A service safari allows design teams better to understand competitors, users, and their own product. This service experience offers valuable insights for very little investment, making it an essential tool during the early stages of the design thinking process.

This article looks at the pros and cons of a service safari, how to plan and run one, and what you can expect from the results.

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What is a Service Safari?

A service safari is a real-world research method where designers experience a product as a user–like mystery shopping. You can conduct a service safari on your product, competitors’, or both. The process works for physical products, services, and digital products.

During a service safari, team members complete various tasks to gain insights into the product’s customer experience.

A service safari is a valuable UX design research method because it’s inexpensive (for most digital products), and teams can complete the process without users.

A service safari ultimately provides a realistic look at the user journey and competition, helping design teams refine their products to deliver a better experience and capitalize on market opportunities.

Who Does a Service Safari?

Usually, various team members from a design project participate in a service safari. Participating in a service safari gives team members valuable insights into the competition, but the process also provides an opportunity to empathize with users from a product-usage perspective.

When to do a Service Safari?

UX designers complete service safaris during the discovery phase of a design project when researching competitors or evaluating an existing product for a redesign. They use the results to identify opportunities and pain points that help guide the design process.

What is the Purpose of a Service Safari?

A service safari is a research activity where design teams observe and interact with competitor services and their own services from a customer’s perspective. By “walking in the shoes” of the end-user, teams gain valuable insights that can help inform product improvements, identify business opportunities, and refine the user experience. Here’s a breakdown of key reasons for conducting a service safari:

Understand the Competition and Their Services

A service safari allows design teams to study competitors’ offerings firsthand, giving them insight into how competing services are structured, marketed, and experienced. This competitive analysis can reveal what other companies are doing well, such as unique features, standout customer service practices, or pricing models. By understanding the competitive landscape, teams can identify gaps or strengths in their own service.

Determine the Quality of Service (Competitors and Internally)

Teams use service safaris to evaluate the quality of both competitor services and their own, helping them to objectively assess things like usability, accessibility, and customer satisfaction. Experiencing the service directly allows them to identify strengths and weaknesses in real-time, such as wait times, support responsiveness, or user interface design, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of service quality compared to traditional benchmarking.

Spot New Business Opportunities

Observing competitor services or even adjacent industry services can spark ideas for new offerings or improvements. By exploring the broader service environment, teams may spot trends or emerging needs that can inform future product features, services, or business models. This insight enables businesses to proactively innovate and stay ahead of market trends.

Identify User Pain Points and Areas for Improvement

Experiencing a service as a user highlights frustrations, barriers, or inefficiencies that might not be obvious in a traditional review. For instance, slow-loading pages, confusing navigation, or poor customer support are issues that teams can better address after experiencing them firsthand. This identification of pain points is crucial for teams looking to improve user satisfaction and optimize the service experience.

Gain a User’s Perspective to Empathize Better

Empathy is at the heart of good design. By immersing themselves in the service as if they were users, team members can better understand and relate to user emotions, expectations, and needs. This empathy-driven perspective helps design teams make decisions that prioritize user comfort and satisfaction, resulting in a more user-centered approach to product and service development.

Pros and Cons of a Service Safari

Pros:

• Improves Empathy for Customers – Experiencing a service directly helps team members connect with user frustrations, challenges, and joys, deepening their empathy for customers. This firsthand experience is crucial for creating a user-centered design and for understanding the emotional journey users undergo during service interactions.
• Gain a First-Hand Understanding of the Competition – By actively engaging with competitor services, teams observe what other businesses are doing well and where they might fall short. This type of direct observation provides insights that go beyond theoretical analysis, offering practical, detailed observations that can inform design and strategy.
• Helps Validate or Complement Other Research – Service safaris serve as a practical validation tool, allowing teams to confirm findings from surveys, user interviews, or usability testing. Observing and interacting with services in real time can highlight details or patterns that may have been overlooked in other types of research, providing a fuller picture of the user experience landscape.

Cons:

• Risk of Bias from Team Members Too Familiar with the Product – When team members who are deeply familiar with their own product undertake a service safari, they might unknowingly carry biases that influence their observations. This familiarity can make it challenging to view the service from an objective, user-centric perspective, potentially skewing results or insights.
• Difficult to Fully Adopt a Customer’s Mindset – Knowing the product too well makes it hard to replicate a true user experience, as team members may anticipate certain steps or outcomes. This insider knowledge can prevent participants from genuinely experiencing the challenges, confusion, or excitement that a first-time user would feel.
• Ambiguity Without Clear Objectives – Service safaris require well-defined goals to yield actionable insights. Without clear objectives or a structured plan, the data collected may be too broad or scattered, making it challenging to draw specific conclusions or identify actionable steps for improvement.

5 Steps for Conducting a Service Safari

The level of planning for a service safari will depend on the product or service you’re evaluating. For example, a travel booking app will require taking a flight, while a productivity app you can experience from the office.

Step 1. Meet With Team Members & Stakeholders

Meeting with stakeholders before a service safari is essential to agree on the approach, budget, business goals, timeline, and deliverables.

Next, you want to meet with the team taking part in the safari, create a plan, define the methods, outcomes, and assign tasks. Your team will also need to gather the necessary tools and materials like stationery, devices, tools, etc.

Step 2. Set Clear Objectives

Setting clear and actionable objectives is crucial in planning a service safari. These objectives will ensure team members understand each task and its outputs/deliverables.

Design Principal at ustwo in the UK, Hollie Lubbock, recommends pairing a research question with a goal to create a clear objective mission statement–objective = research question + goal.

For example:

• Question: “How do we open a new bank account using a competitor’s app? What are the current options, hacks, and issues with achieving this goal?”
• Goal: “Understand the highs, lows, and friction points in this experience.”

Step 3. Define the Documentation Process and Deliverables

How do you want team members to document their service safari experience? Some examples include:

• Notes (written, voice, etc.)
• Screenshots/screen recordings
• Photos and videos

Hollie Lubbock recommends you outline “key areas to document.”

• The experience over time: Pre/during/post
• What or who you encounter: People/processes/objects/ environments/places/communications

Hollie also gets team members to gather their general impression of the experience, like:

• How much time does it take to complete the task?
• Is it easy to complete?
• Are there clear instructions or options?
• Did you hit any dead ends? Or experience any errors?

Answering these questions provides valuable insights about the product and enables team members to empathize better when developing a solution later in the design process.

Step 4. Conduct the Service Safari

Depending on the product, a service safari could take a few hours or several weeks. Kate Greenstock’s service safari of Jelf Insurance Brokers’ UK offices took eight weeks to complete.

The most important part of running a service safari is documenting the process according to your objectives. We recommend taking lots of notes, screenshots, recordings, etc., so you don’t miss anything.

Hollie Lubbock created this free Google Doc for documenting your service safari. 

We also recommend checking out Preety Naveen’s Service Safari With Skycash–a Polish-based payment service. Preety created a three-step process for each step of her Skycash service safari:

• Actions: The actions she took in each step
• Problems: The problems resulting from each action
• Recommendations: Suggestings to improve each step

A service safari aims to experience every touchpoint from a user’s perspective. Sutherland Labs’ service safari gives an example of exploring touchpoints for a train booking service:

• Booking website/app
• Visiting the station, getting on the train, etc.
• What happens at the turnstiles?
• What’s the physical ticket office like?
• Physical artifacts (tickets, maps, etc.)

The team from Sutherland Labs also takes the opportunity to speak to people, including staff and customers, to get different perspectives. For example, if you’re designing a train booking app, how do people with disabilities experience the service? What are their pain points?

While a service safari is primarily about you experiencing the service, it’s ultimately about finding a solution for customers, so take the opportunity to speak to other users and ask questions. This inquisitive approach could provide valuable usability and accessibility insights.

Step 5. Synthesizing the Results

An affinity map works best when analyzing notes from a service safari. You’ll need a whiteboard (or digital alternative for remote collaboration) and sticky notes.

1. Create headings for each step in your service safari–i.e., open the app, create an account, etc. If you’re analyzing products from several competitors, these steps might differ.
2. Write your raw notes for each step onto sticky notes and paste them under the relevant heading.
3. As a group, identify patterns, key issues, and opportunities.
4. Create a journey map to visualize your results and guide your next decisions.

It’s important to note that you must never use a service safari as a standalone piece of research. Design teams must cross-reference the results with other data or use it to guide and validate further user research.

Using Service Safaris to Prototype in UXPin

Building prototypes is an excellent way to test recommendations and hypotheses after a service safari. UXPin’s built-in design libraries, like Google’s comprehensive Material Design UI, enable designers to build prototypes, test ideas, and iterate fast!

Instead of presenting just a customer journey map or report to stakeholders, designers can build a quick prototype in UXPin, and use it to get buy-in for their solution.

Enhanced Collaboration

Whether you’re working in the office or part of a remote team, UXPin’s Comments enhance collaboration between design teams. Multiple designers can simultaneously work on the same project to design wireframes, mockups, and prototypes.

Adding Stakeholders and Collaborators

Did you know you can share your UXPin projects with stakeholders, experts, consultants, and other collaborators who don’t have a UXPin account?

These stakeholders can view your designs and prototypes, leave comments, and approve from anywhere–perfect for today’s remote work environments. You can even include a message with your approval, so stakeholders know what they’re reviewing for approval. UXPin also integrates with Slack and Jira, allowing you to discuss projects in one place.

Streamlined Design Handoffs

Design handoffs are a stressful time for designers and engineers. Miscommunication, lack of documentation, and poor-quality prototypes cause friction between teams. 

Because UXPin is a code-based design tool, designers can replicate code-like functionality and fidelity, while Spec Mode gives engineers context and documentation to begin the development process, including:

• Inspecting Properties: Inspect the properties of any element or component, including its size, grid, colors, and typography.
• Distance Measurement: Measure distances between elements or the canvas edges.
• Style Guide: Details about the project’s styles, including colors, typography, and assets.

Designers can also create documentation with labels for each element to provide engineers with context and explanations–no more external PDFs or attachments!

If you’re still using outdated image-based design tools to design, prototype, and test, it’s time to switch to UXPin–the world’s leading code-based design solution. Sign up for a free trial and start designing better user experiences for your customers today!

The post How to Do a Service Safari in 5 Easy Steps appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

The concepts of desirability, feasibility, and viability are foundational to the design process, especially in the context of human-centered design and innovation. They help ensure that designs are not only user-centered but also practical and sustainable.

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What are Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility in Design?

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

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

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

Where Does this Methodology Originate?

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

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

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

Desirability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example of desirability

Here’s an example of desirability in design:

Imagine you’re designing a fitness app aimed at helping people track their workouts and achieve fitness goals. To focus on desirability, you’d start by understanding users’ motivations, needs, and emotional triggers. Through user research and interviews, you might discover that your target users (let’s say busy professionals) want more than just tracking workouts—they want an app that encourages them to stay motivated and makes fitness feel rewarding.

Desirability in Action:

To address this, you design a feature that gamifies the fitness experience, such as:

• Earning badges for milestones (e.g., completing a 30-day workout streak).
• A personalized progress tracker that visually shows how close they are to their fitness goals.
• Social sharing options where users can share achievements with friends or workout communities for added motivation.
• Push notifications that are encouraging, like “You’re halfway to your weekly goal, keep it up!” rather than guilt-inducing or annoying.

These features make the app desirable because they align with users’ deeper needs—such as staying motivated, feeling accomplished, and sharing success with others. They’re not just functional, but also emotionally engaging, making users more likely to use the app regularly and enjoy the experience.

By focusing on desirability, you’re ensuring that the app does more than just meet basic needs; it makes the experience delightful and motivating, ultimately increasing user retention and satisfaction.

Viability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example of viability

Let’s take the same fitness app example and focus on viability—how the design supports the business and remains financially sustainable.

Viability in Action

You’ve already created a desirable app with features that engage users, but now you need to ensure that the app generates revenue and aligns with long-term business goals. To address viability, you decide to implement a freemium model with monetization strategies that balance user satisfaction with business needs.

Here’s how you might approach it:

1. Free Basic Tier: The app provides essential workout tracking features for free, attracting a wide user base. This tier gives users just enough to get value from the app and start using it regularly.
2. Premium Subscription: To drive revenue, you introduce a premium subscription that unlocks additional features. These might include:
   • Advanced fitness analytics and personalized workout plans.
   • Exclusive content like video tutorials from expert trainers.
   • Early access to new features or challenges.
   • An ad-free experience.
3. In-App Purchases: Another viable revenue stream could be selling customized workout plans or nutrition guides as one-time purchases. This allows users to buy specific content without committing to a subscription, catering to different user preferences.
4. Brand Partnerships and Sponsored Content: To further support business viability, you establish partnerships with fitness brands. These brands could sponsor certain challenges within the app, or provide users with exclusive discounts on fitness gear or supplements. This brings in additional revenue without compromising the user experience.
5. Cost-Efficient Scaling: On the backend, you work with your team to ensure that the app’s infrastructure is scalable, meaning it can grow with the user base without incurring massive costs. You may use cloud services with cost-efficient pricing models or optimize the app to use fewer resources.

Why This Supports Viability:

• The premium tier generates recurring revenue, which is crucial for long-term sustainability.
• In-app purchases provide a flexible option for users, tapping into a secondary revenue stream.
• Sponsored content and partnerships offer additional income, while also aligning with the fitness interests of users (so it feels less intrusive).
• The freemium model ensures a large user base, which helps with growth and retention, making the app attractive to potential investors or partners.

By considering these factors, you’re ensuring that the app can not only survive but thrive in the market, making it viable from a business perspective while still delivering value to users.

Feasibility

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

Some feasibility factors include:

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

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

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

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

Example of feasibility

Continuing with the fitness app example, let’s explore feasibility—ensuring that the app can actually be built and maintained with the available resources, technology, and team capacity.

Feasibility in Action

You’ve designed a desirable and potentially viable app with a freemium model, premium features, and possible in-app purchases. However, before moving forward, you need to ensure it’s technically feasible to implement these features with the resources you have.

1. Assess the Development Team’s Skills: You review your team’s capabilities. Your developers are skilled in building mobile apps, but the gamification features (like badges and achievements) you’ve designed require more sophisticated backend systems for tracking user progress in real-time. To make it feasible, you might decide to:
   • Start with basic badges that are awarded based on simple rules (e.g., completing 10 workouts) and phase in more advanced features over time.
   • Use an existing third-party service that provides gamification tools, rather than building it from scratch, saving time and resources.
2. Use Readily Available Technology: Instead of developing a custom AI-based workout recommendation engine (which would be desirable but complex), you decide to use a machine learning API from a trusted provider (like AWS or Google Cloud). This allows you to implement basic personalized recommendations with much less development effort, making the feature feasible within your current tech stack.
3. Optimize for Platform Limitations: Your team needs to ensure the app works smoothly on both iOS and Android. Since developing two separate apps would be resource-intensive, you opt for a cross-platform framework like React Native. This makes it feasible to launch on both platforms using a single codebase, saving time and reducing maintenance costs.
4. Infrastructure and Scaling: The premium subscription model will involve tracking individual user accounts, payments, and access to premium content. To ensure this is feasible at launch, you might integrate with a trusted subscription management service (like Stripe or Paddle) instead of building a custom payment system from scratch. Additionally, you consider using cloud services (e.g., AWS or Google Cloud) for scalable storage and server needs, allowing you to handle user growth without needing to manage your own servers.
5. MVP (Minimum Viable Product) Approach: You realize that building all the features—badges, custom workout plans, social sharing, etc.—at once is not feasible within your current timeline and budget. So, you plan to release an MVP version of the app that includes the core workout tracking and a few simple badges. Other features, like advanced analytics or social sharing, will be introduced in later versions once the app gains traction and resources allow for further development.

Why This Supports Feasibility

• By leveraging third-party tools and APIs, you reduce the development time and complexity, making the project more manageable.
• Using React Native allows you to build for both iOS and Android with a single development team, saving significant time and cost.
• Subscription management services like Stripe make payments and user account management straightforward without the need to build complex systems in-house.
• Focusing on an MVP approach ensures you can release the app in stages, allowing the team to validate the core idea and refine the product without being overwhelmed by too many features at once.

By considering the team’s skills, available technology, and development time, this approach ensures that the fitness app can be built within the given constraints, making it feasible.

Using Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility in a Design Review

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

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

A UX Design Review Template

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hypotheses about the new design: 

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

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

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

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

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

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.

What are 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

What Interaction Designers Do?

An interaction designer’s role focuses on how users interact with products, particularly digital ones like websites, apps, or software interfaces. Their job is to ensure that these interactions are intuitive, seamless, and enjoyable.

Here’s a breakdown of what interaction designers do:

1. Understand User Needs

Interactive designers spend a lot of time researching who the users are and what they need. This includes conducting user research, interviews, and analyzing data to figure out the problems they face and how the product can solve them. Understanding these needs is crucial to designing interactions that make sense for the user.

2. Create User Flows

Once interaction designers know what users need, they design user flows, which are basically maps that outline the steps a user takes to complete a task in the product. For example, in an e-commerce app, the user flow might be from adding an item to their cart, through the checkout process, to receiving a confirmation. The goal is to make these steps as easy and efficient as possible.

3. Design Interactive Elements

This is where interactive designers focus on buttons, navigation, and forms—all the interactive elements users click, tap, or swipe. They design these elements to be clear, functional, and accessible. They’re always thinking about things like: “Does this button stand out? Will the user know what happens when they click it?”

4. Prototype and Test

Interactive designers build prototypes—early models of the product—so we can test how people actually use it. This stage is all about testing assumptions. They gather feedback from users and stakeholders, see what’s working and what’s not, and refine the design based on that.

5. Collaborate with Other Teams

Interactive designers work closely with UX designers, developers, and product managers to make sure the designs are feasible and meet business goals. Developers need to know exactly how interactions should work (like what happens when you hover over a button), and I’m there to clarify and iterate as needed.

6. Ensure Consistency

A big part of their role is making sure the design is consistent across the entire product. Users should feel familiar as they move through different sections. That means sticking to the same design patterns for similar tasks and interactions.

7. Balance User and Business Needs

While their main focus is the user experience, interactive designers also need to align the design with business objectives. For example, if the goal is to increase sign-ups, they might design an interaction that nudges users towards the registration page without feeling pushy or disrupting the user journey.

8. Stay Updated

Finally, interaction designers keep up with design trends, tools, and best practices. Interaction design evolves quickly, and it’s important to stay ahead to ensure the product remains competitive and user-friendly.

In essence, They’re here to make sure the product not only looks good but works in a way that’s easy and satisfying for users. Their focus is always on improving the interaction between the user and the product.

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.

Using AI like ChatGPT to create AI personas for UX design is an emerging practice that can enhance the persona development process, making it faster, more data-driven, and adaptable. Here’s how it works and the potential benefits.

If you’re a fan of AI in design, Merge AI is sure to catch your attention. With UXPin’s design tool with AI features, you can combine the power of code-based design systems with AI-driven component generation for more consistent UI and faster design decisions. This innovative tool bridges the gap between designers and developers, ensuring that what you design is exactly what gets built. Test Merge AI for 14 days on trial. Try UXPin for free.

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What Are AI Personas?

AI personas are simulated user profiles created with the help of artificial intelligence. These personas are designed to represent different user segments based on data and insights. Traditionally, personas are crafted through user research, interviews, and surveys. With AI, personas can be generated or enriched by analyzing large sets of user data, behaviors, and preferences, allowing for more dynamic and up-to-date user representations.

How to Create AI Personas with ChatGPT

AI personas can transform the traditional UX persona development process by offering dynamic, data-driven profiles that evolve with real user behaviors. ChatGPT can assist UX designers in creating, refining, and updating personas quickly and efficiently. Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to leverage ChatGPT for creating AI personas.

Step 1: Understand Your Target Audience and Gather Initial Data

Before using ChatGPT to generate personas, it’s essential to collect or define the data sources that represent your users. AI personas should be grounded in real information to be truly effective. Some sources include:

• User Surveys: Existing data from customer surveys or interviews.
• Analytics: Data from Google Analytics, heatmaps, and other user behavior tools.
• Customer Feedback: Information from product reviews, support tickets, and feedback forms.
• Market Research: Industry reports and competitor analysis.

Once you’ve gathered your user data, you can feed relevant details to ChatGPT to help generate more accurate personas.

Step 2: Start with Basic Prompts to Generate Persona Outlines

To create AI personas with ChatGPT, you’ll need to start by defining the basic traits that make up a persona. You can use ChatGPT to generate these traits by providing a simple prompt. Here’s an example prompt to begin creating an outline:

Prompt Example: “Help me create a UX persona for a young professional who uses mobile apps to manage personal finances. Include details like age, occupation, goals, pain points, and preferred technology.”

ChatGPT will then generate a persona with a specific user profile based on the information provided. You can adjust this as needed by asking more detailed follow-up questions or refining the initial prompt.

Example Output:

• Name: Emily Jones
• Age: 29
• Occupation: Marketing Manager
• Goals: Track monthly spending, build savings, plan for retirement.
• Pain Points: Struggles with overly complex finance apps; concerned about data privacy.
• Technology: Uses mobile apps on iPhone, prefers clean, simple UIs, syncs with banking apps.

Step 3: Expand Persona Details with Specific Prompts

Once you have a basic persona outline, you can use ChatGPT to enrich it with more specific details, such as motivations, behaviors, or even the type of content they prefer. Here are prompts to expand the persona:

1. Goals and Motivations: “What are the main motivations for Emily Jones to use a personal finance app?”
2. User Behavior: “Describe how Emily typically interacts with personal finance apps on her mobile device.”
3. Pain Points: “What are the biggest pain points for users like Emily when it comes to managing personal finances through mobile apps?”
4. Daily Routine: “Describe Emily’s daily routine and when she is most likely to interact with financial tools or apps.”

This iterative process allows you to build detailed, well-rounded personas by continuously refining the responses ChatGPT provides.

Step 4: Create Multiple Personas for Different User Segments

UX projects often need multiple personas to represent different user segments. You can use ChatGPT to create additional personas by altering the input criteria. For example:

Prompt Example: “Create a persona for an older adult who is less tech-savvy and needs an intuitive mobile app for tracking retirement savings.”

This will generate a persona for a different demographic, and you can repeat the process to capture a variety of user segments (e.g., tech-savvy millennials, older users, or small business owners).

Example Output:

• Name: Richard Cooper
• Age: 62
• Occupation: Retired
• Goals: Simplify budgeting for retirement savings.
• Pain Points: Finds most apps too complex, worried about making financial mistakes.
• Technology: Uses Android but prefers apps with large text and straightforward navigation.

Step 5: Use Data to Refine and Validate Personas

After generating initial personas with ChatGPT, you should validate these personas with actual data and feedback. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Validate with Real User Feedback:
   • Compare AI-generated personas with real user feedback from interviews or surveys to ensure they align with actual behaviors and needs.
2. Refine Personas Using Additional Data:
   • Use analytics data (such as app usage patterns, popular features, or common drop-off points) to refine personas, updating pain points, goals, or behaviors based on real-world insights.
3. Iterate Based on Testing:
   • During usability testing, gather more feedback on how users like “Emily” or “Richard” interact with your product. Use this to fine-tune the personas further.

Step 6: Create Scenarios and Journey Maps Using Personas

Once you’ve created your AI personas, you can prompt ChatGPT to create specific user scenarios or journey maps for each persona. This will help you visualize how each persona interacts with your product.

Scenario Prompt Example: “Create a user scenario for Emily Jones using a new feature in a personal finance app that helps her track her spending habits.”

Example Output:

• Scenario: Emily opens the personal finance app at the end of the week to review her spending. She navigates to the “Weekly Summary” feature, where she sees a breakdown of her spending by category. Emily uses the feature to spot an increase in dining out expenses and sets a goal to reduce that spending next month.

You can also generate full user journey maps for a persona by prompting ChatGPT to outline the steps a user might take during a specific interaction, such as signing up for the app or achieving a specific goal.

Step 7: Use Personas for Cross-Team Collaboration

Share AI-generated personas with your team to ensure everyone is aligned. Personas can help:

• Developers understand key features and usability needs.
• Marketers tailor communication and campaigns based on user motivations.
• Designers craft user-centered interfaces that address personas’ pain points and goals.

By integrating AI personas into the workflow, cross-functional teams have a common understanding of the target users, leading to more cohesive decisions.

Step 8: Continuously Update and Improve Personas

One of the key benefits of using AI-generated personas is their ability to evolve. As you gather more data, continue using ChatGPT to update the personas with new insights. This dynamic approach ensures that your personas stay relevant and reflective of real user needs over time.

Update Example: “Based on recent feedback, Emily’s financial goals have changed. Update her persona to reflect a greater focus on long-term investment planning.”

Best Practices for Using AI in Persona Development

1. Combine AI with Qualitative Research: While AI like ChatGPT can speed up persona creation, always supplement personas with qualitative user research (interviews, surveys) to ensure depth and accuracy.
2. Validate AI Personas with Real Data: Use analytics and real user interactions to refine and confirm the personas created by ChatGPT.
3. Keep Personas Dynamic: Don’t treat personas as static. Continuously update them with new data and insights as user behavior evolves.
4. Collaborate with the Entire Team: Share the personas across all teams—development, marketing, and design—so everyone works from the same understanding of your target users.

Advantages of Using AI Personas

1. Speed – AI can dramatically speed up the persona creation process. Instead of weeks of research and manual creation, AI can help you generate personas in a matter of minutes by processing large datasets or using existing insights.
2. Data-Driven Insights – AI personas can be based on actual user behavior and real-time data rather than relying solely on assumptions or limited qualitative research. This makes them more representative of current user needs and trends.
3. Scalability –AI can generate personas for multiple user segments quickly, which is useful for large projects or products that target diverse audiences. You can also create dynamic personas that evolve as new data comes in.
4. Consistency –AI ensures consistency across persona creation, reducing the subjective bias that can occur when different team members manually create personas. ChatGPT can be programmed to follow specific guidelines or criteria, maintaining uniformity.
5. Adaptability – Unlike traditional personas that can become outdated over time, AI personas can be updated easily by feeding new data into the system. This adaptability allows designers to keep pace with changing user needs and market conditions.

Challenges and Considerations

1. Accuracy and Depth – While AI like ChatGPT can analyze and generate personas based on available data, it may lack the depth of insights gained from direct user interactions. AI personas should be supplemented with qualitative research to ensure they capture the emotional and psychological nuances of users.
2. Ethical Concerns – AI-generated personas rely on data, which raises ethical considerations about data privacy and bias. Care must be taken to ensure that data used is representative, unbiased, and complies with privacy regulations.
3. Over-Reliance on AI – AI should not replace human intuition and empathy in the persona creation process. While AI can assist, it’s essential for designers to remain engaged with users through interviews and research to fully understand their needs.

Are AI Personas Any Good?

AI like ChatGPT can be a powerful tool for creating or enhancing UX personas. It speeds up the persona development process, allows for dynamic updates, and provides more data-driven insights. However, it’s important to combine AI-generated personas with traditional user research to ensure depth, empathy, and ethical integrity in your design process. By using AI personas, UX designers can save time, focus on more strategic tasks, and create more accurate and adaptable user profiles.

UXPin’s Merge revolutionized how teams design by allowing them to create fully functional, code-based components directly in the design tool. Now, with the power of AI, UXPin takes your design process to an entirely new level. Imagine the seamless integration of design systems and AI component generation that fits your design system perfectly. Test Merge AI for 14 days on trial. Try UXPin for free.

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A cheat sheet is a concise reference guide that provides quick, essential information about a particular topic or process. It’s designed to simplify complex information into easy-to-follow steps without having to sift through large amounts of content.

In the context of UX process, a cheat sheet might outline the steps in the design process It acts as a quick, structured tool to guide you through each step, ensuring that important tasks are not overlooked and that the design work remains organized and efficient.

If you’re working in a large team, use UXPin to streamline your entire UX process and improve collaboration across departments. UXPin offers an all-in-one design tool that allows designers, developers, and stakeholders to work seamlessly together. With UXPin, you can create high-fidelity prototypes with real, interactive components—no need for switching between multiple tools or handoffs that lose important details. Try UXPin for free.

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Why Should You Follow This Cheat Sheet?

The cheat sheet transforms chaos into clarity, giving your team the tools to succeed from day one. It not only helps you stay on track but also elevates your work, turning good designs into great user experiences. With it, you’re not just completing a project—you’re crafting a product that truly solves problems, delights users, and exceeds expectations.

With this cheat sheet, you know exactly where to start: gathering insights from stakeholders, mapping out user journeys, and conducting solid user research. As you move from ideation to prototyping and testing, the cheat sheet ensures no steps are overlooked. It keeps the team aligned, helps you avoid mistakes, and provides a roadmap for each member to follow.

This cheatlist becomes handy when dealing with stakeholders. They can see the process is professional and methodical, and they trust the final product will meet user needs because you’ve built it around research and continuous iteration. Every decision you make is backed by data and user feedback. Instead of feeling lost, you’re confidently delivering a product that’s been validated at every step.

UX Process Cheat Sheet

Here’s a UX Process Cheat Sheet that provides an overview of key steps in a typical UX design process. This cheat sheet can help teams streamline their workflow and ensure a user-centered approach.

1. Discovery (Research Phase)

• Goal: Understand the problem space, users, and business objectives.
• Action Steps:
  1. Conduct stakeholder interviews to define business goals, project scope, and success metrics.
  2. Perform user research through interviews, surveys, and contextual inquiries to understand user pain points, behaviors, and motivations.
  3. Analyze competitors by identifying market gaps and opportunities.
  4. Review user data and performance metrics to uncover trends and identify areas for improvement.
  5. Conduct a SWOT analysis to evaluate strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for the product.
  6. Document detailed user personas and user journey maps.
  7. Compile a competitive analysis report, highlighting key findings.
  8. Draft a preliminary PRD that outlines product goals, constraints, and user requirements.

2. Product Definition (Define Phase)

• Goal: Establish a clear product vision that aligns with user and business needs.
• Action Steps:
  1. Organize a product kickoff meeting to align all stakeholders on the product vision, roles, and responsibilities.
  2. Define value propositions, customer segments, and strategic goals.
  3. Conduct a technical feasibility assessment to ensure the product concept is achievable.
  4. Perform a risk assessment to identify potential roadblocks and how to mitigate them.
  5. Create a product vision document that defines the long-term strategic vision.
  6. Create a detailed Functional Specification Document (FSD) to outline technical requirements such as supported platforms, input fields, error messages, and system behaviors.

3. Ideation (Creative Phase)

• Goal: Generate creative solutions that address user needs and business objectives.
• Action Steps:
  1. Facilitate brainstorming and design thinking workshops to generate a range of possible solutions.
  2. Conduct assumption mapping to identify and validate key assumptions about users, the market, and technical constraints.
  3. Create service blueprints to visualize the ecosystem and interactions users have with the product.
  4. Organize and prioritize features using card sorting exercises and a user task matrix.
  5. Develop rough sketches and low-fidelity wireframes to visualize key concepts.
  6. Prioritize the feature list based on technical feasibility, business impact, and user needs.

4. Prototyping (Design Phase)

• Goal: Create interactive prototypes to test ideas and validate user flows.
• Action Steps:
  1. Build low-fidelity prototypes using UXPin to quickly test concepts and user flows.
  2. Create prototypes focused on structure, user flow, and content hierarchy, without visual styling.
  3. Create a content strategy to plan how messaging, content structure, and hierarchy align with user needs.
  4. Implement accessibility guidelines to ensure compliance with WCAG standards (e.g., color contrast, screen reader compatibility).
  5. Design microinteractions that offer feedback to users during interactions.
  6. Develop high-fidelity prototypes that include branding, visual design, and detailed interaction elements.
  7. Establish a design system, if needed, to ensure design consistency and efficiency.

5. Testing (Validation Phase)

• Goal: Validate design decisions through user testing and iteration.
• Action Steps:
  1. Conduct usability testing sessions with real users to gather qualitative feedback on ease of use and task completion.
  2. Implement A/B testing to compare different design variations and determine the most effective solution.
  3. Perform heuristic evaluations to assess the product against usability principles and best practices.
  4. Validate frequent user tasks using the user task matrix to ensure the most critical functions are easy to use.
  5. Test for accessibility using automated tools and manual testing methods to ensure compliance with accessibility guidelines.
  6. Monitor performance benchmarks to ensure the product runs efficiently across devices.
  7. Document usability findings and iterate on the design based on feedback.

6. Build (Implementation Phase)

• Goal: Translate the validated design into a working product through collaboration between design and development teams.
• Action Steps:
  1. Prepare and deliver design specifications and assets to developers using tools.
  2. Plan development sprints using an Agile methodology, ensuring continuous feedback loops with stakeholders.
  3. Integrate automated testing tools for functionality, performance, and security to ensure code quality during development.
  4. Implement design QA processes to ensure the final build matches design specifications and functions as expected.
  5. Use bug tracking software (e.g., JIRA) to monitor, document, and resolve issues as they arise.
  6. Perform dogfooding (internal testing) by having your own team use the product to find bugs and usability issues.
  7. Document technical details for future reference and maintenance.

7. Iteration & Continuous Improvement

• Goal: Continuously refine and improve the product based on real-world data and user feedback.
• Action Steps:
  1. Set up feedback loops with customer support, sales, and other customer-facing teams to collect real-world issues and suggestions.
  2. Monitor analytics and performance metrics using tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar to identify friction points or areas for improvement.
  3. Conduct post-launch A/B testing and usability testing to further optimize the product experience.
  4. Use feature flagging to release new features incrementally and gather feedback from specific user segments.
  5. Update the product roadmap based on feedback, performance data, and business priorities.
  6. Iterate on key features based on insights from post-launch analysis.

Supplemental Tools and Documentation:

• Action Steps:
  1. Create a Functional Specifications Document (FSD) with precise technical details, including data input fields, validation rules, and interaction behaviors.
  2. Develop a Design Specification Document that includes detailed typography, spacing, grids, colors, and reusable components.
  3. Draft a QA Test Plan outlining the steps and criteria for testing the product’s functionality, usability, and performance.
  4. Implement a Content Strategy Document to plan and manage content structure, governance, and updates.
  5. Maintain a Product Roadmap that outlines future features, updates, and iterations based on feedback and performance data.

How to use UX Process Checklist?

To use this checklist effectively in your UX process, follow these steps:

Set Up at the Start of Your Project

Begin by reviewing the checklist before you start the project. Identify which phases of the UX process are most relevant to your current project and align them with your goals, team structure, and timeline.

Integrate into Your Workflow

Break your project into stages that mirror the checklist’s phases: Discovery, Product Definition, Ideation, Prototyping, Testing, Build, and Iteration. Assign team members to each phase and ensure they understand their responsibilities.

Track Progress

Use the checklist as a progress tracker. After each phase is completed, review the corresponding steps in the checklist to ensure nothing has been overlooked. Check off completed tasks and revisit areas where refinement or additional work may be required.

Collaborate with Your Team

Share the checklist with your team so everyone has a clear understanding of the process. Use it as a guide in meetings to set expectations, discuss progress, and resolve any blockers.

Adapt and Iterate

Not every project will follow the exact same path. Adapt the checklist as needed for specific projects—add tasks for unique requirements or skip phases if they don’t apply. Remember to review and iterate on the checklist itself after each project to improve its relevance for future work.

Maintain Accountability

Use the checklist as a source of accountability. Keep it visible to track what has been done and what’s next, ensuring that the entire team stays aligned and responsible for delivering on time and meeting the project’s goals.

Use UX Process Checklist to Track Your Projects

By using checklists effectively, you can ensure a smooth, structured, and user-focused design process, leading to high-quality products delivered on time.

When it comes to delivering exceptional design and streamlining project workflows, UXPin stands out as the ultimate tool for UX designers and teams. UXPin brings everything you need—design, prototyping, and collaboration—into one platform, making it easy to manage the entire design process from start to finish.

UXPin is your all-in-one solution that saves time, reduces friction, and ensures that every design decision is validated and user-centered. If you’re looking for a tool that makes designing smarter, faster, and more collaborative in real time, UXPin is the best choice for any team. Try UXPin for free.

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“The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it does exist.”  – Zig Ziglar

Product definition is the cornerstone of our entire product and sets the stage for the success of our product. Every solution we design builds upon the framework of this initial problem.

That means we need to start with a problem that we work to understand and define–carefully. Otherwise, we risk clinging to the first problem that feels right. And we all know how that ends.

UXPin Merge is an ideal solution for tackling design problems by bridging the gap between designers and developers. It allows teams to use live, code-based components from a design system to create fully interactive prototypes that look and function like the final product. This drastically reduces the discrepancies between design and development, eliminates handoff issues, and ensures design consistency across the project.

With UXPin Merge, you can test real-world scenarios early in the process, quickly iterate, and validate if the design solves the original problem, all within a single platform. Request access to UXPin Merge.

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What is a Design Problem?

A design problem is an obstacle or challenge that arises during the creation of a product, service, or system that affects the user experience. It typically involves a mismatch between user needs or goals and the current design solution.

Design problems can range from usability issues (e.g., confusing navigation) to more complex challenges, like ensuring accessibility or aligning business objectives with user satisfaction. Identifying and solving these problems is at the heart of UX design, as it focuses on improving the experience for users and achieving desired outcomes.

Imagine you’re designing a website, and users are struggling to find the information they need. That’s a design problem. It happens when the design of a product or system doesn’t meet user needs or expectations. This could be anything from hard-to-use navigation, a confusing checkout process, or even a mismatch between the design and business goals.

In UX, solving design problems is all about understanding what users need, why they struggle, and creating solutions that make their experience smoother, faster, and more enjoyable.

How to Design an App Around a Problem?

Let’s go through the process of designing an app around a problem. Since it’s always fun to be a designer on a project that deals with a problem you can relate to, I’ll choose a problem experienced by myself and the majority of people I know.

The problem of having too much stress.

I did some quick and dirty research by calling up a dozen friends and asking if it was a problem they felt they also had. 9 out of the 12 people said they experience the same problem. I suspect 3 of those 12 people are super-secret Zen monks.

Of course, I didn’t have to call them up. I could’ve just sent this 5 minute survey (which you can feel free to take too) to get a sense of the problem.

Now that we have perceived a problem to design an app around we can define it in a problem statement, or definition — a statement that captures the scope of the problem we are trying to solve.

In this piece, I’ll dive deep into how to write a well-crafted statement that communicates the right problem to the team. The next time you come up with a great product idea (or get feedback), follow the steps below to make sure your heart and mind are in the right place.

How to Identify a Design Problem

Adapted from: Danielle Elder, Creative Commons 2.0

As a designer fortunate enough to get to work with some incredible teams building mobile apps, I get to hear a lot about what other people think about the way many apps are designed and function. There are so many great examples of well designed apps available, it makes finding inspiration easy and enjoyable. Not every app is a pillar of stellar design though, every now and then I hear about one that got everything wrong.

Recently my wife was telling me about an app she was trying to use to assist her with some of the fun things associated with newborn humans, and said:

“This is a bad app.”

My designer’s ears pricked up at the sound of a problem.

“What’s that dear? You have a problem that needs solving?”

“No, I’m trying to tell you a story. Can’t you just empathize with me and let me finish?” she probably implored.

“Of course I’ll help you!” I exclaimed. “First we need to understand your perceived problem at a deeper level.”

An audible sigh came from somewhere in the room.

Many people don’t know how to begin solving their user’s problem because they don’t take the time to listen and really consider their problem. This is usually true not because the person is lazy, rather they just don’t know how to go about thinking about the problem on a deeper level in an effort to understand what is causing it. The design process has to start somewhere though, and that starting point is usually our perceived problem. The perceived problem my wife was having (apart from my listening and empathizing skills) was that the app she was trying to use was a bad app.

To recap, here is what we need to do when a problem is perceived:

• Acknowledge the problem. First things first, we must understand that there is a problem. You can’t solve it without saying that it exists. Brushing it under the rug does nothing for you or for your users.
• Listen and consider. Don’t just jump to wanting to solve the problem. You have to listen to your users — think about my interaction with my wife — to really understand what’s going on. Asking follow up questions is fine, but don’t just try to suggest a solution before you really understand what’s going on.

Let’s go back to our original problem as an example: I have too much stress.

Well, the problem of having too much stress is probably too general to design a solution around. As is the problem of an app being bad. This is where you need to probe deeper, asking more questions: How many ways can you fix a bad app? All the ways probably. How many different ways can you think of to manage stress? Are overall app design and amounts of stress our real problems, or are they symptoms of deeper problems?

Learn more: The Skeptical Designer’s UX Process. 

What Are the Symptoms of Bad Design Problems?

A symptom is a subjective departure from normal function or feeling which is noticed by a user.

For example, the feeling (feelings are subjective, not objective) of being tired (departure from the normal of being awake during the day) is a symptom (a subjective departure from the norm) of not getting enough sleep.

Adapted from: Eamon Curry, Creative Commons 2.0

Our feeling of too much stress is a subjective departure from our normal function of not being too stressed. It also has many different ways we could deal with it, such as having a glass of wine at night, or a bottle, or listening to music, or watching TV.

Maybe you know someone who has huge meltdowns and throws tantrums as a way of letting off steam.

Maybe you sit in a quiet place and breathe deeply and try to figure out what is causing you to feel stressed.

Many people don’t even recognize that they are stressed, which means it’s not easy to recognize what is causing it.

Is having too much stress really our problem? It seems like it is just a symptom of a much deeper problem. In order to solve the perceived problem of having too much stress, we need to think about the problem to determine if it is a root cause or merely a symptom of something deeper.

What is the Root Cause of the Design Problem?

Why is it important to find the root cause of the problem? It’s important because solving a symptom isn’t a permanent solution.

For example, if your leg hurts you could take aspirin to dull the pain, but you will not be fixing the root cause of the pain. You will continue to experience the pain which is a symptom of the real problem.

If you went to the doctor complaining about the pain and she determined that your leg hurt because you broke a bone, you could address the broken bone, which is the root cause of the pain problem.

So how do we determine the root cause of our perceived problem of too much stress? We can use something developed at Toyota during the design of its manufacturing methodologies known as the Five Whys Technique.

The Five Whys Technique

Adapted from: Jeffrey Pioquinto, Creative Commons 2.0

The Five Whys Technique is an iterative question-asking technique we will use to explore the cause and effect relationships underlying our perceived problems. This will enable us to find the root cause of our perceived problem. What was my wife confused about again? Something about an app she was trying to use, I think.

“This is a bad app. Also you could do a better job at listening to me when I’m trying to tal..”

..oh yeah that’s right. She couldn’t figure out how to use a productivity app to help her manage some of the fun things that are associated with having a newborn. Things like the amount of poopy diapers, ounces of milk consumed, etc.

In an effort to identify the deeper problem with the app I suggested we go through the Five Whys process.

1. Why is it a bad app?
   …because it doesn’t work the right way. (refined problem)
2. Why doesn’t it work the right way?
   …because I don’t understand where to go. (refined problem)
3. Why don’t you understand where to go?
   …because none of these icons make sense. (refined problem)
4. Why don’t the icons make sense?
   …because they don’t take me where I think they should. (refined problem)
5. Why don’t they take you where you think they should?
   …because some of them that I think are icons, actually aren’t, and the ones that are icons aren’t ones I’ve ever seen before. (alterable behaviors identified)

Created in UXPin

The root cause of my wife’s problem has been identified very quickly, which I can send to the app’s design team as actionable feedback.

How can we be sure we have identified a root cause? The key to understanding the root cause of the problem (it isn’t always answered with the 5th why) is in identifying a broken process or an alterable behavior. Sometimes there are more than one you will identify, like in the app we are going to design to help with the problem of too much stress.

1. Why do I have too much stress?
   …because I have too many stressful thoughts. (refined problem)
2. Why do I have so many stressful thoughts?
   …because I can not calm my thoughts. (refined problem)
3. Why am I unable to calm my mind?
   …because I don’t practice calming my mind. (refined problem and alterable behavior)
4. Why am I unable to practice calming my mind?
   …because I don’t have a process to calm my mind. (broken process identified)
5. Why do I not have a process to calm my mind?
   …because I’m not aware of myself enough to know I need one. (deeper broken process identified)

Created in UXPin

The root cause of the perceived problem of too much stress is a lack of process to calming and focusing our mind. In this example, calming my thoughts would lead to less stress, which solves the original problem. We can evolve our problem definition now.

Learn more: Free e-book UX Design Process Best Practices. 

Redefining the Design Problem

New Problem Definition:
To enable users to calm their mind in an effort to reduce their stress.

What about the deeper problem of not being more aware of our true self? Sometimes a product will benefit from attempts to solve a deeper broken processes than may be necessary. By designing a solution with a deeper and more abstract problem definition we should still be solving the original symptom with the benefit of solving additional symptoms.

Throughout the design process we will continue to evolve the problem definition, so if we find we have gone too deep we can abstract back up one level. Let’s go ahead and redefine our problem definition:

Redefined Problem Definition:
to enable users to become more aware of themselves in an effort to reduce their stress.

Photo Credit: Kevin Dooley, Creative Commons 2.0

Here are a couple of ways you can probe deeper into design problems with your team, as discussed in the e-book The Guide to UX Design Process and Documentation:

• Brainstorm on the problem. Get your team together on the perceived problem, having everyone on the team — from designers to developers to marketers to business analysts to sales — participate. Now while it’ll be up to the designer ultimately to solve the design problems, teammates from other departments can provide other insights that will help frame your work. After all, sales may be closer to users and have a deeper understanding of their problems while a business analyst may have insights into the market.
• Researching the problem. You can conduct a competitive marketing analysis to determine if this problem is being faced elsewhere. You can also conduct a customer survey (like the one we did earlier on stress). If it’s an existing product, dig through your analytics, heuristics, content, or conduct users tests.

Doing these things will go a long way to getting to what’s causing your problem, its root cause and how to solve it.

3 Examples of Design Problems

1. Enlight

According to Stav Tishler from Enlight, their mobile app’s problem definition is:

“To empower the mobile photographer with creative tools, that until now, were reserved only for professionals and only on desktop.”

Enlight solves this problem through the careful design and technology. Lightricks’ proprietary image processing engine powers the tools that are tied together with a consistent UI that allow the users to transfer the knowledge they acquire by learning one tool, to other tools.

2. PureChat

According to Hamid Shojaee, Pure Chat CEO, their mobile app’s problem definition is:

“To enable small business owners who are on the move to be able to communicate with visitors on their websites.”

Maintaining 4.5 stars on the Apple and Google mobile app stores is a pretty good indicator that they have designed a great solution for the problem they set out to solve.

3. Crowd Mics

According to Tim Holladay, Crowd Mics CEO, their mobile app’s problem definition is:

“To enable users who have a voice to be heard in the conference, meeting or any live event in which they are attending.”

Crowd Mics turns the users’ smartphones into wireless microphones for use in live events.

Conclusion

By dedicating some time to thinking about the problem your product aims to solve, you will define a strong foundation for all your future design decisions.

• Start by making a list of the problems you perceive that you plan on solving with your product and combine them into a problem definition.
• Next take some time to think deeper about the problem definition with the 5 Whys.
• Finally discuss the problem with any of the product’s stakeholders and re-evaluate the problem, iterating on the problem definition if it needs further clarification.

Once you write a really strong problem statement, don’t feel like you’re married to it.

As you go along the design process, you may have to redefine your problem. That’s because you’ll discover things that weren’t apparent in the early discovery stage of the process.

For more UX advice, get the free guide UX Design Process Best Practices. 

Let’s say you’re building a design, and developers need to turn it into a real product. Often, things get lost in translation. UXPin Merge solves this by allowing designers to work with actual, code-based components from a design system. This means the prototype isn’t just a mockup—it works like the real product.

UXPin Merge eliminates the usual back-and-forth between designers and developers, ensuring everything looks and behaves exactly as intended. Plus, you can test and iterate faster to fix problems before going live. Request access to UXPin Merge here.

The post What is a Design Problem? How to Avoid Bad Ones 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.

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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

#1: UI Design with regular UXPin

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.

#2: Code-backed design with UXPin Merge

Those of you who use UXPin Merge can use Frames to build fully responsive prototypes.

1. Open a UXPin prototype.
2. Select the Frame tool from the Quick Tools Bar.
3. Click anywhere on the canvas to create a default frame (300 x 100 px), or click and drag on the canvas to create a frame with custom dimensions.
4. Put code-backed components inside of Frame and manage their properties.

You can preview just a frame of full design in the Spec Mode. Frames in UXPin work similarly to iFrames but offer more flexibility for responsive design. They support dynamic resizing and styling which allows components to automatically adapt their appearance and behavior for different screen sizes, making it easy to ensure a responsive design across all devices. To see how it works exactly, request access to UXPin Merge.

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

Where does the empathy map come in?

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s get started.

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

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What Are Empathy Maps?

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

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

When to Use Empathy Maps

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

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

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

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

Empathy Map Format

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

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

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

Some common variants include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empathy Map – The Creation Process 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to Do With Finished Empathy Maps

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

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

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

Next Steps

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

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

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

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.

Discover UXPin Merge

What is a Prototype?

A prototype is a simulation of a final product which design teams use for testing before committing resources to building the actual thing.

The goal of a prototype is to test and validate ideas before sharing them with stakeholders and eventually passing the final designs to engineering teams for the development process.

Prototypes are essential for identifying and solving user pain points with participants during usability testing. Testing prototypes with end-users enables UX teams to visualize and optimize the user experience during the design process.

Engineering is expensive, and making changes to a final product is often not as straightforward as teams may anticipate. So, finding and fixing errors during the design process is critical.

Another common misconception about prototyping is that it only needs to be done once or twice at the end of the design process— it’s not true. 

One of our mottos that we believe at UXPin is “test early and test often.”

According to Elementor’s Director of UX, the website building platform’s designer – there should be an average of four to five prototyping sessions, depending on the complexity of a given UI design.

Teams should create a prototype of every possible iteration of the design—even your early basic ideas for solving a user need. Prototyping shouldn’t be reserved only for beta tests of the final version; you should test basic and more complex versions of the end-product.

If testing a prototype produces new insights about how users interact with your product, then it’s worth taking the time to gather user feedback and iterate—whether that’s paper, low-fidelity or high-fidelity.

Prototyping Tools

A variety of tools and methods are available for creating prototypes in UX design, each offering different features and capabilities. Tools like UXPin, Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD are popular for creating both low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes. These tools allow designers to build interactive prototypes with dynamic elements, transitions, and animations, enhancing the ability to test and refine designs.

Read about top prototyping tools for designers and developers.

Prototype in UX Design

In UX design, a prototype serves as a preliminary version of a product, allowing designers, developers, and stakeholders to explore and validate design concepts before full-scale development. Prototyping is a critical step in the UX design process because it bridges the gap between a concept and its final execution, ensuring that the end product meets user needs and expectations.

Qualities of Effective Prototypes in UX Design

Prototypes are crucial tools in the UX design process, embodying several key qualities that make them indispensable for creating successful, user-centered designs:

1. Visualizing and Testing Ideas

Prototypes allow designers to bring their ideas to life in a tangible format, making it easier to explore and test different concepts. This hands-on approach provides a clearer picture of how a design will function in real-world scenarios, enabling designers to make more informed decisions and iterate quickly based on what works best.

2. Enhancing User Experience

An effective prototype goes beyond static visuals by simulating interactive user experiences. This enables designers to identify usability issues early on, ensuring the design is intuitive and user-friendly. By testing these interactions in a prototype, designers can refine the user journey and enhance the overall quality of the final product.

3. Facilitating Feedback and Collaboration

Prototypes serve as a concrete representation of design ideas, making them an excellent tool for gathering feedback and fostering collaboration among team members and stakeholders. By providing a visual and interactive reference, prototypes ensure that everyone involved in the project can review, discuss, and align on the design direction, fostering a more collaborative and consensus-driven development process.

4. Reducing Development Costs

One of the most valuable qualities of prototypes is their ability to catch design flaws and usability issues early. By identifying and resolving these problems before full-scale development begins, teams can avoid costly changes later in the process. This proactive approach reduces the risk of expensive rework and helps maintain project timelines and budgets.

5. Enabling Rapid Iteration

Prototypes are inherently flexible, allowing for quick changes and adjustments based on feedback, testing, and analysis. This quality is vital for refining the design to meet user needs and achieve project goals. The ability to iterate rapidly ensures that the design evolves in response to real user insights, making it more effective and aligned with the intended user experience.

Types of Prototypes

We’re going to explore prototypes in three types of prototypes: paper, digital, and HTML.

Paper Prototypes

A paper prototype is a prototype that is drawn on a paper or a digital whitebaord. Such a prototype is used during the early design stages, like a design thinking workshop while designers still brainstorm ideas.

Paper prototyping works best during early design stages where design teams collaborate to explore many concepts fast. Team members sketch ideas by hand using simple lines, shapes, and text. The emphasis is on lots of ideas and speed, not aesthetics.

UX Teams lay paper screens on the floor, table, or pinned to a board to simulate user flows. A common practice for testing these prototypes is to have one person play “the product,” switching the sketches according to how the real user behaves.

A low visual/low functional paper prototype.

Advantages of Paper Prototypes

• Fast — You can sketch a prototype in minutes, which is why paper works so well for testing lots of ideas. You can draw a prototype quickly (even during a brainstorming meeting), so you haven’t wasted more than a few minutes if an idea falls flat. 
• Inexpensive — You only need a maker pen and paper to create prototypes, making the process cheap and accessible.
• Team-building — Paper prototyping is a collaborative effort, and often teams have fun coming up with fresh ideas. It’s a fantastic team-building exercise, and these free-thinking sessions often inspire creativity.
• Documentation — Team members can keep physical copies of paper prototypes, notes, and todos for quick reference during future iterations. 

Disadvantages

• Unrealistic — No matter how skilled the art or craftsmanship, paper prototypes will never be more than hand-drawn representations of a digital product. So, while they’re quick to draw, paper prototypes produce little or no results when doing user testing.
• False positives — Sometimes, paper prototypes don’t validate ideas properly. What seems like a good idea on paper might not work effectively in a digital wireframe.
• No gut reactions — Paper prototypes rely on the user’s imagination, adding a break between seeing the stimulus and responding to it. That “gut” reaction is crucial for a successful UX.

Considering these advantages and disadvantages, we recommend paper prototyping only during early-stage design. Once you move from paper to digital, there shouldn’t be any reason to revisit hand-sketched prototypes for the same designs or user flows.

For more information on paper prototyping, check out these helpful resources:

• Paper Prototyping as a Usability Testing Technique by Justin Mifsud
• Better Use of Paper in UX Design by Marcin Treder
• iPhone User Interface Design, Paper Prototype Design (video)
• Printable Paper Prototyping Templates courtesy of Tripwire Magazine

Digital Prototyping

Digital prototyping is an exciting part of the design process. Prototypes start to resemble the final product allowing teams to test and validate ideas.

There are two types of digital prototypes:

• Low-fidelity prototypes: a user flow using wireframes
• High-fidelity prototypes: a user flow using mockups

Low-fidelity prototypes allow research teams to outline basic user flows and information architecture. High-fidelity prototypes go into more detail, testing user interfaces, interactions, and how usability participants interact with a product.

Designers build prototypes using design tools like Figma, Adobe XD, and others. Sometimes non-designers, from product teams use Powerpoint or Google Slides to simulate user flows.

UXPin is unique because it allows designers to create prototypes that look and function exactly like the final product—something you cannot achieve with other popular design tools!

Advantages of Digital Prototyping

• Realistic interactions — Testing with high-fidelity digital prototypes lets UX teams see how users interact with the final product, thus effectively iron out any usability issues.
• Flexibility — Test early and test often! You can start with lo-fi prototypes that become progressively more advanced as the product design process moves forward.
• Speed — While paper prototypes might be the fastest way to test ideas, digital prototypes are the quickest way to test usability issues. Once a product gets to the engineering stage, changes cost significantly more time and money.

Disadvantages

• Learning curve — Before you can build a prototype, you’ll need to learn and understand the software—which is why product teams often use Powerpoint instead of a specialized design tool. The good news is that most design software incorporates the same tools, so it’s relatively easy to switch between them.
• Cost — As you move from low-fidelity to high-fidelity prototyping, time and labor costs increase.

A prototype’s success depends on teams outlining clear objectives and KPIs for each usability study. Without a proper plan, designers can get side-tracked, adding unnecessary features and interactions!

Here are some helpful resources for creating digital prototypes:

• A 10-Minute Rapid Prototyping Lesson by Marek Bowers

HTML & JavaScript Prototyping

On rare occasions, teams might build HTML & JavaScript prototypes to get more accurate results. The downside to this approach is that coding comes with considerable time and technical costs.

But with UXPin Merge, that isn’t the case!

Product designers (and non-designers) can create code-based high-fidelity prototypes that look and function like the final product.

For example, with UXPin’s Merge technology, teams can use React components pulled from a Git repository or Storybook components to create fully functional high-fidelity prototypes. With UXPin Merge, participants never have to “imagine” what a button or dropdown will do because the prototype functions like the final product!

Low Visual/High Functional Prototype built-in HTML. (Image credit: Mike Hill)

Advantages

• Final product functionality — HTML prototypes provide participants with an accurate model of the final product.
• The technical foundation for the final product — Building an HTML prototype provides researchers with a valuable research tool and provides developers with the foundations for building the final product.
• Platform agnostic — You can test your prototype on virtually any operating system or device, and the user won’t need to run outside software.

Disadvantages

• Dependent on designer skill level — Your HTML prototype is only as good as your ability to code. Poorly coded prototypes could introduce usability issues that don’t have anything to do with UX design!
• Inhibits creativity — Coding takes time and focus to build a usable prototype. Designers might not achieve the same level of innovation or creativity as using a familiar design tool.

Here are some helpful resources on HTML prototyping:

• Designing with Code by Andy Fitzgerald
• The Advantage of Rapid Prototyping by ZURB
• UXPin Merge for interactive prototyping by Robert Kirkman

The Prototyping Process

There’s no single best process for prototyping; it all depends on the product and application. Below are the three most effective prototyping processes, each intended for different scenarios.

(Note: We advise that you ALWAYS test the prototype when going from lo-fi to hi-fi.)

Paper => Lo-fi Digital => Hi-fi Digital => Code

Most designers follow the paper => lo-fi digital => hi-fi digital => code process for prototyping—it’s how we designed UXPin :).

Teams collaborate to develop lots of ideas, sketching wireframes on paper and creating user flows before committing to digital. Here, UX teams will use common brainstorming methods like crazy eights or asking “how might we” questions to get into an end-user mindset.

A lo-fi digital prototype (wireframe) tests crucial elements like navigation and information architecture early in the design process. Teams can use feedback to make quick adjustments to wireframes before committing to mockups.

Once teams complete navigation and information architecture, designers build mockups resembling the final product—adding color, content, interactions, and animations.

When researchers have exhausted testing, UX teams hand over designs to engineers to develop the final product.

Paper => Lo-fi Digital => Code

Going from Lo-fi prototyping to code is an old approach that few teams ever use these days. While lo-fi prototyping is cheap, it doesn’t catch many of the usability issues high-fidelity prototypes expose.

Product developers without design skills might use the paper => lo-fi digital => code method because it’s quicker for them to code than learn how to use a design tool.

The process is exactly like the example above, except that teams will skip the hi-fi digital step.

Low fidelity prototype created during a Yelp redesign exercise. 

High fidelity prototype created during a Yelp redesign exercise.

HTML Prototyping => Code

Solo developers might skip any early prototyping methods and go straight to code. With no one to bounce ideas with, it can make sense for a developer to jump straight in.

Essentially, the prototype creates a foundation and evolves into the final product. This prototyping method is only effective for skilled product developers with efficient workflows.

Even designers with excellent design skills might want to avoid this method of prototyping. Low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototyping are significantly faster than building and editing code.

Paper =>UXPin Merge – Hi-fi Prototyping => Code

With UXPin Merge, you can accelerate the UX process through rapid prototyping. Create fully-functioning high-fidelity prototypes using UI code components to provide participants with a life-like model of the final product.

UX teams follow the standard paper prototyping processes as outlined above. Next, designers build high-fidelity prototypes using UXPin Merge just by dragging and dropping ready interactive UI blocks on the canvas.

The outcome: no more “imagining!” Your prototype will work just as the final product. Prototyping in a code-based design tool like UXPin Merge means engineers can build the final product significantly quicker than working with vector-based designs. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post What is a Prototype? A Guide to Functional UX appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

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.

Ship products faster by designing layouts that are production-ready from the start. Drag and drop code-backed components to build an interface of your product and get front-end code to build your app with. Try UXPin Merge.

Design UI with code-backed components.

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

Try UXPin Merge

What is 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.

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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 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.

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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.

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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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.

Try UXPin

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.

Build advanced prototypes

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

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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.