1. Place users in control of the interface
2. Make it comfortable to interact with a product
3. Reduce cognitive load
4. Make user interfaces consistent

But before a designer embarks on this journey, it’s essential to execute some prerequisite processes that will help ensure the UI is truly exceptional, and their design services are worth the investment. This article takes a deeper look at these prerequisite processes that form a roadmap to the ideal UI/UX design for your specific product. The roadmap to designing a beautiful, intuitive user interface should consist of the following elements:

User Research & Analysis

Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task. —Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO

This quote perfectly sums up why User Research is an indispensable part of your design roadmap. Even though it is often treated as a good-to-have, and ignored, it essentially lays the foundation for every design decision.

To do effective research, designers need to put themselves in the user’s shoes – this gives designers a true feel of what users see, feel, and want – it is necessary for them to do user research as often as possible, and depending on their time and budget, as deep a dive as possible.  As the famous saying goes, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted – therefore a mix of qualitative & quantitative analysis would be the ideal way to go about things. 

Design Strategy

Having a design strategy in place ensures you don’t waste any precious time or resources on the misunderstandings that can crop up because a plan wasn’t laid out at the get-go. While formulating a design strategy, you are pre-defining every aspect of the UI/UX before initiating the designing – thereby giving the designers a clear direction in which to take every design decision. 

While it is good to have a short, crisp strategy to roll out, it is also important to be flexible. It’s perfectly acceptable to tweak your strategy depending on the dynamic market condition.

Wireframe & Prototype

Wireframes are to websites or products that blueprints are to construction sites – they paint a clear picture that can be used as a reliable reference. Wireframes give everyone an idea of what goes where, and with the right interactions and additions, have the potential to turn into a dream house. 

Prototypes are simulations of your finished product – they show you how your website or product will look, what it can do, and how your users might interact with it. They are extremely useful because they allow designers to see new ways in which a final cohesive design can be arrived at – it is usually at this phase that most designers come across their Eureka! moment. 

Interaction Design

As the name suggests, Interaction Design is nothing but the design of interactions that happen between a user and a product. The goal of ID is to ensure that a user’s objectives while using your solution are met as seamlessly as possible. 

For instance, some of the questions Interaction Designers might ask are :  

• What can a user do with their mouse, finger, or stylus to directly interact with the interface?
• What feedback does a user get once an action is performed?
• What about the appearance (color, shape, size, etc.) gives the user a clue about how it may function?
• Do error messages provide a way for the user to correct the problem or explain why the error occurred?

At this point in the journey, you are ready to begin design and development.  Armed with the information you gathered up until this point of the journey, you can now design an interface that customers will enjoy engaging with. This is the point where you need to start thinking out-of-the-box and customize your design to suit your specific business needs. 

Once you have arrived at what you believe is the perfect UI/UX design for your solution, there is one more crucial step to follow, that will ensure your UI is truly fool-proof. 

User and Usability Testing

User and usability testing helps you determine if the assumptions you made about your solution are correct. During user testing, you get a representative set of users to use your prototype and see if those assumptions are correct. 

Christopher Murphy, in his guide to User Testing, says it best – “Remember: Design is an iterative process. There are always improvements to be made, informed by your testing. In short: User testing should be happening at every point in the process as an integral part of an iterative design process.”

User and usability testing help you identify the maximum amount of feedback at the very beginning of your process before you invest too much money into the final build. It’s too late and will be too expensive, to leave your user testing for after the solution is built. 

At Experion, we enjoy crafting intuitive user experiences. We work with enterprises, SMEs, and startups around the world to create web and mobile applications, across industries, using a wide range of tools. Above all,  our design services are about creating amazing products that end-users will love.

Work with us to make the best version of your vision come to life. Drop a mail to sales@blackrockdxb.com

The post The roadmap for good UI/UX design appeared first on Black Rock IT Solutions – Software Product Engineering Services.

We have an app for almost everything today. It has passed beyond the time when there were apps for every action. Today, it is about one’s mood or state of mind, and depending on which state of mind, you have got an app. If you are sad, apps such as Code Blue, Lantern and the likes cheer you up and put you in a better mood. If you are stressed then there is Happify, Headspace and others to make you feel relaxed. There are tens and hundreds of apps for every state of mind and for every age whatsoever. Why this is important again drops down to “user adoption” and how the modern app thrives to get a hold on to the main screen and stay there for some time.

User experience is the lifeline of an app which helps it see that pinch of success to survive the first 10 seconds without hitting the recycle bin. With around 2.2 million apps on the stores now, it has burnt down to a matter of choice whether to use App A or App B to cater to a particular need. Today, it is not about the idea you have, because that idea would have been recognized into multiple apps already. Rather, it is about how you make it get past that first 10 seconds and give the user what he/she needs within this time frame. That decides the fate and life of the app.

When we design an application, there are a few constraints that we take into account. They can be summarized into:

Getting the Story On-board for every App

Before we even start developing the wireframes, we think that it is important to have empirical knowledge about what we are going to implement. Be it an app that helps your coffee shop to function better or help a couple manage their dates, it’s always wise to get the story from the coffee shop owner and from real couple. At our workplace, we follow the concept of interviewing real users and understand what could help their lives tick with our app. This helps our business analysts eliminate assumptions and deal with real world problems and find solutions for them.

The Cognitive Load and Releasing Frustration

Most apps follow a particular navigation to achieve something. For example, applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter have the option to like or share posts just beneath the messages. It would bring down the cognitive load of the user if a new app we built follows the same or similar logic. Anything other than this would imply a new learning curve and could frustrate the user. Getting inspired from some commonly used design logic into our app, could eventually let the user focus on the actual task.

At Experion, we are way past the myth that UX and user designs are different words with the same meaning. User Experience for us starts from the idea, from inception to all the way up the process ladder. Our designs are just a part of the experience it promised to deliver. After all, it is just the user’s feelings and emotions that matter, and if we cannot cater to this fact in the easiest manner possible, we have not created a great app at all.

The Habitat and the Ecosystem We Create

Just open Google.com.

What do you see?

Just a couple of buttons and a search bar right? That’s it. That’s all Google has been trying to do. It wants to search for you what you need at the time. If you look closely, you would still see a few other options too like setting a language, Gmail, images etc. But did you see how prominent they are compared to the core function of search? That’s how simple and focused an app or website should be.

We often intend to build an app that tries to satisfy everybody. I mean everybody big or small. We pull in a lot of controls and functions and cram the user’s world. The app thus become a maze of search and find for a user who might have opened the app just to order his/her favourite pizza when hungry. To make it worse, we dump all the controls in the home screen with the same dimensions.

See, we get it. We need an app or a website that covers all possible use cases. However, there is a way to achieve it and stuffing the available real estate is the last resort a developer should use. In Instagram for example, it is an array of image tiles from which you can select the image you want to zoom into. So simple, isn’t it?

Often, we tend to forget that most users do not go beyond 2 minutes to do what they would love to get done from apps. Of course, I am not talking about music or video streaming apps here. The habitat that we create should help the user get their things done in a flick so that they can resume to their most important tasks.

Not the last things first if you can help it
Joe got late one day and missed his office cab. He decided to download the app of a local cab service in town. After installing, the first thing the app asked was to login or signup and didn’t allow the user to navigate to the services unless authenticated. Now, being new to the app, the user had to sit and register which took at least 5 minutes to set up.

Now, is this normal?
Why do you need to log in if all you require is to hail a cab and travel from say place A to place B? In the real world, if you need to catch a cab, do you need to fill up a form, submit your documents, and submit a photograph for id?

The apps we use should help us achieve what we need to get with minimal user inputs. While signing up for an app might be seen as something that is not uncomfortable, it might not be so for someone such as Joe who is in a crisis and wants a solution without hurdles. Otherwise, the last thing one would do to an app the first time they use it would be to un-install it. If you get what I mean.

The post User Experience: Considerations before choosing the best UX path? appeared first on Black Rock IT Solutions – Software Product Engineering Services.