Tag: ux design

Over the past few decades, there is a remarkable change in our lifestyle, like our mode of transportation, our means of communication, our trading, etc. Similarly, digital tools and platforms that have become an integral part of human life too, have seen a rapid transformation. Thanks to the revolution in digital solutions through user-friendly interfaces. User Experience (UX) Design is a key factor that determines such an application’s efficiency and usability.  

Why is UX Important in Digital Industry: 

Building a digital presence is very important for any organization. Organizations mainly depend on appealing content, attractive interfaces, and competitive market strategy in promoting their products that are often backed with great user experience design. The benefits of UX design for organizations with the help of key improvement areas are: 

UX Metrics and Key Performance Index (KPI)

UX metrics help determine how the users are interacting with the product, user engagement, satisfaction levels, site traffic, and loyalty. Due to their subjective nature, these metrics are not easily measurable and can be tracked through a campaign. 

An organization’s success can be enhanced by taking the necessary steps to improve the key performance index or KPIs. Some of these include task efficiency, error frequency, task completion rates, learnability, average order per value, and revenue per user.  

Saves Development Cost 

Continuous engagement and frequent customer feedback right from the requirements gathering phase, through the product development life cycle are essential for a project’s success. Statistics prove that fixing issues late in the development cycle of a product is nearly 10 times the cost of fixing them early in the requirements gathering phase. Developers spend 40-50% of their time doing avoidable rework and it can be reduced by 33-50% with early user inputs, according to studies cited by IEEE. 

Product Success 

The key to a product’s success is measured by the ease of understanding the product, usability, and how well it addresses the problems for which it is designed. A prototype with early feedback from the end-user helps make the design of the product accurate. Unfortunately, at times, project leads progress impulsively toward building products without early analysis. Close to 80% of marketing teams say the aim of a customer experience strategy is to improve retention through a good user experience.  

Training and Support Costs  

Every organization needs to have a support system to continue the best customer engagement service. Operational costs are low if we have a high-quality UX design. This in turn saves time for the customer who can spend that quality time more on engaging with the product and getting even more addicted to it. Customer support teams can focus on other important challenges than on these trivial issues.  

How is UX Implemented in Products: 

Creating better products by implementing the best UX Design practices should be the approach of any designer. The organizations should focus on a collaborative and data-driven approach that is Discovery, Design, and Development.  

Discovery 

The product requirements and business challenges are initially communicated by the organization’s leadership team to set the product direction and explore through research. Review the requirement documents by collecting information through conducting interviews of the users to know their habits, historical data, and goals.  The identified opportunities to provide a solution to the problems are documented through this analysis.  

Design  

All the problems identified, and the path set in the initial discovery phase is first brainstormed through drawing workflow charts, making prototypes, reviewing, and modifying them. Once the low-fidelity prototypes are built they are sent for an expert’s review, and the design results of the program are shared. These low-fidelity prototypes that are approved are then used as a model to design the high-fidelity models that are further reviewed and modified. 

The prototypes that are designed are tested by the targeted users to find out usability issues and the interactive results scheme is recorded. The received results of the program according to the user demands enable designers to build a visual interface that includes the style, layout, and key interface design text. The visual interface is reviewed by the designer and the program is determined.  

The designers then enter the code cutting process where they cut pages, generate HTML codes, optimize the visual interface, and then review the UI standards. Feedback is collected from the users, bugs are fixed, and the whole process is optimized. All the prototypes that are tested and addressed for usability issues are now pushed into the final phase of development. 

Development 

Release tracking by collecting the user data and detecting each feedback channel that helps data screening out of the test report from the user and then publish it.  All the final prototypes that are pushed into the final stage are now developed with confidence.  

How can UX Design help any organization: 

UX design clearly improves revenues, customer retention, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. UX designers introduce positive, quantifiable, and qualitative changes to products and services. 89% of customers prefer to drop the product if it doesn’t have a good customer experience. So, organizations should consider heavy investment in providing the best user experience. 70% of new projects fail for not meeting user acceptance testing. Thorough research can help an organization provide various solutions and keep itself ahead in the marketplace.  

While most of these benefits can be measured and tracked through metrics for future enhancements, there are other tangible benefits like giving opportunities for developers to innovate new designs or solutions. It also provides a deeper understanding of users and their needs. An organization’s success to retain customers through new innovations and great customer experience helps in establishing the brand value which in turn helps add to the ROI (return on investment). Inovar’s user interface methodologies help in bringing ideas to reality by embracing new technologies and building creative user interface designs. Reach out to us to talk more. 

The world is evolving at an ever-growing right to change. The rise of economies, emerging technologies such as IoT, and the commoditization of knowledge are driving changes in the way we work. While forcing businesses to reinvent business mottos and the methods, they use a creative design and human-centric solution approach.

Complex problem solving has emerged as the top skill in this list. Business models seek professionals with the ability to unpack the problems and successfully navigate to a solution that isn’t necessarily obvious to the naked eye. Design Thinking has come into force with a discipline that many believe, will help businesses to solve complex problems.

Where is this new wave of Design Thinking seed, when lined up against the traditional disciplines and definitions of design?

The Design Thinking approach is based on the type of problems being solved. Traditional design techniques focus largely on the 1st and 2nd orders of design. The first-order deals with graphic design and visual representation while the second-order deals with physical solutions and industrial designs like mobile apps.

The third and the fourth-order of design thinking leads to complex problems where experiential and strategic design comes into play. These complex problems need to address services and large-scale issues which require a deep understanding of the needs of the customers and deliver more value and successful solutions.

For many designers, this is a fundamental shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. To solve complex problems, designers tackle traditional and linear ways of thinking about the problems and find ways to solve them.

Design Thinking Model and Implementation

Design Thinking follows a six-step process. Embarking these steps into the businesses leads to embracing new situations and seeking profit growth opportunities in the market. Integrating solutions into the businesses through architecture and agile delivery ensures the successful incorporation of new products and services into business operations with a rapid rate of increase.

The six-step process used to solve real-time problems in the Design Thinking approach is

Prepare Stage: Designers get everything ready to start the design journey by understanding which problems are best suited to tackle using the Design Thinking process.

Discovery Phase: Designers focus on research and exploring the problems in more detail.

Definition Phase: Designers synthesize all the data and get insights, arrive at a validation point of view, and take it forward into ideation.

Develop Phase: Designers generate, concepts and rapid prototyping into test ideas.

Delivery Phase: In this stage, the prototypes are taken into the real world before refining and creating a final version of the product, that is ready for production.

Launch: Designers thoroughly know how the product or the solution is integrated into the existing operation, services, or product offerings of the businesses, and the customers, thus enabling the businesses to scale fast when required.

We at Inovar view Design Thinking as a deep-rooted approach to embark on resolving problems with tailored solutions that hold relevance for a wider scope of challenges than simply using the traditional design arena.

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Human-centered design mainly focuses on “building to learn.” It is beyond traditional program design as it is an improved understanding of the people you are designing for and tailored with creative strategic techniques and solutions that address all business needs.  

Human-centered design is a five step process:  

1. Empathize: Empathy is about sharing and developing ideas to life by using complex test cases simulating end-user use cases and rendering promising solutions. Designers create world-class solutions to address real-time challenges using a 5-step approach.  

2. Define: Designers are well-trained to solve many challenging problems using innovative Human-centered design solutions. The company helps happen with experienced UX designers wherever needed to streamline or develop any processes.  

3. Ideate: The designers craft strategic design and build many workable solutions with innovative ideas that help address any challenges. The design strategy team plays a significant role by looking into the long-term goals and thereby meeting business needs, the end users’ desire making it feasible from a resource/technology point of view.  

4. Prototype: Designers are the therapists who diagnose all the problems by listening and understanding all the perspectives. Using their design skills, designers ideate many creative solutions that are elite. 

5. Test and Iterate: Effective design and best UX practices using assessment tools and great prototypes help identify and categorize any business challenges rendering creative solutions. While designing, the expertise adds intrinsic value to all the business goals.   

Inovar design strategy 

We believe excellent design is the outcome of proper research, strategic technical plan, architecture, and aesthetics leading to an innovative design that provides a competitive advantage for any business. Excellent designers @Inovar facilitate creative solutions to diverse stakeholders and end-users. Our design strategy and approach will help every business decision-maker successfully implement a user-centric app, assure large-scale adoption and growth, and get one hundred times better ROI. Check out our entire design strategy and contact us for a consultation. 

Digital user experience or digital experience (DX) is the reaction of an end-user after an interaction in a digital environment. Earlier, digital user experience was considered as the field of web designers and related to elements like webpage colors, navigability, layout, and performance. But today’s scenario has changed a lot, and DX is about how intuitive a webpage or app is, how effectively users can complete their tasks, and how well integrated the product is with other applications.  

Factors of Digital UX

A strong user experience needs an efficient design team that brings value to an organization by increasing customers, sales, and organization productivity. The scope of DX has broadened as the sophistication of online environments has grown and diversified beyond a webpage to encompass wearables as well as applications incorporate with virtual reality and augmented reality. DX creates customer loyalty with effectiveness, improves conversion rates, as well as creates the appropriate customer-to-company circle. It reduces support costs since your digital user experience design forges your user’s habits.  

As a business owner, you need to analyze how your business is approaching digital user-experience.

4 pillars of digital user experience

 According to a survey result, if a webpage takes 10 seconds to load, 50%* of users give up and leave the page. The poor digital experience of users can create a negative impact on the brand and reduce website traffic. Hence, it is crucial to look at the four main pillars of Digital UX to improve final customer conversion.

Make the design interactive:

Websites, apps, screens almost all digital products need an active response from users who click, open, and scroll.  Web designers should first check whether the elements in the screen such as controls, forms, responses, and workflow are well-defined.  If not then, you need to

Keep attention to the website innovation

Innovation develops a bridge between today’s experience and tomorrow’s experience.  Make sure the value customers get from your website needs to match the amount of effort and resources they have got to invest in the experience. One business should actively measure how users feel about their product/service experience, which will bring opportunities to improve.

Make the presentation intuitive

Your website design should make a user interface as easy, effective, and emotionally resonant as possible for customers to use. The presentation intuitive must include layouts, grid systems, graphical elements, typography, and other elements.   

Four Pillars of digital UX

Apply smooth digital integration

All the digital and non-digital touchpoints need to be interconnected and consistent with each other. If users get a seamless journey to experience, then they will automatically trust your brand.

Here I have also mentioned what to prioritize as your organization doubles down on digital UX. 

1. Scale up your design architect 

You will probably need more capacity and efficiency to up-level the UX of your website or app — in terms of skills, structure, standards, processes, and mix of people. When you are working with your customers, you need to be more focused on their requirements. If the design team has a clear image of project requirements, then it will be easy for them to implement proper solutions and set appropriate design standards. Your design team should first communicate with the internal users from the client-site, analyze their pain points, and initiate the project requirements.   Here design leaders play a leading role in up-leveling skills among team members and building a trustworthy relationship with clients by keeping their commitments.

2. Outsource experience designer if you need

Maybe your organization does not have a design team, or there is no option to hire a design team, then outsource an experienced design consultant is an easy option for you.  Outsourcing a web or an app designing expert team will expose you to interact with so many experts and creative architects. It will allow you to get access to the latest high-tech resources as well. An experienced designer will understand your business requirements and equip you with highly innovative, user-friendly, and latest web designs.  According to a Forrester research report, a digital UX could boost your conversion rate by up to 400%** with higher sales, higher customer engagement, and faster product cycle.

3. Review and do usability testing rigorously

Businesses should never assume that users will bring inconsistencies to their notice and actively measure user experience.  It is necessary to conduct a rigorous review and testing for your website performance to measure how your website is contributing to user experience. The process required several techniques, including a heuristic approach in which trained experts will perform key user scenarios, map user experience journey, and do usability testing.  You can also contract with a third party (like a UX design consulting firm) to ensure your review objectives, and make sure you hire staff for a project with UX experts, not generalists.

4. Update and implement new thoughts in your UX expertise

There is always room for improvement, so never be too proud that you have designed something perfect. Make sure you are aware of the latest digital design trends and apply best practices in key UX areas. Use alternative approaches in sections like search, navigation, clarity of the content, accessibility, and others.  

5. Visual and experience consistency

Visual consistency matters a lot to offer a great digital experience. A brand should maintain consistency in user-experiences in their product design across a range of products. Along with that, companies must follow consistency in offering digital experiences for which they must invest in UX design. Surprisingly, 65%* of companies have no thinking behind consistency in user experience. Inovar designers help clients to maintain consistency in the digital user experience through human-centric UX design.  

The above artifacts will help you to understand how customer experiences are now essential for every business and how digital UX can redeem the pace. Now it is your turn to take views from your employees and users about what they would like to see and dig deeper into opportunities that an individual UX/UI can provide. Designers will have greater flexibility and more time to make impactful designs, and websites will finally have room to become more user-centric in 2021. 

I would like to hear from you how your organization is coping with the challenges of ensuring high-quality UX at this historic time? If you are interested in contact with a design expert to get viable solutions for your website, then reach out to a UX design company like Inovar Tech.  

References

*  YUJ Developers, What is Digital User Experience? Retrieved from: https://medium.com/@yujsocial/what-is-digital-user-experience-cb82ceefae0d

** Akindunjoye, O How bad UX can ruin your online business Retrieved from: https://uxdesign.cc/how-bad-ux-can-ruin-your-online-business-61886a728cd8

2020 has proven this decade will be dramatically different than the one before it with so much change and volatility. The Covid-19 pandemic has allowed many businesses an opportunity to reboot their way of thinking and reinvent their approach in the field of modern software development.  Software services companies are now leading other industries to inculcate the way of modern software development.

Cloud-centric software companies now can change, tune, tweak, and augment the functionality of the different parts of the software if they want. “Modern software development is about acknowledging the landscape of libraries and tools and applying them. The knowledge of creating an optimal algorithm is no longer required. Modern software development platforms become agile and move on from the traditional coding process of the 90s that required a sophisticated application” as mentioned by our CEO Apratim Ghosh.

Now the hidden question is how modern software development trends will be reshaping the organization’s future and how software developers are going to accommodate this in 2020 and beyond?

1. AI-powered business process  

The growth of AI-powered businesses will exponentially increase in the next few years. It is a great opportunity for organizations to retool routine business and technical processes using AI technology. It is also a great consideration for the software consulting services company engaged in developing custom applications. AI will lead the business with greater efficiency, better accuracy, and improving the bottom-line as well. 

2. Low-Code and No-code tools in frontline

After this pandemic, global business has observed five years of digital transformation within five months. Low-code and no-code platforms come to the front line of future software development. Low-code and no-code tools are now shining by building custom business processes and apps for businesses with minimal IT support in the blink of an eye. 

low-code-platform

Software consulting firms are now more adhere to this platform as it allows citizen developers with minimal knowledge of hand-coding and makes the delivery faster with pre-packaged templates, graphic design, and drag-n-drop options.

3. Switch to machine learning operation

Machine learning operations are now highly recommended for an advanced modicum of operational excellence. In MLOps, the automated concept drift-detection allows us to check how production data differ from the data used to train the model. Based on the real-time feedback on the KPI model of production software services companies provide pre-build support to their clients and successfully update the model in the production phase with the support of AutoML integration. Software consulting companies are also applying the same machine learning techniques for successful software application development.  

machine-learning-environments

4. Automated evaluation of code quality

Code quality is the first consideration of every software consulting firm in building any software because without readable, scalable, and maintainable code they cannot run the application successfully. Considering it, experienced engineers pay more attention to developers’ coding capability at the time of hiring. In the voice of Tigran Sloyan, Code signal, the manual code review is a lengthy process, but with advanced AI and machine-learning techniques, it will be automated very soon.

5. Progressive custom web app

Progressive Web Applications are the latest generation of mobile-optimized websites. According to Gartner’s research, Progressive Web Apps will replace 50% of all customers facing native apps by 2020. Software consulting companies are now giving more preference to these PWA as it shares many of the same functionalities as native apps and provides an identical user experience. 

native-progressive-app-differences

6. Python squeezes its competition

According to software services companies, Python’s robust growth is likely to be continued in 2020 and beyond. We all know that computer languages are always growing to shift and evolving but, Python has magically edged out Java for the top spot.

top-programming-languages

As per the opinions of the corporate leaders, Python is an easy-to-learn language, and spontaneous syntax makes it a transcendent language for beginners. Open source and versatile features make Python an ideal choice for start-ups and mid based software consulting firms. With so much popularity this trending programming language of 2020 reached Version 3.8.1 from version 1.0.  

7. User-experience design

According to the Forrester Research report 2019, on average, every dollar invested in UX brings $100 in return with an ROI of 9900%. For every business. In that context, User Experience designs have entirely shaken the ground of how custom applications were developed to address user challenges, and now it is time to explore how the UX principle could play a pioneering role in defining a product or service roadmap. In the view of IT consultants, user experience led software design is critical for redesigning customer-facing services and allow companies to recapture their business in the present all-digital environment.  

8. Motion UI

In 2020 and beyond, we will start seeing a less static website with more applications of motion UI. It is the most user-centric and sophisticated approach for a design that makes the website more expressive and even user-friendly. For example, a user clicks on a button will redirect them to a page with new information along with the moving effects on the screen. According to Thomas Griffin, Motion UI can connect dots and improve user journeys that a static image or a screen cannot.

9. Edge computing and FAAS

For a long time, the cloud-based IaaS and PaaS technologies have helped many organizations to accelerate their delivery while the majority still require a nonredundant service for isolated geolocation. The shift to FaaS (functions-as-a-service) is the next big evolution that will host at the very edge of our cloud and CDN networks.

10. The integration of DevSecOps

Within modern software development, shifting security and integrating DevSecops combine with automation is the next big future trend. Developers can not overlook the security nor allowed waiting until the later stages of the software development life cycle to ‘take on’ security. Software services companies apply threat modeling automation as it enables them to detect, prioritize, and mitigate threats from virus attacks in the design phase. 

devops-security

11. Perfection with digital experience

A perfect digital experience went from a novelty to a table stake in a blink of an eye. Front-end development takes center stage as the number of applications skyrockets, and cloud infrastructure becomes ubiquitous for software development services. As per McKinsey build up the next-generation operation model is the most crucial part of digital experience in development. It allows business free from all constraints (decision-making bureaucracy, tech infrastructure, business-historic culture) innovative talent that can push the envelope and hatch new business models—your in-house Internet start-up.

In short, we can say that modern software development is all about building solutions that take advantage of technology offer using the different architectures, services, and capabilities available to maximize the benefits. It also increases interpersonal skills and improves the collaborative approach to maintain harmony with the context of use and customers. 

Now organizations are paying much attention to fundamental concerns like security, privacy, and ethical responsibility with modern software development practice. We hope in the future Modern software practice will make developers more eligible with better techniques and technologies. If you also want to apply modern software development techniques for your business, then feel free to reach us. We are here to help you!