might be challenging to interpret, limiting any accurate or meaningful feedback. 
• Potentially unnecessary — With rapid prototyping tools like UXPin, paper prototyping might add additional, unnecessary steps to the design process. UXPin comes with pre-made design systems, so designers can quickly drag-and-drop high-fidelity elements to design and edit working prototypes quickly.

Sign up for a 14-day trial and see how quickly you can turn paper design concepts into high-fidelity prototypes that function like the final product using UXPin. 

When to Paper Prototype

Jake Knapp of Google says that “paper prototyping is a waste of time“—but admits that paper prototyping is useful for early-stage conceptualizing.

Once you move from paper to digital, there’s no reason to return. Some designers might return to paper prototyping for new features or a product redesign. But even then, returning to paper prototyping might be unnecessary.

That said, paper prototyping is perfect for early-stage conceptualizing. Its speed, ease, and simplicity make it accessible to all teams (including non-designers) while fostering experimentation and creativity—something you can’t achieve with a digital canvas.

Paper prototypes are ideal for:

• Brainstorming meetings and sessions
• Basic internal user testing early on

How to Paper Prototype

Paper prototyping is the fun part of product design. It’s an opportunity for team members to brainstorm and sketch ideas. 

Don’t worry about how beautiful your sketches look. Even the best UX designers aren’t brilliant sketch artists! The goal is to visualize your ideas and get the creative juices flowing.

Creating a paper prototype involves three main steps:

1. Prepare Materials

Gather materials like paper, pens, markers, sticky notes, and scissors. You may also use a whiteboard or large sheets of paper to sketch user interfaces.

2. Sketch Interfaces

Draw basic screens, user interfaces, and key components of the design on separate pieces of paper. Represent user flows by arranging these sketches in sequence.

3. Simulate Interaction

Lay out the sketches in the order of user interaction. Simulate the user experience by manually switching between sketches based on user actions, gathering feedback to refine the design.

For a detailed guide, check out UXPin’s article on prototyping.

6 Tips to Building Paper Prototypes

1. Use printer paper and cheap pencils/pens. Ruled or line pads often stifle creativity as designers get side-tracked drawing between the lines rather than developing lots of ideas.
2. Start with a warm-up! Sometimes it takes a few sketches to loosen up and get into the flow. Crazy eights is a fantastic paper prototyping method to design many versions of the same screen fast. After a couple of crazy eights rounds, you’ll have many ideas to expand on.
3. Prototype mobile-first or progressive enhancement. Start with the smallest screen and adjust the layout as you scale the viewport (this applies to mobile and web design. Scaling up is much easier than scaling down because you prioritize content and avoid elaborate desktop layouts that don’t translate to mobile. Side note: UXPin’s Auto Layout lets you automatically resize, fit, and fill your designs. A handy feature for mobile-first design. 
4. Stick to one sketch per screen (a piece of paper). Paper prototyping requires you to create user flows by placing pieces of paper in sequences. You’ll also switch these around or add new screens. If you have more than one screen on a piece of paper, you lose this speed and flexibility.
5. Iterate as the ideas come to mind. The goal is quantity, not quality. When you create lots of paper prototype ideas, you often end up taking bits from each to get the final result—like a Lego set, but with paper.
6. Planning is crucial for a successful paper prototyping session! Ensure you have enough pens (black fine-tipped markers work best), paper, scissors, glue, post-it notes, index cards, tape, cardboard, and anything else you think your specific project might need. A whiteboard and marker are also great for outlining user flows collaboratively. Pro tip—assign the job of preparing your paper prototyping to an arts & crafts enthusiast! Every team has at least one, and they always make sure you have more than enough of everything you need!

Testing & Presenting Paper Prototypes

Testing & presenting paper prototypes outside of the UX department is always tricky. The stakeholders or usability participants have to “imagine” what will happen, which can confuse or divert focus from what you’re trying to present. Nevertheless, a study by Jakob Nielsen found that 75% of usability issues can be identified with simple, low-fidelity prototypes like paper ones.

Here are some tips for presenting and testing paper prototypes:

• Designate one person other than the presenter as play the “human computer” or product simulator – The person playing the human-computer will simulate scrolling, swiping, navigating to different screens, and other functionality.
• Rehearse – Rehearsing is essential so that the presenter and simulator are in sync. The presenter can work out a good cadence for the simulator to keep up with the presentation.
• Follow standard usability test best practices – Standards like using a minimum of 5 users and recording the tests still apply. You can download our free Guide to Usability Testing for more understanding of usability standards and practices.
• If you’re giving users a paper prototype to inspect, ensure you provide guidance and annotations, so they know where to focus and what they’re supposed to test.

Prototyping in UXPin

Whether you’re building a mobile application or a new website, UXPin provides designers with tools to build advanced prototypes; most leading design tools simply can’t!

Don’t take our word for it! Sign up for a free 14-day trial and test UXPin’s powerful prototyping features for your next project. 

The post Paper Prototyping: The 10-Minute Practical Guide appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

In today’s fast-paced tech industry, it’s challenging to maintain perfect design consistency, especially when you have multiple teams working on the same digital product!

Periodic UX design audits allow designers to evaluate a product to identify continuity, consistency, accessibility, and usability issues.

Reduce errors while increasing fidelity, functionality, and collaboration with UXPin’s code-based design tool. Sign up for a free trial.

Build advanced prototypes

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

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What is a UX Audit?

A UX audit is a a systematic evaluation of a website, application, or digital product to assess and improve its overall user experience. The goal of a UX audit is to identify usability issues, design flaws, and areas for improvement in order to enhance the user satisfaction and effectiveness of the product.

This process is typically carried out by UX professionals, designers, or usability experts and it may be referred to as UX review or quality assurance of design.

A design audit allows UX designers to identify user pain points and business value opportunities using valuable real-world data. Testing during the design process is limited in revealing how a product will perform in the real world –especially if you have thousands or millions of daily users. 

An auditor will measure, test, and analyze the following during a UX audit:

• Usability Evaluation – assessing the ease with which users can interact with the product. This involves evaluating navigation, clarity of information, and the overall flow of the user journey.
• Visual Design – examining the aesthetics and visual elements of the interface to ensure they align with best practices, brand guidelines, and contribute to a positive user experience.
• Content Evaluation – reviewing the quality, relevance, and clarity of the content presented to users. This includes text, images, and multimedia elements.
• Interaction Design – analyzing the responsiveness and effectiveness of interactive elements, such as buttons, forms, and other user interface components.
• Accessibility – ensuring that the product is accessible to users with disabilities by checking compliance with accessibility standards and guidelines.
• Performance Assessment – evaluating the speed and responsiveness of the product, including page load times and the efficiency of interactive features.
• Mobile Responsiveness – verifying that the product is optimized for various devices and screen sizes, with a focus on mobile responsiveness.
• Broken Links – identifying and fixing any broken or dysfunctional links within the product to ensure a seamless user experience.
• Design System Inconsistencies – checking for inconsistencies in design elements such as fonts, colors, patterns, and ensuring adherence to a cohesive design system.
• Layout and Hierarchy Inconsistencies – reviewing the overall layout and hierarchy of information to maintain consistency and improve user understanding.
• Outdated Content – identifying and updating any outdated or irrelevant content to ensure users receive accurate and timely information.
• Customer Journey Bottlenecks and Roadblocks – analyzing the user journey to identify any bottlenecks or obstacles that may hinder a smooth progression through the product.
• Usability Heuristics – applying established usability heuristics (such as Nielsen’s 10 heuristics) to evaluate and address potential usability issues.
• Branding and Messaging – ensuring consistency in branding elements and messaging to maintain a coherent and recognizable brand identity.
• Review Product Design Against Business and User Experience Goals – evaluating the alignment of the product design with both business objectives and user experience goals.
• Traffic, Engagement, Conversion Rates, Retention, and Sales Analytics – analyzing relevant analytics data to gain insights into user behavior, engagement, and the product’s overall performance.
• Legal Compliance (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) – checking the product’s compliance with applicable legal standards, such as data protection regulations (GDPR, CCPA, etc.)

At the end of a design audit, auditors generate a UX audit report with actionable recommendations to fix any issues or optimize the product.

When to Conduct a UX Design Audit?

Teams typically conduct a UX audit as part of the QA process whenever they release a significant product update or product redesign. Organizations may also schedule periodic UX audits to ensure a product meets business and user experience objectives.

Additionally, a UX design audit is recommended:

• When experiencing a noticeable drop in user engagement or satisfaction metrics.
• Before launching a new feature or major update to assess potential impact on the user experience.
• After receiving significant user feedback or complaints about usability issues.
• When considering a rebranding or significant change in the product’s visual identity.
• Before embarking on a large-scale marketing campaign or expansion effort to ensure the product can effectively support increased traffic or usage.
• Following changes in industry standards, regulations, or technological advancements that may affect the user experience.
• As part of a competitive analysis to benchmark the product against industry peers and identify areas for improvement.
• When seeking investment or partnerships, as a thorough UX audit can demonstrate a commitment to delivering a high-quality user experience. Overall, the timing of a UX design audit depends on the specific needs and circumstances of the organization and the product, but it’s essential to prioritize regular evaluations to maintain and enhance the user experience.

Who Conducts a UX Audit?

Who conducts a UX audit will depend on the size of the company and available resources. Many small companies and startups will likely use in-house design teams to perform UX audits.

To get an objective, non-bias UX audit, some organizations use external auditors to evaluate their products and deliver a report. Large companies might use a UX design agency, which can be expensive but produce thorough audits with meaningful feedback and insights. Smaller businesses and startups might consider hiring a freelancer to get similar results.

Recommended reading: How to Set Up Internal Consultancy?

How to Prepare for a UX Audit

A UX audit requires several benchmarks to evaluate a digital product. Without these benchmarks, auditors have no way to determine whether the product is meeting its KPIs, goals, and objectives.

If your company doesn’t have a UX strategy, you probably want to start by defining this before you conduct a UX audit. You can download our Free UX Process & Documentation Templates and read this article to outline your company’s UX strategy before your first design audit.

To prepare for a UX audit, you will need:

• User personas
• Clearly defined business goals
• Product data and analytics
• Previous UX audit results & changes
• Audit constraints, deliverables, deadline, and stakeholders

User Personas

Identifying your customers and their personas before you conduct a UX audit will help determine if your current users (from analytics data) match your target users (from previous user and market research).

Suppose the UX audit reveals a change in user demographics. In that case, UX designers might need to apply the design thinking process to determine if the product adequately caters to this new group.

Clearly Defined Business Goals

Understanding the company’s business goals is another essential factor auditors must know in preparation for a UX audit. Auditors will need to assess whether the product meets the company’s business expectations and the design’s impact, whether negative or positive.

Product Data and Analytics

Auditors must gather relevant product analytics and information like heatmaps, click tracking, and other interaction data. Companies might acquire this data through Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, Hotjar, and CrazyEgg, to name a few.

This data is crucial to understanding how users navigate a digital product and whether designers need to consider changes to match this behavior.

Analytics can also provide auditors with conversion and revenue data to measure the product’s success metrics and KPIs.

Recommended reading: A List of Design Feedback Tools

Previous UX Audit Results & Changes

Auditors can use reports from previous UX audits to check if any of the same problems still exist. If there were any design changes after the last UX audit, auditors can determine whether the changes solved the problem and impacted user experience.

Audit Constraints, Deliverables, Deadline, and Stakeholders

Lastly, auditors must understand the audit’s budget/resource constraints, deliverables, deadline, and stakeholders for reporting. This information is as important as the audit itself because it will determine how auditors conduct the review to meet constraints and expectations.

Conducting a UX Design Audit

Once you have completed your preparation, it’s time to conduct a UX design audit. Auditors will examine four key elements of a digital product, including:

• Usability heuristics
• User experience
• Design system evaluation
• Accessibility

Usability Heuristics

Jakob Nielsen’s 10 general principles for interaction design form the basis for many UX design audits. Developed in the early 90s, Nielsen’s list of ten heuristics outlines a broad “rule of thumb” rather than specific usability guidelines auditors must follow.

1. Visibility of system status—ensure users know the current system status to understand the impact of their interactions and next steps.
2. Match between system and the real world—designs must speak users’ language with familiar words, phrases, and concepts. Products must feel logical and intuitive so users can achieve tasks and goals effortlessly.
3. User control and freedom—designs should give users complete control to change their minds, exit, or redo tasks and flows. For example, providing a “back” button during user flows or a way to update/delete shopping cart items.
4. Consistency and standards—design inconsistency can increase users’ cognitive load resulting in a poor product experience. Minimize what users must learn to use your product by following industry standards and maintaining design consistency.
5. Error prevention—designers must do everything they can to prevent or eliminate error-prone conditions. 
6. Recognition rather than recall—users should not have to remember what buttons, actions, and elements do. User interfaces must promote recognition (explicit labels & instructions) to reduce users’ cognitive load.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use—a digital product should provide users with the flexibility to customize their preferred workflow. For example, allowing users to create easily retrievable “favorite” links to their most-used features.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design—avoid redundant content and UI elements that don’t serve users. A minimalist screen layout will help users find what they need with minimal effort.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors—error messages should guide users with straightforward steps to solve the problem. Avoid meaningless error codes and instead provide links to product documentation or customer support.
10. Help and documentation—product documentation must help users understand the product’s features and complete desired tasks.

Auditors might need to evaluate a mix of user testing and product analytics to audit these ten usability heuristics.

User Experience

As UX design follows a human-centered approach, auditing your product’s user experience is probably the most critical part of a design audit.

Auditors will examine analytics and interaction data to determine the design’s impact on user flows, navigation, and the overall user experience. If something stands out in analytics data, auditors may conduct or recommend usability testing to fully understand the problem.

Design System Evaluation

A company’s design system is vital for maintaining continuity and consistency. Auditors must examine the product’s design system to ensure UI components and design patterns meet user experience goals and branding guidelines.

Accessibility

Accessibility is a vital factor in ensuring a product is inclusive for all users. Auditors need to consider whether the color palette, fonts, and components serve users with visual impairments. They may also look at whether the product allows users to switch between light/dark modes to accommodate users with sensitive eyesight.

UXPin’s built-in accessibility features help designers follow best practices, so products pass WCAG standards before the design handoff. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to discover more of UXPin’s built-in features to help optimize your UX workflow.

UX Audit Checklist

A UX audit checklist must take auditors through the necessary preparation through to the final audit report. 

UXPin’s 23-Point UX Checklist will help you avoid common design issues before reaching your final product to improve the overall user experience. You can also use this 23-point checklist as a guideline for creating your audit checklist.

5 Tips to Perform a Successful UX Audit

1. Record everything: take notes, screenshots, and provide links to every flagged issue. These records will ensure you don’t forget anything and provide thorough, actionable feedback to stakeholders.
2. Stay organized: depending on the scale of the product, you’re likely to collect a lot of data, including notes, images, metrics, etc. Use a spreadsheet to organize and analyze analytics data, and use cloud storage to save corresponding assets, like screenshots.
3. Actionable recommendations: provide stakeholders with actions they can take to fix the problems you identify. These actions must align with real insights rather than guesses or assumptions.
4. Be exact: when reporting, tell stakeholders the specific problem, where to find it, and recommendations to fix.
5. Prioritize findings: let stakeholders know the importance of issues you identify—for example, low, medium, and high. You would typically prioritize these based on the severity of the problem and how it impacts the user experience.

Summary

Regular design audits are vital to determine how products align with user experience and business goals. If you are conducting your first UX audit, you must have a clear UX strategy, so auditors have benchmarks, objectives, and KPIs to measure against.

Jakob Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics provide a fantastic foundation for auditors to test a product’s components and features. Auditors should use these usability heuristics to look at a product objectively and ask questions from a user’s perspective.

Improve Your UX Audit UXPin

Here are three ways to improve your UX audits with UXPin:

1. Code-based prototypes: UXPin’s code-based design editor allows teams to create high-fidelity prototypes that look and feel like the final product. Auditors can use these prototypes for usability studies to test assumptions based on data and analytics.
2. Comments: UXPin’s Comments feature lets auditors describe problems and assign tasks directly on user interfaces.
3. Built-in accessibility: auditors can use UXPin’s built-in accessibility features like our contrast checker and blindness simulator to quickly evaluate the product’s accessibility.

Ready to get started with the world’s best user experience design tool? Sign up for a 14-day free trial and discover how UXPin’s code-based design tool can improve UX workflows and produce better user experiences for your customers.

The post UX Audit – All You Need to Know, Benefits, and Checklist appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

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

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

Key takeaways:

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

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

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What is a Design Framework?

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

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

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

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

Why do we need design frameworks?

 Some of the core benefits of using a design framework include:

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

9 Examples of UX Design Frameworks

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

User-Centered Design (UCD)

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

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

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

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

Design Thinking Process

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

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

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

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

Double Diamond

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

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

Stage One – Preparation:

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

Stage Two – Prototyping & Testing:

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

Hook Model

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

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

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

 Further reading: 

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

Lean UX

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

There are three stages to the Lean UX framework:

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

Further reading: 

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

Agile UX

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

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

Further reading:

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

BASIC Framework

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

The BASIC acronym follows five principles:

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

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

Beauty:

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

Accessibility:

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

Simplicity:

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

Intuitiveness:

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

Consistency:

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

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

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

The UX Honeycomb

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

The UX Honeycomb’s seven principles include:

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

The Fogg Behavior Model

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

• Motivation
• Ability
• Trigger

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

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

Further reading: 

• Fogg Behavior Model
• Tiny Habits by B J Fogg

End-to-End Product Design With UXPin

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

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

Meaningful Testing Feedback

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

Streamlined Design Handoffs

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

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

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

A perfect website isn’t made in one smooth creation and launch effort. Seamless and fully functional sites are the result of careful prototyping. Prototypes allow early imperfections to be weeded out of websites and offer opportunities to maximize the effectiveness of your site.

A business’s website is, oftentimes, the first impression made on investors and customers. Understanding how to perfect your website through prototyping is crucial for early success, which is why this article covers website prototyping in depth.

Create a website prototype that you can actually test with users. Build an interactive prototype in UXPin and design a UI that brings the whole team together. Try UXPin for free.

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What is a website prototype?

A website prototype is an early version of a site that serves as a starting point. The ability to prototype creates room for exploration, refinement, and perfection in an effective way. One of its best aspects is that it creates a space for development prior to publishing a website.

A prototype can start out in a low-fidelity format and contain a simple outline of the site’s form and function. This outline can evolve into a high-fidelity prototype with all of the details and interactive design intended for the final product.

The flexibility of website prototyping benefits all parties. Designers and developers have a space to perfect their products, while stakeholders can get a realistic idea of the interface early on. Even clients benefit from the flawless user interface that prototyping helps develop. 

Benefits of website prototypes

Let’s highlight the most notable impacts website prototyping offers, so you can visualize how your business will benefit.   

Visualization

Visually appealing platforms are best created through a visually informed process, like prototyping. A powerful system allows multiple iterations, as the early image of a site develops into something fully functional.

The ability to visualize each step of a site’s development in real time gives everyone involved a chance to be included and inspired. Designers and developers have the option to constantly tweak and interact with their work to find the perfect fit for a site. The ability to actively assess the direction of a project also benefits stakeholders who may not fully understand a team’s progress and goal without interactive visuals. 

Early feedback

Nothing is more time-consuming and fruitless than completing a project only to find that, at some point, things are headed in the wrong direction and need to be redone. Prototyping is an effective strategy for avoiding these late-development pitfalls.

When teams are able to interact with their design during all stages of construction, feedback is easily generated and implemented. With the ability to test and reorient the direction of a platform at any time, it is far less likely that the end product will miss its goals at completion. 

User experience testing

The final product is all about its users, so why not integrate user input as early into the design process as possible?

Prior to a product’s completion, the user interface and user design can be tested on real users with a prototype. This allows for a fully interactive experience, so users can test and provide feedback on all functions of a website. 

Risk reduction

Website design can be riddled with hidden pitfalls that only become blatantly apparent when the site is published. User interface issues like confusing navigation and inconsistent design styles can diminish your website’s impact. 

Interactive prototyping helps mitigate these risks by bringing issues with website form or function into plain view prior to publishing. What would have been a costly complication, is little more than a slight tweak with a prototype.

You can even reduce risks beyond functionality by using a prototype to ensure the product aligns with the visions of stakeholders. An alignment with company goals is much easier to assess when the site can be easily reviewed during its creation by anyone in the company.

Clear communication

A cohesive and smoothly functioning platform is the result of a well-connected team. While there are plenty of ways to foster general teamwork, communication on a singular product is best accomplished with a shared source of information.

A prototype is the perfect central point of information for a website design team to communicate through. Contributions from all members can be seen and interacted with in this format, allowing all members to be on the same page and discuss various points of improvement. 

Efficient iteration

Editing a fully published website is a very complex process that can be avoided with the right tools. The ability to repeatedly create new iterations of a project with ease helps build the best product you can.

An effective and efficient process for creating new iterations of a project encourages teams to make more edits prior to publishing and pursue more creative concepts. As a result, final sites are more likely to run smoothly and stand out from cookie-cutter competitors’ sites.

User-centered design

User research can only go so far. This form of user integration may work for concept creation, but as platforms are developed, more specific user input is needed. Prototypes offer an opportunity to explore user interactions in a way that is unique to your website.

By granting test users access to interact with and review a prototype of a site, teams gain a better understanding of what improvements can be made. Issues that may have otherwise been missed by a busy design team can be highlighted by users, and this information can inspire impactful improvements. 

Defining the scope

Defining and maintaining scope is an important part of any project, and websites are no exception. With multiple individuals involved in the creation of a website, a loose scope can result in projects taking up more time and resources for developments that are not necessary.

Prototypes act like an outline, allowing teams to define the scope of their work early on. Specifying what features are needed creates a foundation for focus, where any additions that fall outside of the project’s scope can be easily caught and redirected.  

Stakeholder approval

Stakeholders may not have an in-depth understanding of website design, making it difficult to describe a product and receive approval. Prototypes provide an accurate visual reference that makes projects easy for stakeholders to perceive and approve.

Cost savings

The later mistakes are caught, the larger and more costly they tend to be. Early resolution of design errors or flaws in a prototype can prevent mistakes from growing into a financial burden in the final version of a site.

Design exploration

Exploration tends to be most inviting and effective when it is easy and without risk. Prototypes provide designers with a risk-free space to indulge in creative whims and the best prototyping systems allow easy access to a variety of design tools.

This form of exploration opens up opportunities for new design styles that might help your website stand out and impress its audience. 

How to create a website prototype

If website prototyping sounds like it would benefit your business, that’s great! Here are a few important things to consider before getting started to maximize your prototype’s potential.

Run preliminary work

Well-executed ideas tend to have one thing in common, research. Understanding how, why, and for whom you plan to design a website should come before all else. Take time to identify your target audience with some preliminary user research studies. Understanding what users want and marrying those concepts with what your website is meant to do can set up a successful foundation.

While you can’t expect to have every answer at such an early phase, it is worth trying to answer every core question you can think of regarding your future website. For example:

• What is the purpose of your site?
• How would you categorize your website; as a blog, a sales platform, or something else?
• Who is your intended audience?
• How will your audience interact with your website?
• What features will your site need to succeed?
• How will your website be similar to others in its category?
• How will it be different?

The more preliminary work you do, the easier and more precise the following design steps will be. For more information on preliminary work, explore the product development guide.

Sketch out your first visuals

With all of your key elements and goals in mind, it’s time to create the precursor to your prototype. This original outline is often referred to as a wireframe and its goal is to outline your website’s key features.

This rough draft should detail things like the site’s information architecture, interactive elements, and basic design ideas. Details and precision are not the main goals during this phase, so wireframes can be generated with mockup tools or hand-drawn sketches. A little paper prototyping know-how can go a long way in this stage. 

Create a prototype with UXPin

Now it’s time for the main event; a prototype that is flexible, interactive, and capable of representing a completed product. Your wireframe initiates this process, by directing focus towards the key aspects of your design. Meanwhile, the prototype allows for the addition of new details.

The traditional prototyping process can be lengthy and complex, but advancements in technology have simplified prototyping. UXPin is one such tool, designed specifically to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of prototyping in website design.

UXPin prototypes are designed for simplified previewing so your team can check for imperfections and get feedback with ease. Previews can be tested in multiple browsers or even viewed on mobile devices to ensure they meet your standards in all formats. With UXPin Mirror, you can even see the difference your updates make in real time on mobile devices.

A library of advanced features ensures that your UXPin prototype will accurately encapsulate every detail you intend to have in a completed website. Create various states for interactive components, design a drop-down menu that supports smooth navigation, or organize with tab menus, navigational drawers, and many other options.

The opportunities for customization in the prototyping phase don’t stop here. Variables can be added to personalize user experiences and expressions can be used to compute a variety of values, like those in a virtual shopping cart. You can even generate conditional interactions to have your site respond differently based on users’ interactions. 

UXPin’s professionally designed prototyping tool allows you to create all of the complex functions necessary for a professional website, through a simplified system that does not require you to learn how to code.     

Validate your concept and refine your website prototype

Once you have generated a prototype that fits your goals, it’s time to test. An interactive and fully functioning prototype can be used to test how well users are able to navigate your website. Record how long it takes users to discover and use specific features, identify challenges, and observe how your design is received.

With a flexible prototype, revisions can be easily implemented based on user response and then those revisions can be retested to refine your website into its final form.

A Practical Example of a Website Prototype in UXPin

When designing for users, you need to know their end goals and actions along the way. The two are called content and user flows, respectively, and together they form the heart of any great website.

But how do we go from an information outline to interactive design? In this post, we’ll discuss how to turn a set of content into a prototype, rapidly.

Step 1: Assemble a content inventory

What are we designing? Many designers start from the outside and work their way in, crafting the containers and framework before examining the information that users spend more time with.

When you start designing from the inside out, you design with the user in mind. What they need to see immediately will gain prominence over what you want them to notice second. Navigation bars deserve less attention than the call to action, for example.

As importantly, a content-first approach is also naturally a mobile-first approach. Mobile devices have more limitations, screen size, and bandwidth to name a few, and so designing within these parameters force you to prioritize content ruthlessly.

A content inventory is an organized list, spreadsheet, or equivalent document containing all the elements relevant to the end-user. A good inventory acts as a hierarchy of information divided into sections.

Your completed content inventory lays out all the possibilities for your user flows.

Step 2: Plan the core flow with informed decisions

A complex project like a banking website will require many flows, such as:

• Changing a password
• Viewing investment options
• Reviewing 401k
• Ordering checks
• Opening a new account, or closing an old one
• Transferring funds to or from a different bank
• Paying the credit card balance

Each flow requires a user to weave through multiple content pages. For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll focus just on the credit card payment process, one of the most crucial flows. When you prototype, focus first on the riskiest or most fundamental user flows.

Let’s write it out this user flow:

• The user lands on the homepage.
• The user completes their login information and redirects to their dashboard.
• The user clicks into their credit card balance.
• The user chooses an account from which to pay the balance. Then submits the request and confirms their balance is paid off.

That sounds like a lot of steps, but there are only three decisions involved: deciding whether or not to pay, choosing an account from which to do so, and choosing to confirm the transaction. Each step must be clear and effortless in our prototype.

Step 3: Build the prototype

In this case, we’ll build a user flow that lets people pay off their credit card balance at a fictional bank.

Given real content, our goal is to build a mid-fi. Unlike lo-fi prototypes, which act like boxy wireframes, or hi-fis, which show branding in place, mid-fis demonstrate the flow of decisions users take to accomplish a task.

If you’re limited on iterations, mid-fi prototypes are the perfect choice since you don’t waste time on visual design but still provide enough detail for user testing.

In a mid-fi, functional prototype, you’ll want to show:

• Correct layout of UI elements (navigation, primary content, etc.)
• Basic colors
• Basic interactions (no advanced animations or states yet)
• Correct typography
• Images in the correct dimensions

Here’s how we’d make it work for our bank website.

Login page

Logging in is easy: a simple form on the bank’s home page lets users securely enter their account. But we don’t neglect this obligatory step because it’s the user’s first interaction with the bank and its brand. Everything from the color scheme to the microcopy must fit with the friendly-yet-professional tone.

Account overview

Upon entering their username and password, they see a dashboard that includes their account information. The purpose of this screen is to give the person an overview of their accounts. There are no ads, no upsells, and secondary information is pushed to one side. It’s all about their money.

To help them decide if it’s time to pay, we’ll include their credit card balance on this screen.

Payment process

According to the user flow, we know that the person’s next move is to choose to pay the card balance. That’s an easy click — and presents a second decision. At this point, he or she must choose the account to withdraw money from.

Decisions take time and cognitive power, so we should make choosing an account dead simple. Each account is listed with as little information as necessary (the account name and balance).

Next, the person reaches their third decision: whether or not to commit the transaction. At this point, all they need to know is what the transaction’s about. That means we can eliminate the previous decision’s options.

A new screen, or even a simple modal window, will present the information they need to make that decision. Specifically, the account name, the amount to pay, and the approve and disapprove buttons.

Success! Clicking the right button confirms that the balance is now cleared.

Getting close to reality makes it work

Notice that each screen in this design uses both realistic colors, typography, and layout — in addition to real microcopy. It’s not fully polished, but enough to start testing.

At this point, we just need to add some basic interactions so people can click through the screens. Once that’s finished, it’s time to collect feedback, iterate as needed, and then test with our users.

To complete your prototype, just repeat all the above steps with each user flow.

Build your own prototype in UXPin

People visit an interactive website to accomplish a task, not use a widget or admire its graphics. That makes the flow along with real content as important as developing a prototype’s UI.

Content-centric design helps find their way along that path. If you’d like to try what you learned in this guide, go ahead and start your free trial in UXPin.

The post Website Prototyping: The Hands-on Guide appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

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

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

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

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

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UXPin Merge

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

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

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

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

Zeplin

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

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

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

Marvel

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

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

Sympli

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

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

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

Avocode

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

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

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

InVision

InVision offered their clients Inspect – a design handoff tool that automatically generated design specs and code snippets. Nevertheless, you can’t use InVision for design handoff in 2024. The tool was shut down in January 2024.

If you’re looking for a replacement for InVision, try UXPin Merge – it has a similar suite of integrations and solves major design handoff isssues.

Framer

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

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

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

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

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

Spectrr

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

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

Adobe XD

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

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

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

Figma

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

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

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

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

Why are Design Handoffs so Challenging?

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

Unrealistic Expectations

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

Poor Image-Based Tools for Rendering Code

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

Technical Constraints

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

Too Many Design Handoff Tools

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

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

Better Design Handoffs with UXPin Merge

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways:

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

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

Build advanced prototypes

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

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What is a UX Wireframe?

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

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

What are the Benefits of Wireframing?

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

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

Is UXPin the Right Tool for Wireframing?

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

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

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

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

What is the Difference Between UXPin and Other Wireframing Tools?

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

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

Built-in features vs. plugins

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

Code-to-design

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

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

How to Build a Wireframe in UXPin

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

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

Step 1: Open UXPin and create a new project

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

Step 2: Choose the wireframe’s canvas size

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

Step 3: Create pages for each screen

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

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

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

Step 4: Create wireframe UI elements

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

Step 5: Define interactions

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

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

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

Step 6: Collaborate and gather feedback

How to go From Wireframe to Prototype in UXPin

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

UXPin provides four key features to enhance your prototyping capability:

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

Increase prototyping complexity with APIs

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

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways:

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

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

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

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What is a Design Insight?

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

Why are Design Insights Important?

Drive user-centricity

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

Reduce risks

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

Inform iterations

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

Align teams

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

Enhance ROI

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

How to Gather Design Insights

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

Run user interviews

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

Perform usability testing

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

Do UX research

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

Interview others

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

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

Analyze the product’s use

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

Heatmaps

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

Market research

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

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

Competitor analysis

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

A/B testing

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

AI and machine learning

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

Social listening

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

Leverage crowdsourcing

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

Implement real-time feedback loops

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

Surveys and questionnaires

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

Correlate Data Sources

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

How to Analyze Design Insights

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

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

Categorize the data

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

Validate the insights

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

Prioritize action items

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

Implement changes

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

Monitor impact

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

Share knowledge

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

Prototype and Test Design Insights with UXPin

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

Step 1: Create your designs

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

Step 2: Add interactive elements

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

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

Step 3: Conduct usability testing

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

Step 4: Share prototypes with stakeholders

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

Step 5: Iterate with confidence

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

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

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

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

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

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

Why Do You Need to Break the Silo Mentality?

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

Here are 5 common problems created by silos:

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

6 Practical Tips to Break Down Silos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the top options include:

• Zoom, 
• BlueJeans,
• Google Meet

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

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

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

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

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

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

Create a design system that contains all approved assets

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

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

Share information between teams as you make progress

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

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

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

Eliminate organizational silos with UXPin Merge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

Days gone by

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

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

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

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

Does this sound familiar? If so, keep reading.

The inefficiencies of the design to delivery handover

So the above is hugely inefficient. Why?

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

Design system maturity scale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do I Mature a Design System?

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways:

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

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

Build advanced prototypes

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

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What is Lean UX?

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

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

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

The History of Lean UX

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

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

Agile UX vs. Lean UX

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

The Lean UX Process

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

The five stages of the design thinking process include:

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

While lean UX breaks the process into three stages:

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

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

Lean UX Principles

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

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

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

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

Benefits of Lean UX

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

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

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

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

We can summarize Lean UX benefits in five bullet points:

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

The Lean UX Methodology

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

• Assumptions
• Hypotheses
• Minimum viable products (MVP)

Assumptions

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

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

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

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

Hypothesis

A UX hypothesis is a testable assumption with three variables:

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

You can write a hypothesis statement as follows:

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

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

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

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

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

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

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

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

Minimum Viable Products in UXPin

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

Need more fidelity for better accuracy during testing?

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

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

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

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

Testing

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways:

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

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

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

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What is Rapid Prototyping?

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

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

Rapid Prototyping vs Traditional Prototyping

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

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

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

Benefits of Rapid Prototyping

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

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

The Rapid Prototyping Process

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

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

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

Step 0 – Interactive Wireframes

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

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

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

Step 1 – Create a Design System

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

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

Step 2 – Create Your Mockups

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

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

Step 3 – Creating Interactions – The UXPin Way

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

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

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

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

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

Step 3 – Test, Tweak, Repeat

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

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

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

How UXPin Merge Accelerates Rapid Prototyping

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

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

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

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

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

PayPal’s DesignOps 2.0 – A UXPin Merge Success Story

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

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

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

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

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

Reach a new level of prototyping

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

Discover UXPin Merge

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