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React Design System – Where to Start?

React design system

Building a React design system from scratch requires careful planning and consideration. Input from multiple departments and stakeholders is crucial for creating a component library that serves the organization and its end users.

This article is an introduction to React design systems and how to approach component development, documentation, governance, design tools, and more. We also have a step-by-step guide to building a design system which covers 12 essential topics.

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What is a React Design System?

A React Design System is a collection of reusable UI components and guidelines built specifically for use with React, a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It encompasses a set of pre-designed, customizable components such as buttons, forms, navigation bars, cards, and more, along with guidelines for their usage and implementation within React applications.

The main purpose of a React Design System is to promote consistency, efficiency, and scalability in UI development by providing a unified set of components and design patterns that can be easily reused across projects. By leveraging a React Design System, developers can streamline the development process, reduce code duplication, and ensure a cohesive and polished look and feel across their applications.

Key components of a React Design System typically include:

  1. Reusable Components: A library of React components that encapsulate common UI patterns and functionalities, such as input fields, dropdown menus, modals, and tabs.
  2. Design Guidelines: Clear documentation and guidelines on how to use each component, including information on props, styling options, accessibility considerations, and best practices for integration within React applications.
  3. Theming and Customization: Support for theming and customization, allowing developers to easily adapt the design system to match their brand identity and design requirements.
  4. Responsive Design: Components designed to be responsive and adaptable to different screen sizes and devices, ensuring a consistent user experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile platforms.
  5. Accessibility: Considerations for accessibility, with components designed to meet accessibility standards and guidelines, ensuring that applications built with the design system are usable by all users, including those with disabilities.

Overall, a React Design System provides a solid foundation for building React applications, enabling developers to create consistent, high-quality user interfaces with minimal effort. It promotes collaboration, efficiency, and maintainability, making it an invaluable tool for teams working on React-based projects.

The Benefits of a React Design System

There are many benefits to using or building a React design system. React’s component-driven development approach makes it the perfect modular-style UI library for design systems. Front-end developers can strip React components down to atoms and combine these to create new UI elements, patterns, and templates.

React is one of the most widely used UI libraries, which offers many benefits for building design systems:

  • A big community of developers to ask questions and solve problems
  • An abundance of Javascript tools and integrations
  • Many well-established design systems for inspiration

Which companies use React design systems?

Here is a short list of companies using React for their design systems:

We recommend checking out these design systems to learn about component syntax, documentation, guidelines, and other design system factors.

Check out Adele for more design system inspiration. It’s a repository of publicly available design systems and pattern libraries with links to GitHub repos to download and analyze.

React Design System Fundamentals

design system components

Understanding Atomic Design Principles

Atomic Design is a system created by Brad Frost where he organizes UI elements into five categories:

  • Atoms: foundational UI elements you cannot break down further–e.g., HTML tags, fonts, buttons, animations, and color palettes.
  • Molecules: groups of atoms create components that serve a specific function or purpose. e.g., search input, nav links, dropdown menu, etc.
  • Organisms: Complex UI patterns that combine to create user interfaces. e.g., a header nav bar, footer, image carousel, etc.
  • Templates: represent a complete user interface with multiple organisms working together. e.g., a dashboard, news feed, chat UI, etc.
  • Pages: represent the different instances of the template and how content changes within the screen–for example, refreshing content in a newsfeed or receiving a message through chat.

Why is Atomic Design important for React design systems? 

The Atomic Design methodology enables you to leverage React’s modularity and reusability benefits. By approaching a design system as a sum of many atoms (or Lego pieces), it’s easier to develop a flexible, scalable UI library that can adapt and evolve with your product.

The design system team can build new components and patterns much quicker by combining atoms and molecules. This modular approach also makes building one-off solutions easier and more cost-effective because it’s a matter of combining what you have rather than developing from scratch.

The role of components in a React design system

React components are the building blocks that help ensure consistency, reusability, and maintainability across user interfaces and apps. These UI elements serve many vital purposes, including:

  • Modularity: React components are modular by design, making it easy to combine, reuse, and manage the UI library.
  • Consistency: React’s effortless reusability enables developers to build design principles, styles, and interactions into each component and recall it anywhere in the application.
  • Reusability: Developers can leverage a UI library of reusable components to save time and resources when developing new products. This reusability also reduces errors and technical debt because devs don’t have to write code from scratch.
  • Customizability: developers can easily customize specific components while still adhering to design guidelines or affecting the UI library, allowing for flexibility when necessary.
  • Maintainability: With components stored in a centralized repository, developers can push updates and bug fixes from one place, making it easy to maintain and improve the design system and its products.
  • Scalability: Engineers can extend and adapt React components to evolve with products and new technology.
  • Accessibility: Developers can incorporate foundational accessibility standards at the component level, making it easier to implement product-wide.

The importance of using design tokens

Design tokens incorporate the core values of a React design system. These tokens contain properties such as colors, typography, spacing, sizing, states, interactivity, and more to maintain a consistent design language across multiple platforms, devices, and operating systems.

A design token can contain many values for multiple platforms. For example, UXPin’s homepage uses yellow for CTAs. The hex code for this yellow is #FCC821, which you can represent in several ways:

  • HEX: #FCC821
  • RGB (CSS): rgb(252, 200, 33)
  • RGBA: rgba(252, 200, 33, 1)
  • Octal (Android/Flutter): 77144041

We can encapsulate all four values under one design token:

  • cta-background-primary

So, if you’re implementing this color in any platform, you use the token instead of the code. Design tokens also make cross-functional collaboration easier because everyone uses the same language rather than one team referencing the HEX, another the RGB, and another the octal–which can get confusing and lead to errors.

Design tokens also allow the design system team to implement product-wide modifications simply by changing the properties in the token file. For example, the team can change the cta-background-primary design token from yellow to blue across the product ecosystem by adjusting the four codes in one place rather than updating every instance or stylesheet individually.

Getting Started with a React Design System

design system atomic library components

On the surface, a design system appears simple. But, in reality, these UI libraries are complex organisms with many moving parts. Here are some things to consider when planning your React design system.

These factors will lay the foundation for your design system’s governance protocols and procedures. For this reason, it’s essential to document every stage of this early decision-making process.

Mono-repo vs. poly-repo repositories

Decide whether to use a single repository (mono-repo) or multiple repositories (poly-repo) for your design system’s React component library.

Mono-repos simplify dependency management and make it easier to work on multiple packages simultaneously. Poly-repos offer more modularity and isolation between packages, making it easier to maintain and use individual components independently.

Accenture shares the pros and cons of using mono vs. poly-repos.

Component organization

Organize your component library in a way that makes the most sense to your product and team. For example, you can group components by functionality, domain, or Atomic Design–MUI organizes its UI library by functionality:

  • Inputs: Button, Switch, Text Field, etc.
  • Navigation: Drawer, Menu, Pagination, etc.
  • Layouts: Box, Container, Grid, etc.
  • Data Display: Avatar, Icons, List, etc.

No matter how you categorize these components, each must have its own source code, styles, tests, and documentation.

Design token management

Centralize design token management in a dedicated folder or package controlled by the design system team. This centralized management helps facilitate better maintenance and governance while simplifying changes and updates.

Theming and customization

Design system theming and customization are vital for modern product development, typically requiring at least two themes, light and dark modes. Multi-brand design systems require greater customization and flexibility, so you must consider these factors before developing.

Check out “Theming and Theme Switching with React and styled-components” from CSS Tricks for details on how to set up themes for React libraries.

Documentation

Design system documentation is vital for successful adoption and consistent implementation. The docs must include your design language, guidelines (content, design, code, accessibility, etc.), style guide, use cases, code examples, tools, and other critical information.

A tool like Storybook can help centralize your design system’s documentation management and updates. You can sync your Storybook to UXPin using Merge and create a single source of truth across design and development.

Testing

Plan a structure for managing and organizing your component tests–another reason to consider Storybook. Storybook offers built-in component testing automation with multiple bug-prevention tests, including visual, interaction, accessibility, snapshot, and more.

Versioning and release management

Establish your React library’s versioning strategy and release management process to ensure your design system remains updated and compatible with your products.

Design tools

Designers will need access to your React design system for prototyping and testing. A common strategy is to use vector-based tools, but this means updating and maintaining two formats of your React design system:

  • The component library in the repository
  • UI kits for design teams

With UXPin Merge, you can import your React library into UXPin’s design editor so designers and engineers use the exact same UI components. There are a couple of options for syncing code components. Learn more about them and discover UXPin Merge.

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UX Audit – All You Need to Know, Benefits, and Checklist

UX audit

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.

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What is a UX Audit?

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

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

user search user centered

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 pink 1

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

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.

uxpin design system components states icons 1

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.

uxpin accessibility wcag color

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.

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UI Design vs. UI Development – What’s the Difference?

There are many software and web development roles and responsibilities–from initial concept to design and delivery, QA, and lifecycle management. UI design and UI development are two crucial roles that impact how users engage and interact with a user interface. These roles are especially important in delivering high-quality mobile design services that ensure seamless user experiences across devices.

This article compares the practice of UI design vs. UI development, the people behind these roles, and how they work together to deliver digital products.

Key takeaways:

  • UI design is the process of designing user interface of a product while UI development is the process of programming this design.
  • UI design and UI development appear on opposite ends of the software development process.
  • UI designers and UI developers work together to create products that are feasible, desirable, and viable.

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What is UI Design?

color id brand design

UI design (User Interface Design) is the process of designing user interface elements, layouts, and interactions–everything users see and interact with. These elements include images, animations, sliders, text fields, buttons, etc. Like user experience design, UI design decisions are based on user needs and testing.

What does a UI designer do?

A UI designer is responsible for designing the visual elements of a digital product or application that users interact with. Their primary focus is on creating a user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing interface that not only enhances the overall user experience, but also communicates what actions are possible within a given user interface (clicking a button, navigating to the homepage, typing in text.)

What are UI designer skills and responsibilities?

UI designers are responsible for the UI design process. Their role includes:

  • Product aesthetics: branding, visual design
  • Research: understanding context of use and users
  • Testing: making sure that design is easy to follow for the user
  • Design: creating prototypes, mockups, interaction design, animations, viewport layouts (responsive design)

What are UI designer’s qualities and skill set?

  • Visually creative
  • Web design
  • Graphic design
  • Design principles and design thinking
  • Interested in visual design
  • User journeys and personas
  • User research
  • Typography
  • Balances form with function
  • Looks at user interaction and behavior
  • Task orientated

What is UI Design Process?

UI designers follow the same design thinking process as other UX professionals but complete different activities within the framework:

  • Empathize: focuses on the user’s environment, movements, and actions
  • Define: focuses on each step users need to take to achieve their goals
  • Ideate: looks at the elements and components users will need to navigate a product
  • Prototype: designs mockups and interactivity for high-fidelity prototypes
  • Test: tests how users interact with the product and ask practical questions

Further reading: UX vs. UI Design – The Differences You Need to Know.

What Software does a UI Designer Use?

UI designers generally use the same design tools and software as other UX designers. These tools allow them to design, prototype, and test user interfaces.

The goal for any UI designer is to create high-fidelity prototypes that look and function like the final product. Code-based design tools like UXPin have revolutionized how UI designers prototype and test digital products.

Some of UXPin’s advanced prototyping features include:

  • States: Create multiple states for a single component with separate properties for interactions and system changes.
  • Conditional Interactions: Create dynamic user experiences with Javascript-like “if-then” and “if-else” rules that respond to user and system actions.
  • Variables: Store user inputs and take actions based on that data–like displaying a customized welcome message from the user’s name input.
  • Expressions: Write Javascript-like functions that perform complex tasks, like form validation, computational formatting, and more.

Discover these and more advanced UXPin features with a free 14-day trial–no payment details necessary!

What is UI Development?

design and development collaboration process product communication 1

UI development is the process of programming client-facing interfaces. Like UI design, the UI development process includes writing code for images, animations, sliders, text fields, buttons, etc.

What is a UI developer?

A UI developer is responsible for implementing the visual design of a website or application. While UI designers focus on creating the overall look and feel of the interface, UI developers bring those designs to life by writing the code that enables the interface to function on the web or within an application.

What are UI developer skills and responsibilities?

Depending on the product and organization structure, the UI development role might fall on a front-end developer, UX engineer, or full-stack engineer. Their responsibilities include (these will vary depending on the engineering team’s structure):

  • UI component development
  • UI maintenance
  • Styling architecture
  • Implementation
  • Technical feasibility
  • Backlog management
  • Performance
  • Query architecture
  • Search engine optimization

What is the difference between Front-End Development vs. Back-End Development?

Engineers divide programming into two separate disciplines, front-end, and back-end development.

  • Front-end development: Focuses on developing “client-facing” interfaces using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
  • Back-end development: Write server-side code to connect front-end interfaces to databases, APIs, authentication, etc. Some programming languages include Java, Ruby, Python, and Javascript, to name a few.

Further reading: Front-End vs. Back-End: What’s the Difference?

What Software does a UI Developer Use?

Like any engineer, UI developers use an integrated development environment (IDE) to examine and write code. Modern IDEs feature various extensions to interface with engineering tools like Git, package managers, repositories, APIs, etc.

Further reading: The 7 Essential Tools for Frontend Web Development.

UI Design vs. UI Development

code design developer

With UI design and UI development defined, it’s clear to see these disciplines appear on opposite ends of the software development process. UI design happens during the design process, while UI development occurs during the engineering process. 

While these are separate disciplines, UI designers and UI engineers must work together to deliver a successful final product.

It’s important to note that not every organization has a UI designer and UI engineer role. Here are some positions that might fulfill these UI roles and responsibilities:

  • UI design: UX engineer, visual designer, graphic designer
  • UI development: Front-end developer, UX engineer/UX developer, full-stack engineer

How UI Designers and UI Developers Work Together

Here is a typical workflow demonstrating how a UI designer and UI developer would collaborate on a project:

  1. UI designers start a design project with various forms of UX research to understand users, competition, the market, product, etc. They use user-centered design processes to understand the problem from a user’s point of view.
  2. UI designers will meet with UI developers early in the design process to discuss technical limitations, design handoff procedures, and documentation requirements.
  3. UI designers work with other UX designers to design, prototype, and test user interfaces, layouts, and components. In some instances, the UI developer might collaborate with the design team to build basic code prototypes to test complex UI components.
  4. Once the design process is complete, UI designers prepare prototypes and documentation for the design handoff.
  5. UI designers and UI developers might meet to discuss designs and ensure engineers understand everything correctly during the design handoff process. 
  6. UI developers work with the rest of the engineering team to convert designs into functioning code.
  7. UI designers work with the design and product teams to complete the QA (quality assurance) process to ensure the final release meets design specifications.

The Importance of UI designer and UI developer collaboration

Modern software development relies on exceptional UI design and development. 

Designers ensure the product meets users’ needs and thoroughly test user interfaces and UI components to ensure they meet usability and accessibility standards. Without this prototyping and testing phase, usability issues impact the product, resulting in a poor user experience resulting in avoidable costs on multiple fronts–customer service, rework, losing customers, etc.

UI developers also play a crucial role in delivering successful software releases. They must ensure the final UI meets design specs and test code for bugs and performance. They’re also responsible for managing code, including updates to packages, APIs, security, etc., to ensure the product maintains its integrity and consistency over time.

To achieve this, designers and engineers must collaborate throughout the software development process–which can be challenging in large organizations where silos and poor communication are common.

UI designers and UI developers often work with DesignOps and DevOps to help bridge the gap between these disciplines to improve operational processes and collaboration.

Better Designer-Developer Collaboration With UXPin Merge

team collaboration talk communication

The Drift Challenge

One of the challenges designers and engineers face is that they speak different languages. 

  • Designers = image-based static mockups and prototypes
  • Engineers = code, browsers, operating systems, databases, etc.

Without in-depth knowledge and experience of one another’s disciplines, it’s hard for designers and programmers to understand the other’s limitations, constraints, and other challenges. Bridging that gap is crucial for organizations to deliver products successfully, on time, and on budget.

The Code-Based Solution

UXPin Merge has revolutionized the traditional UX workflow with a code-based design solution allowing orgs to sync a component library from a repository to UXPin’s editor, so designers build prototypes using fully functioning UI elements and components.

Merge components retain exactly the same properties as those in the repository, including interactivity, so designers can simply drag and drop to build UIs. Engineers can also set various props (for React or Args for Storybook) to allow designers to customize components in JSX or via UXPin’s Properties Panel. Any changes to these props render JSX, which engineers can copy/paste to begin development.

collaboration team prototyping

This Merge-powered workflow enhances collaboration and understanding between UI designers and UI developers because they’re speaking the same language with the same constraints–a truly single source of truth for your org’s component library.

UXPin has also recently announced the upcoming release of Merge Component Manager–a tool that reduces developer involvement in importing and managing coded UI components. Less reliance on engineers means designers can get up and running with Merge much faster.

“It used to take us two to three months just to do the design. Now, with UXPin Merge, teams can design, test, and deliver products in the same timeframe. Faster time to market is one of the most significant changes we’ve experienced using Merge.” Erica Rider, UX Lead EPX @ PayPal

Discover how UXPin’s Merge technology can revolutionize your design processes. Get access to UXPin Merge.

Discover Merge

How to Use Tailwind to Build Responsive UI Design

Tailwind UI

Tailwind provides a set of pre-designed and pre-built styles that you can apply directly to your HTML markup. Unlike traditional CSS frameworks, which often come with pre-defined components and styles, Tailwind focuses on providing low-level utility classes that you can combine to create custom UI designs.

To start a project, front-end developers typically install it via npm or yarn and then include the generated CSS file in your HTML. Once installed, they start applying utility classes to HTML elements to style them according to UI design requirements.

Tailwind CSS is often used to build a wide range of web applications and websites, such as landing pages, dashboards, admin panels, eCommerce sites, and of course, rapid prototyping.

Want to create interactive prototypes with Tailwind UI components? UXPin Merge gives you a library full of official Tailwind UI components that you just drag and drop on the canvas. Then, you just copy the code and paste it into your project for product development. Try UXPin Merge for free.

Design UI with code-backed components.

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

What is Tailwind CSS?

Tailwind CSS is a different way to style your website from traditional CSS framework. Think of it as a set of predefined building blocks (or Lego pieces,) but for your website’s style. Instead of writing a bunch of CSS rules, you could use pre-made classes directly in your HTML code.

Imagine you want to style a website, and you’re faced with the task of writing a lot of CSS code to make things look good. Now, traditional CSS involves creating rules for each element, defining margins, paddings, colors, and more. It can be time-consuming and sometimes a bit repetitive.

Tailwind simplifies styling by providing a set of pre-made classes that you can apply directly to your HTML elements, making the styling process more efficient and flexible.

For example, instead of writing:

cssCopy code

.button { background-color: #3490dc; color: #ffffff; padding: 10px 20px; border-radius: 5px; }

You can just apply these styles directly in your HTML using Tailwind classes:

htmlCopy code

<button class="bg-blue-500 text-white p-2 rounded-md">Click me</button>

Here, each class (bg-blue-500, text-white, p-2, rounded-md) represents a specific style. So, bg-blue-500 gives the button a blue background, text-white makes the text white, p-2 adds padding, and rounded-md gives it rounded corners.

Tailwind is highly customizable. If you decide you don’t need a particular style or you want to add your own, you can easily tweak this framework to fit your needs. Tailwind has also a plugin system that allows you to extend its functionality. You can add third-party plugins or create your own to tailor the framework to your specific needs.

You can hear that web developers call Tailwind a utility-first CSS framework. In the context of Tailwind CSS, “utilities” refer to small, single-purpose classes that directly apply styling to an element. These utility classes are named based on their purpose, making it easy to understand what each class does. They are the building blocks of the framework and can be combined to create complex styles.

What can you build with Tailwind CSS?

Here are some examples of what you can build with Tailwind CSS:

  1. Responsive Websites: Tailwind’s responsive utility classes make it easy to create websites that adapt to different screen sizes, providing a seamless experience across devices.
  2. Web Applications: Tailwind can be used to build the user interface of web applications. Its modular utility classes allow for quick and efficient styling of application components.
  3. Landing Pages: Tailwind is well-suited for designing and styling landing pages. Its simplicity and ease of use make it a popular choice for quickly prototyping and building marketing pages.
  4. Blogs and Content Websites: Whether you’re building a personal blog or a content-heavy website, Tailwind’s utility classes make it easy to style text, images, and other content elements.
  5. E-commerce Sites: Tailwind can be applied to the design of product listings, shopping carts, and checkout pages in e-commerce websites. Its flexibility allows for customization to match specific brand requirements.
  6. Dashboards and Admin Panels: Web applications with dashboards and admin panels often benefit from the modular and customizable nature of Tailwind CSS. It provides the tools to create a clean and functional user interface.
  7. Prototypes and Rapid Development: Tailwind is popular for quickly prototyping ideas and for projects that require fast development. Its utility-first approach allows developers to iterate rapidly without needing to write custom CSS for every style.
  8. Portfolio Websites: Tailwind can be used to build stylish and responsive portfolios for showcasing personal or professional projects. Its utility classes enable the creation of visually appealing layouts.
  9. Documentation Sites: Tailwind can be employed to style documentation and help center websites. Its simplicity makes it easy to create clean and readable documentation layouts.
  10. Custom UI Components: Tailwind can be used to style custom UI components, allowing developers to create unique and visually appealing interfaces and responsive design.

Where to take Tailwind components from?

There are a few different sources where you can find Tailwind CSS components and resources. One notable resource is Tailwind UI, a premium set of professionally designed components and templates.

Tailwind UI was created by the founders of Tailwind CSS, Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger. The primary motivation behind creating Tailwind UI was to provide a set of professionally designed, ready-to-use UI components and templates that seamlessly integrate with Tailwind CSS. The goal was to offer front-end developers a premium resource for building beautiful and consistent user interfaces with ease.

One of the main selling points of Tailwind UI is the quality of its designs. The components and templates are professionally crafted by Steve Schoger, known for his expertise in design. This ensures a polished and visually appealing look for your web applications.

Here are some examples of the types of components and templates you can expect from Tailwind UI:

  1. Navigation Components — you can find navbars, dropdowns or mega menus.
  2. Form Components — components for building forms, such as Input fields, checkboxes and radio buttons, select dropdowns, buttons, and for gorups.
  3. Content Display Components — those include cards, modals and popovers, alerts, badges, and tooltips.
  4. Typography and Text Components — for adding headings, blockquotes, lists, and text styles.
  5. Grid and Layout Components — you’ll find container, grid system, and flexbox utilities.
  6. Media Components — they include image cards, galleries, and responsive video components.
  7. Utility Components — spacing, margin, flexbox, alignment and visibility utilities.
  8. Templates — the library has templates for landing pages, dashboards, eCommerce products, pricing, and blog layouts.

These are just a couple of examples, and Tailwind UI provides a comprehensive set of components and templates that cater to different use cases in web development. Each component is designed to be flexible and customizable, allowing you to easily adapt them to fit the specific needs and branding of your project.

The components in Tailwind UI are often built with the principles of good design and usability in mind, thanks to the expertise of Steve Schoger, who is known for his work in design and user interface aesthetics. Overall, Tailwind UI aims to save developers time by providing high-quality, ready-to-use components that align with the Tailwind CSS framework.

What makes Tailwind different from Material UI and Bootstrap?

Tailwind CSS, Material UI, and Bootstrap are all popular libraries in web development, but they differ significantly in their approach to styling and the user interface.

As we covered already, Tailwind follows a utility-first approach. It provides a set of low-level utility classes that you can apply directly in your HTML markup to build your styles. This approach is highly flexible and allows for more granular control over styling. It’s often favored for rapid prototyping and customization.

Bootstrap and Material UI are widely used for quickly building responsive websites. Bootstrap comes with a set of pre-designed components and styles. It follows a more component-centric approach, providing developers with a set of ready-made UI components that can be easily customized through a theming system. Developers can modify variables like colors and fonts to match their brand.

MUI, on the other hand, is a React component library that implements Google’s Material Design guidelines. MUI like Bootstrap is component-centric, providing a set of pre-designed React components. It’s easy to customize and it has a large and active community with good support and documentation.

How to create a responsive UI design with Tailwind

lib tailwind

You don’t need to spend time reading documentation to create a Tailwind UI design. Here’s how you can do it quickly with UXPin Merge.

UXPin Merge is a prototyping tool that allows designers and developers to create and collaborate on interactive UI design seamlessly. It’s part of UXPin, which is known for its focus on collaborative design. UXPin Merge specifically emphasizes the integration of design and development workflows, enabling faster design and development processes.

In this article, we will show you how to create a UI design with Tailwind UI and UXPin.

Then, we will give you quick tips on installing Tailwind CSS. To follow along the article, sign up for UXPin and start your trial.

Step 1: Pull Tailwind UI components out of the library.

UXPin Merge comes with a built-in library of Tailwind UI components. This library includes a collection of pre-designed UI elements, such as buttons, cards, forms, and more, adhering to the Tailwind CSS styling principles.

To start designing, Design System Libraries in UXPin. Access them by clicking the Design System Libraries icon in the bottom bar or with the Option + 2 keyboard shortcut.

Then, scroll to Merge libraries and you’ll see Tailwind UI among React libraries like MUIv5 (see how to design with it,) Ant design or React Bootstrap. The Tailwind library isn’t React-based for now. You can copy HTML only off your design while using it.

Place components that you like on the canvas. It can be button, card, whatever you need to build an interface.

Step 2: Generate complex components with ChatGPT.

Up until this point, we were using children. Based on the atomic design principles, children are the smallest building blocks that together make up molecules and organisms. Atomic design, coined by Brad Frost, is a methodology that breaks down web design into its fundamental building blocks, facilitating the creation of consistent and scalable user interfaces.

To learn more about atomic design, follow our article Atomic UI Components or read Brad Frosts’s article.

For bringing the so-called “molecules,” use UXPin Merge’s AI Component Creator that assists in generating components. This can be particularly useful for creating dynamic or custom components that you may need for your project. The AI Component Creator leverages machine learning to understand design patterns and generate code snippets or components based on your design.

Read ou guide on speeding up design with AI Component Creator and ChatGPT.

Step 3: Use Custom Component to bring whole layouts in.

image2

We’re not leaving atomic design methodology yet, because there is a way of importing organisms, that is combinations of molecules that form distinct sections or components of an interface, into UXPin.

The built-in Tailwind UI library has a New Custom Component option for directly copying UI components, patterns, and full layouts from the Tailwind UI website into your UXPin project. The components can be customized and themed in UXPin.

At the top of Tailwind library inside the editor, you will see a see-through component with a plus sign. It’s our Custom Component. Go to Tailwind UI website, copy a code from examples or components pages and paste it into UXPin’s Custom Component. Then, save the component to Patterns for future reuse.

See how Sage uses this feature in our Product Tour.

Step 4: Edit properties of components

Now that you have building blocks of your interface, adjust properties of your UI components, so your design feels consistent and professional. A properties panel appears on the right once you click on the component you want to adjust. You can change colors, text, add state, and any special styling that you have in mind.

This is also the place of switching themes. For that, you have two options.

  • Global themes — pick a light or dark theme for the full page.
  • Local themes — pick a light ot dark theme for each component.

Here you can also add interactions. Decide what should happen if a user clicks a button, such as take them to the next page, make a modal appear or disappear, etc. You’ll also be able to set a property for coded components.

Step 5: Copy the code to your dev’s environment

The layout is done, time to build the thing. Go to “Preview mode” > “Spec mode.” and click on the component you want to copy the code of, or export the full prototype in one click by using one of the export functions. That’s a good start for building the app.

If you haven’t yet, set up a new project that will use the Tailwind UI library. Create a new HTML file and link to the Tailwind CSS and Tailwind UI stylesheets in the <head> section. Alternatively, use our Stackblitz integration and have a project preconfigured there.

Build layouts 8.6x faster with Tailwind UI

Tailwind CSS stands out for its unique approach to styling. Unlike conventional CSS frameworks, Tailwind offers a collection of pre-designed styles through low-level utility classes, allowing front-end developers to craft custom UI designs effortlessly. Installation involves a simple npm or yarn setup, followed by the application of utility classes directly to HTML elements to meet specific UI design requirements.

Tailwind CSS finds its application in diverse web projects, ranging from landing pages and dashboards to admin panels, eCommerce sites, and rapid prototyping.

For those seeking interactive prototypes with Tailwind UI components, UXPin Merge presents an ideal solution. This tool provides a library brimming with official Tailwind UI components, facilitating a seamless drag-and-drop experience on the canvas. Copy the generated code and integrate it into your project for efficient product development. Try UXPin Merge for free.

Try UXPin Merge

Merge AI – What You Get in a New Plan?

2024 Merge AI

Our new plan is a game-changer for many teams. One of the reviewers during our ProductHunt Launch called UXPin an “Apple” of product design, and we couldn’t be more proud. Apple stands for innovation, creativity, and future – the values which are important to us, too.

Merge AI aims at democratizing design for many teams. Finally, they can create interfaces fast and without compromising quality and consistency. In this article, we’ll look closer at what we’re offering in this new plan and invite you to try it out.

Ready to give Merge AI a go? All the features we will talk about are available on trial. Try UXPin Merge for free.

Design UI with code-backed components.

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

Four built-in Merge libraries, backed with production-ready code

Remember the time you needed to redraw a button, just to make it look consistent? Not anymore! With Merge AI, you can access four fully-coded components that come from top open-source libraries for building interface layouts like MUIv5, React Bootstrap, Ant design (those are React-based libraries) or Tailwind UI (this one is HTML only.)

Choose a library, place its components on the canvas and build layouts 8.6x faster than with vector-based tools. Yes, we tested it! The most important thing here, nonetheless, is that all UI components are backed with code, so you don’t need to worry about recreating your design to fit the developer’s environment. Pixels are burning with jealousy, aren’t they?

What we added: MUIv5, React Bootstrap, Ant design, and Tailwind UI.

Quick instruction:

  1. Open UXPin.
  2. Create a new prototype.
  3. Head on to Design System Libraries.
  4. Pick a Merge library.

Use pre-built layouts and patterns

With the new plan, Merge AI, you have access to the most popular layouts, including eCommerce product pages, checkouts, internal apps, and more. Those templates belong to you. You can edit them, add elements in, or switch themes.

The layouts are backed with ready-to-use code and they were built with open-source library components, so you can stay consistent with a component library you want to use from this point onwards, as well as, adjust.

What we added: Fully coded and interactive layouts and patterns.

Instruction:

  1. Open UXPin
  2. Scroll down until you see Projects.
  3. Pick a layout and copy its code.

AI Component Creator for ChatGPT wizardry

One of the biggest productivity boosts these days is ChatGPT. With our integration via OpenAI API, you’re able to generate a Tailwind CSS component with a prompt. It generates complex components, such as data reports, sign-up forms, and shopping cards that are backed with HTML and can be fully customizable.

What we added: AI Component Creator

Instruction:

  1. Create a new prototype (sign up for UXPin.)
  2. Navigate to “Quick Tools’ bar.
  3. Open AI Component Creator.
  4. Paste OpenAI API key.
  5. Write your prompt.

UXPin and StackBlitz integration

StackBlitz is a development environment that simplifies creating, sharing, and collaborating on web applications directly from their web browsers. We’ve built an integration that allows users to open their design as code in StackBlitz.

What we added: Stackblitz integration for easy code export.

Instruction:

  1. Open a prototype in your browser.
  2. Click “Preview Prototype.”
  3. Go to Spec mode.
  4. Click “Copy to Stackblitz.”

Export clean and working code off UI

A while back a ProductHunter called us “Google Translator” for design to code, and it stuck with us. In UXPin Merge, you are using coded components, not vector ones, so it’s a given that you’ll be able to copy the code behind them. Now, you are able to copy the code of your entire prototype with one click.

We support any React-based component library, so if you have your own, reach out to us, and we will integrate it, so you can try it by yourself. See how you can reach out to us.

What we built: Code export.

Instruction:

  1. Open a prototype in your browser.
  2. Click “Preview Prototype.”
  3. Go to Spec mode.
  4. Click “Copy code.”

Try Merge AI for free

Thank you for being with us for so long and seeing all the transformations. UXPin started as a paper prototyping tool, then online wireframing solution, and code-to-design facilitator. This release is even more special because it helps build MVPs in lightning speed. Want to try it? Try UXPin Merge AI for free.

Try UXPin Merge

UX Design Frameworks – What Are The Most Useful Ones?

design frameworks

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.

lo fi pencil

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:

9 Examples of UX Design Frameworks

process brainstorm ideas

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 framework by interaction design
Source: Interaction Design Foundation

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

design thinking process ibm 2
Source: IBM’s Renner Modafares

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

double diamond
Source: UX Collective

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

hooked model 2
Source: Webkul

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: 

Lean UX

lean ux cycle 1
Source: Plain Concepts

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: 

Agile UX

agile ux
Source: UXmatters

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:

BASIC Framework

basic ux framework infographic
Source: Basic UX

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

Morvilles User Experience Honeycomb 35 Useful fit for practical use in the clinical
Source: Researchgate

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

fogg framework
Source: UI Patterns

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: 

End-to-End Product Design With UXPin

collaboration team prototyping

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.

Try UXPin for free

How to Build a Sign-Up Page in Under 15 Minutes

Sign-up pages serve as the welcoming gateway for users eager to explore apps, websites, and other digital products. Whether it’s a social media network, e-commerce site, or a productivity tool, these pages grant access to whatever it is that you’re offering. They are the digital reception area where users take their first steps into getting to know your product more.

In this article, we will guide you through the process of building a sign-up page with MUIv5 components and create a prototype like this under 15 minutes. Material UI is one of the best open-source component libraries for code-based prototyping. We’ll build a sign-up page with it.

Design beautiful and consistent user interfaces even if you don’t have a designer on the team. Drag fully coded components from the library and arrange them on the canvas. Customize them as you like and ship stunning layouts 8.6x times faster. Try UXPin Merge.

Design UI with code-backed components.

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

What is a sign-up page?

A sign-up page is a web page or form where users provide the necessary information to create an account or access online services. It typically includes fields for entering details like name, email, and password. This page serves as the starting point for users to join a digital community, start using an app, or buy a product.

A well-designed sign-up page makes the registration process easy, builds trust, ensures security, and collects data.

What are the sign-up page elements?

After looking at a dozen sign-up pages, anyone can spot that most of them use the same UI elements: input fields, buttons, sign-up text, visuals, and so on. Those UI elements are a staple, but to make a sign-up process even more user-friendly, designers also put in error handling, password strength indicators, confirmation messages, and more.

Let’s break down the essential elements of a sign-up page.

Input field

prototyping hi fi interactions desktop

Input fields are the primary means of collecting essential user information, such as name, email address, and password. They serve as the entry points for users to provide the necessary data for completing the sign-up process.

Well-designed input fields enhance the user experience by providing clear and easily navigable areas for entering information. Users should be able to understand what is expected in each field without confusion.

They should also realize that this is the place for entering data. To make that clear, designers apply a subtle background color or shading. This technique helps create a visual contrast, making it easier for users to recognize where they need to interact.

Input fields on a sign-up page are not just blank spaces; they are integral components that facilitate data entry, enhance user experience, and contribute to the overall success of the sign-up process.

Button

Buttons in a sign-up form play a critical role in guiding users through the registration process. Their importance lies in providing a clear call to action and facilitating user interactions. 

Well-designed buttons meet user expectations in terms of placement, size, and styling. Users anticipate a button to be the actionable element that moves them forward or finalizes an action.

Buttons also contribute to the visual hierarchy of the page. The design, color, and placement of the primary sign-up button should make it stand out, guiding users’ attention effectively.

Sign-up text (header)

prototyping elements components

Most sign-up pages feature a header or a sign-up text as one of the top UI elements. It’s important to make it stand out. The header provides a clear and concise message about the purpose of the page — getting users to sign up. Thanks to the text, users instantly understand that they are on a sign-up page, reducing confusion and giving them reassurance that they are in the right place.

The header can also have a persuasive function and increase conversion rates. It can reinforce the call-to-action, providing additional motivation for users to complete the registration process.

Visuals

Visuals on a sign-up page refer to the graphical elements that complement the overall design and contribute to the visual appeal of the page. These elements play a crucial role in enhancing user engagement, conveying information, and establishing a desired brand impression.

Visuals contribute to the overall aesthetics of the sign-up page, making it visually appealing. An aesthetically pleasing design can positively impact the user’s perception of the platform and encourage them to proceed with the sign-up process.

Well-designed visuals can help break up text and reduce cognitive load. They guide users’ attention, making it easier for them to understand the information presented and navigate through the sign-up process.

Checkbox

Checkboxes are commonly used for obtaining user consent for terms and conditions, newsletter subscriptions, or additional features. They empower users to express their preferences and make informed choices during the sign-up process.

Considering checkbox design, these UI elements need sufficient size and contrast to ensure legibility. Users should easily recognize the state of the checkbox (whether it is checked or unchecked), minimizing confusion and enhancing the overall clarity of the sign-up form.

To enhance the comprehension of those UI elements, you may consider learning about different layouts, visual hierarchy, and contrast.

What do you need for this tutorial?

We’ll go over building a sign-up page. It’s possible to do that super quick if you get the same tools. You will need two things:

  • UXPin trial account – sign up for free here, so you can follow our walkthrough.
  • Access to MUIv5 kit – all trial accounts at UXPin have access to our built-in MUIv5 kit. It includes pre-built UI coded elements that you will use to build the layout of your sign-up page.

This walkthrough is also available as a built-in tutorial for the users who open the MUIv5 trial kit. Where to find it? Just jump into the dashboard, go to project “Start here”, and enter a prototype with the walkthrough as well as the sign-up prototype, ready to be copied and customized.

How to build a sign-up page, step by step

In about 15 minutes, we’re going to create a simple layout of a sign-up page. We’ll use some of the available MUIv5 components, lay them out on the canvas, and do a simple design magic to make the sign-up page look professional. Here we go!

Step 1: Place UI components on the canvas

Prepare your working area. Navigate to design system libraries in the bottom-left corner, and double-check if you have MUIv5 chosen as your UXPin library. You will see that you have various components to choose from. For this tutorial drag and drop onto the canvas the following components:

  • Image x1
  • Breadcrumbs x1
  • Typography x2
  • TextField x1
  • Checkbox x1
  • Button x1
  • Grid x1
  • Paper x1
  • Box x2

Below is a simple visualization of the components.

You can scroll through the MUIv5 library and drag the components onto the canvas. Can’t find them? Just type their names inside of the search field. Click the magnifying glass icon and you’ll see this field. Once you have all the components on the canvas, go to the next step.

Step 2: Adjust UI components

Let’s take components and set up the right properties, so it fits our purpose – a sign-up form. Click on the UI element you want to adjust, and you will see that the Properties panel appears on the right-hand menu.

Let’s start with editing following components properties:

  • Adjust colors and copy of breadcrumbs links – The breadcrumbs tell users where they are located inside of the app or site. Change the color of the link to primary and secondary. Plus, edit the copy. It should say “Account / Security / Settings”.
  • Edit the TextField – This component is our input field and our sign-up form collects email addresses. Edit the copy, so it says “Email” and change its variant.
  • Change the size and copy of Typography – Adjust the size of two typography components. Set up the variant of the first one as H3 and the second one as Caption and edit the copy, so it says “Create your account” and “Check this box to receive our weekly newsletter” respectively.
  • Change the size and copy of the button – Set up the button size to large, edit the copy, so it says “Next,” and switch its width.

We introduced changes to five components: Breadcrumbs, Typography, Typography, TextField, Button.

Step 3: Organize components inside the boxes

Take the components we’ve just adjusted, and place them into the boxes. One box should contain Checkbox and Typography, and together they will form our checkbox field. The other box has breadcrumbs, typography, input field and button. This arrangement helps us organize our design, providing a necessary structure.

Notice that we are not including Grid, Image and Paper in any of those boxes.

If done correctly, you should be able to see the following structure in Layers Panel, located next to Design System Libraries.

Step 4: Add padding

Add the padding to boxes, so the UI elements have room to breathe. Padding is a common UI term that refers to the space between an element and the border.

Start with Box 1. Add Top and Bottom padding to components in Box 1. Use 12px for the Top padding and 32px for the Bottom. Remember to type in “px” next to the number, so the measurements are crystal clear.

Let’s move on to Box 2. For this one, add a 64px padding on each side for the whole box.

If you struggle to select the right box, use Layers Panel and click on the box you want to add padding to.

Your boxes should look like the image below.

Step 5: Set up grids

The sign-up form has a two-column layout. To make that happen, use the Grid component. It looks like this:

We want to have an Image in one column and the rest of the design in the other column. So, drag an Image component to one of the Grid’s columns (it’s this rectangle that says XS:12, SM:6) and the rest of the components into the other Grid’s column (the other rectangle.) Then, stretch the Grid component into a desired width.

Your Image component will not fit the column appropriately at first. It will be too small. To stretch it, get rid of Width and Height by clicking ‘X’. By selecting ‘cover’, the Image component will look like the one below.

Step 6: Drag everything into Paper component

There’s one component that is left. It is Paper. It adds dimension to the sign-up page. We want our design to fit inside Paper, so we can improve our form visually.

Notice that Paper has a Typography component inside, but we don‘t need it. Replace it with Grid. Stretch the Paper components, so all elements of our sign-up form fit nicely.

Step 7: Final UI design touches

There are a couple of tricks that designers use to make their design more harmonious and easy for the eye. Right now the design looks a bit stiff. 

First of all, there’s too much padding. Get rid of it by deleting ‘SX’ PADDING from Paper and SPACING from Grid.

Secondly, Image can take less space in order to make the more important sign-up form shine. Adjust the width of both columns of the grid. Right now both columns take up 6 units. Change Image width to 4 units and the other column will take up 8 units.

Small changes, but the effect is huge, isn’t it?

Step 8: Preview your design

Head on to the preview mode to see your design in flesh. A preview mode is a powerful place where you can simulate your design’s interactions, leave comments, get specs, and copy clean JSX code out of your design. If you’re ready, you can add interactions to the form to make it sensitive to users’ input. Read our help documentation to learn how to add interactions.

What will you build next?

You did it! Congrats! Together we’ve built your first form but that’s just a tip of an iceberg. You can build interactive interfaces of pages, apps, no matter how complex they are. To do that, you can use one of the built-in libraries like the MUI one we used in this tutorial or import your own React library. 

Need more practice? Take a look at our ready layouts that you can copy and customize to your needs. Or just watch our mini-course where Rachel walks you through building an employee portal in UXPin Merge. Sign up for a trial and follow her along: from creating a prototype to pushing it to code. Try UXPin Merge for free.

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Product Announcement – Helping You Bring Design Vision to Life

product announcement

We are excited to share what we’ve been working on in the past few months. We’ve been doing extensive research and development concerning the technology behind UXPin Merge, and today’s the day when we announce it all.

Evolution of UXPin

Our tool was grounded in a passion for innovation and a strong desire to make design accessible to anyone. It started as a paper prototyping notepad, aimed at democratizing prototyping and making it a universal concept that can be used to conceptualize design ideas fast.

Around 2011 we developed a digital wireframing solution. At that time, this type of design work had its limitations. UXPin emerged as a solution to overcome existing flaws and introduce new advantages – from better collaboration with teammates outside of design to the challenges of quick iterations.

UXPin was dedicated to reinventing the design process from the very beginning. Instead of operating on pixels, the tool was backed with code. Instead of focusing on flat mockups, it gave users the power to build highly interactive prototypes. Instead of following a well-threaded path of making a design handoff an afterthought, it married it into the design process from the very beginning.

All of that is backed up with many interesting feature releases, such as Spec Mode, an advanced version of Figma’s “Dev Mode” which UXPin has had for about 8 years. With Spec Mode, developers could inspect properties, measure distance, and get a generated style guide from the design.

We’ve never stopped innovating – the next step was developing a unique design technology – UXPin Merge – meant to bridge the gap between design and development by making teams share a single source of truth (coded UI components.)

And now, we clarified our mission even further – we want to foster an even more inclusive design environment for everyone.

The Journey to Change

Our journey began with a critical realization – developers often struggle to find a designer and need to build a UI by themselves. This sparked the inspiration to refocus UXPin Merge to cater specifically to design-less or developer-driven teams, seeking a more straightforward way to create highly interactive and beautifully-looking user interfaces.

After talking to the users, we understood that UXPin Merge can play a key role in making design accessible and heralding the new era of design – one in which you can blend both design and development into one cohesive process.

Starting with the most popular coded component libraries, MUI, Ant Design, Bootstrap, and Tailwind UI, we transformed UXPin Merge into a drag-and-drop UI builder that serves as a powerful tool for anyone who wants to design fast without compromising on quality, interactivity, and documentation.

UXPin Merge Update – Drag-and-Drop UI Builder with Code Export

To achieve our mission, we introduced key functionalities that make the product development process easier. Let’s explore them one by one.

AI Component Creator

AI proved itself to increase productivity, speed of work, and when it comes to the world of UI and code – product development. That’s why we decided to include it in our design tool.

Our built-in ChatGPT integration can help you get AI-generated fully customizable components based on the prompts you use. Just describe the component you need, and in seconds, it will appear on the canvas. If you need to reuse it or share it – save it as UXPin Pattern.

The AI Component Creator is located on the left (see the screenshot below.) For now, it works with the Tailwind component library (you will read more about that in a separate article.)

It’s a great tool for getting custom components to complement your Tailwind UI library. A form field, menu, modal – the AI Component Creator can generate fully coded components. Once you finish up your AI-generated design, you can copy the working code off the prototype, and kick off the product development phase.

The plugin requires an OpenAI API key, but we’re ready to help with that. Anyone interested in the plugin is welcome to write to our support team or read our help documentation.

Open-source UI component libraries

We’re adding new UI libraries, so that you can enjoy 100% code parity between design and development. This release includes MUIv5, Ant Design, React Bootstrap, and Tailwind UI – four powerful UI libraries that are fully themeable, customizable and their elements can be copied to the development environment without translation.

What’s worth highlighting is that since code comes from open-source libraries, you are the owner of it! You can copy the entire code and use it outside UXPin Merge. We’re giving you a safe design environment to do UI and code exploration. Without making you dependent on our tool.

1. Tailwind UI

We’re adding a full library of Tailwind UI components that is available in UXPin. Tailwind is one of the best choices for reusable CSS code and it’s a great fit for anyone who wants to rapidly build a polished front-end without the need to start from scratch.

It works like this: open Tailwind library in UXPin, pick components that you need, adjust their props, go to Spec Mode and copy the code off your design with one click. We’re including 18 components (button, alerts, input, avatar group, dropdown, and more,) plus we’re giving users the option to add custom Tailwind components, be it with AI Component Creator or just the “Custom component” option in the library.

With Custom component, you can take any code from Tailwind UI and paste it into UXPin. Let’s say you want a Hero Section. Go to Tailwind UI > Components > Marketing > Hero Sections (quick link here.) Then, copy the code by clicking the icon on the right. Go to UXPin’s Tailwind library and click the first component named “Custom component.” Paste the code and watch how your hero section gets dropped on the canvas.

Additionally, with this integration, users can set up themes:

  • Global theme property to have the theme propagated across the entire prototype. 
  • Local theme property to change a theme only on a specific page.

To read more about Tailwind, head to our help documentation.

2. MUIv5

Another new built-in library in UXPin is MUIv5. You’re free to use it on a trial and we have a tutorial plus fully-functional layouts waiting for you. As with Tailwind, just take the component that you like out of a built-in library, place it on the canvas, adjust properties, and copy code.

MUIv5 is a React library that many teams use as a design system. With UXPin, you can easily do that too, and get consistent UI without constantly updating two environments.

  • Access documentation with one click – place a component onto the canvas, click on it, and preview its official documentation, linked in the Properties panel.
  • Switch themes to make your design unique – MUIv5 is fully themeable and you can update it to match the theme you want to use.
  • Forget about redesigning the same element over and over again – most design tools keep the look of your components consistent, we’re going a step further. With our tool, components’ states are also baked in the library..

What’s amazing about this and the rest of libraries in this update is that you get clean code behind every component that you use. Unlike in other design tools, you don’t need to translate components to be usable in the dev’s environment.

Here’s a guide on how to use MUIv5 library components: How to build a simple and responsive dashboard.

Want to get skilled at using MUIv5 in design? Follow our mini-course with Rachel. Here’s the first episode.

3. Antd (Ant Design)

This release also includes Ant Design. Ant Design is a React component library and like any library in UXPin, it works in a drag-and-drop mode. Search for a component you want to use, use it in your design, and copy the clean code that’s fully consistent with official documentation.

If your team is looking for a design system, Antd can be your React component library to base it on. The components that are inside UXPin include avatar, breadcrumbs, cards, inputs, but we also have elements for building layout, adding feedback, such as alerts, and navigation.

You’re free to check it out on trial. Sign up for UXPin Merge.

4. React Bootstrap

We’re also integrating React Bootstrap to UXPin Merge. Next to MUI, Bootstrap is one of the most popular open-source React component libraries that forms a foundation for design systems.

Just navigate to Design Systems Libraries in the Editor, pick React Bootstrap and explore dozens of built-in components that are fully consistent with official Bootstrap documentation.

Drag and drop React Bootstrap components on the canvas, manage their props, arrange the layout, and go to Spec Mode to copy the code.

Do you want to learn how to use it? Great! React Bootstrap is available on trial and comes with its own trial kit. Dive into this React library. Try UXPin Merge for free.

Templates

A blank canvas can be quite scary. For that reason, our release comes with a host of customizable templates. Pick a layout that fits your use case, edit it as you like, and ship it as your own UI.

The templates are not exclusive to UXPin. As with coded components, you can copy the code behind the elements and use it to build your own product.

We’ve built the templates with the MUIv5 component library mentioned above. They are based on the official documentation, contain clean React code, and are a great representation of what UXPin Merge is capable of.

The templates include:

  • Dashboard – get a template of a fully-fledged UI dashboard with an activity chart, order history, sales report, and search bar; perfect for internal tools.
  • Blog – use a layout for a blog with an article structure, images, author avatar, tags, and breadcrumbs. 
  • Store – copy the store template and populate the images with your own content, adjust tags names, edit prices, and add your own ranking.
  • Product details – edit the product card that contains UI elements like image, star rating, price changes, and more.
  • Checkout – play around with a checkout page, personalize it to your product needs, and copy the code behind it.

Spec Mode Improvements (Beta)

Our Spec Mode also got revamped. Right now it’s available with MUIv5 library, but we plan to do a full release later on. UXPin’s Spec Mode is a feature that allows developers to copy specifications, assets, and HTML, CSS, and JSX code.

When building a prototype with MUIv5 components, Spec mode has additional features. What are they?

  • Stackblitz integration – with a click of a button, users can copy the code to Stackblitz, a popular front development environment.
  • Clean React code that’s fully consistent with official documentation – get clean working code that you can copy to your developer’s environment or use one of our available integrations.
  • Resizable Spec Panel – users can change the size of Spec Panel instead of using a fixed size.
  • Collapsible code sections – a small but mighty usability improvement in which you can collapse sections that you don’t want to see.

JSON Tree Viewer

We’re releasing a user-friendly version of a JSON code editor – JSON Tree Viewer. Users can expand and collapse nodes, easily navigate through the data, and make modifications visually.

We also support JSON5 format, so there’s no need to use double quotes for keys. Read how to use JSON Tree Viewer in our help documentation.

Start Using UXPin Merge

With this strategic shift, we look forward to a future where developers can create stunning user interfaces, marking a new era for UXPin Merge and the design community as a whole. Join us in this exciting chapter as we redefine the way teams approach design and product development. The capabilities you’ve seen are available on trial – try them out, post your feedback, and spread the word about UXPin Merge new directions.

Another great news is that we have a new pricing plan that includes all those features: Merge AI, an option tailored for those of you who want to use UXPin Merge technology, AI Component Creator, and code export to their full extent. So, go ahead and try UXPin Merge for free.

If you happen to have a React-based component library of your own, we can integrate it so that you can keep designing with your own code components. Talk to us to get it synced.

Try UXPin Merge

Website Prototyping: The Hands-on Guide

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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.

Build advanced prototypes

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

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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.

Content inventory

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.

Bank login screen

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.

Bank dashboard

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.

Bank pay balance

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.

Bank confirmation

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.

Bank process

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.

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What is Throwaway Prototyping?

throwaway prototyping

Throwaway prototyping is a software development approach that involves rapid creation of a prototype with the understanding that it will be discarded after use. The primary goal of throwaway prototyping is to provide a tangible representation of the app functionality early in the development process, allowing stakeholders to visualize and interact with the proposed system.

This approach is particularly useful in agile projects where teams still trying to conceptualize initial requirements and specifications, or where frequent feedback is crucial. However, it may not be suitable for all types of product development, especially those with strict regulatory or documentation requirements.

Throwaway prototyping can take a form of a paper prototype, wireframe or working model of a product — it all depends on the tools you use. UXPin Merge is a perfect tool for throwaway prototyping model, because it allows you to build a prototype that resembles a final product in one day or less. With built-in templates, patterns, and fully coded components, you can assemble a prototype on the spot. Try UXPin Merge.

Design UI with code-backed components.

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

What is Throwaway Prototyping?

Throwaway prototyping is a way of making a fast and cost-effective model of app user interface and its features. Its key characteristic is that this prototype is not intended to being passed to the development phase. Instead, it serves as a learning tool to enhance communication between designers, developers, and stakeholders, clarify requirements, and identify potential design flaws early in the development cycle.

Once the prototype has fulfilled its purpose, it is set aside, and the team moves on to a more structured prototype development with multiple stages of iterations and tests with end users.

This type of prototyping is frequently contrasted with evolutionary prototyping. Throwaway prototyping and evolutionary prototyping are two distinct approaches in the prototyping spectrum, and they are often placed against one another due to their different objectives and methodologies.

Evolutionary prototyping assumes a more stable understanding of requirements. The aim is to build a prototype that evolves into the final product. The prototype is incrementally refined based on user feedback, ultimately becoming the complete system with an utmost care to user experience.

Is a Throwaway Prototype Still Relevant in 2024?

designops efficiency arrow

Throwaway prototyping is relevant in certain scenarios within the software development process. Here are some situations where a throwaway prototype might be particularly useful:

  • Dealing with uncertain requirements — when initial requirements are not well-defined or are expected to change during the development process, a throwaway prototype can help quickly explore and refine those requirements.
  • Getting stakeholders involved — for web development or app development projects where early stakeholder feedback is crucial, a throwaway prototype allows stakeholders to visualize and interact with a tangible representation of the final product, facilitating better communication and understanding.
  • Reducing risk of misunderstandings — if there is a risk of misinterpretation or misinterpreting requirements, a throwaway prototype can serve as an ideation device, helping clarify expectations and avoid compromising project success.
  • Delivering proof of concept — when there’s a need to test the feasibility of a concept or technology, a throwaway prototype allows for a quick proof of concept without the commitment of developing the entire system.
  • Managing time and budget constraints — in projects with tight timeframes or limited budgets, throwaway prototyping provides a cost-effective way to gather early feedback and make necessary adjustments before committing to full-scale development.
  • Enhancing communication — for projects involving diverse stakeholders with varying technical backgrounds, a throwaway prototype can serve as a common visual representation that aids communication and aligns expectations.

While this approach to software prototyping has its advantages in these situations, it’s essential to recognize that it might not be the best fit for all projects.

Key Problems with the Throwaway Prototype Approach

error mistake wrong fail prototyping 1

This form of rapid prototyping isn’t beneficial to the projects with complex approval cycles and strict regulatory compliance.

In industries with strict regulatory requirements, where thorough documentation and traceability are essential, throwaway prototyping may not align with the need for comprehensive documentation and formal processes.

Whereas, in projects where obtaining approvals involves a complex and lengthy process, throwaway prototyping may introduce challenges.

The rapid development and discarding of prototypes may not align well with extended approval cycles, potentially leading to delays and inefficiencies in the project timeline. A more structured form of project management may require design and development teams to build an actual prototype that will serve as a UX deliverable and accommodate the necessary approval procedures.

Advice on Creating a Rapid Throwaway Prototype

testing user behavior prototype click

The success of a throwaway prototype lies in its ability to gather valuable information efficiently, improve the overall understanding of the project, and rapidly explore ideas. How to do that? Here are key pieces of advice that come in handy for anyone who creates a rapid throwaway prototype.

Communicate the purpose

Clearly communicate to all stakeholders the purpose of creating a throwaway prototype. Emphasize that the throwaway prototype is not intended to become the final product. It is a tool designed for exploration, learning, and refinement. This distinction is important to prevent any misconception that the prototype is the actual product in progress.

Highlight that the throwaway prototype enables quick mock-up of the final system, and thus, it is open to iterations. It’s a flexible and adaptable approach that allows for rapid adjustments based on feedback, ultimately leading to a better understanding of initial requirements.

When stakeholders understand the purpose of the throwaway prototype, their expectations align with the intended outcomes. This reduces the likelihood of disappointment or confusion regarding the role of the prototype in the overall project.

Clear communication encourages active participation from stakeholders. When they know that the prototype is a tool for collaboration and refinement, they are more likely to engage proactively in the feedback and evaluation process.

Involve stakeholders from the start

Bring stakeholders into the process from the initial stages of prototype development. Early involvement ensures that their perspectives are considered in the conceptualization and design phases, reducing the likelihood of misalignment in the later stages of project life cycle.

Moreover, involving decision-makers early ensures that the end product meets their expectations. It is also crucial for project approvals, resource allocation, and overall project direction.

Discovering discrepancies or issues late in the development process can be costly and time-consuming. Involving stakeholders in this type of prototyping helps catch and address concerns before extensive development work has been completed, reducing the risk of late-stage changes or miscommunication.

Take design risks

Taking design risks in throwaway prototyping can be a powerful strategy for innovation and refinement, ultimately contributing to the development of a more effective and user-centered final product.

Throwaway prototyping provides a low-risk environment for experimenting with creative and innovative design concepts. The team can push boundaries, explore new ideas, and test unconventional approaches without the fear of impacting the final product.

Since the throwaway prototype is not intended to evolve into the final product, it allows for rapid iteration and adjustment of design elements. Design risks can be taken, and based on feedback, the prototype can be quickly modified to explore alternative approaches.

The freedom to take risks early in the software engineering process helps spot potential issues or challenges with innovative ideas, identifying and addressing them before significant resources are invested in full-scale development. This proactive approach minimizes the risk of discovering problems late in the project.

Embrace interactive prototyping

It’s often said that throwaway prototyping should be done as a sketch on paper or a basic wireframe, but we’re here to propose something different. Design tools evolved so much that you can add functionality to your prototype without wasting resources, such as money and time.

A functional prototype provides clarity on how the proposed idea will work in practice. It helps in addressing uncertainties and ensuring that everyone involved in the project has a shared understanding of the concept.

With UXPin Merge, you don’t start with a blank canvas. The tool gives you fully interactive coded components that you can arrange on the canvas to quickly explore your design idea. Check out how quickly yoou can build a dashboard design with it.

Seek feedback actively

The throwaway prototype is a communication tool to align everyone’s understanding of the project. Establish open communication channels for feedback. Provide multiple avenues, such as surveys, interviews, or dedicated feedback sessions, to make it convenient for stakeholders and users to share their thoughts on the prototype.

Actively seeking feedback is not a one-time activity but an ongoing process throughout the prototyping and development phases. This mindset fosters a culture of adaptability and responsiveness.

Create a Throwaway Prototype with UXPin Merge

Throwaway prototypes are useful when you want to align your team on the requirements for the product you are creating. It helps to find team agreement, explore possibilities, and find an innovative solution while saving costs and time. One of the best tools for this and other kind of prototyping is UXPin Merge. It has templates, patterns, and built-in component libraries that makes prototyping process intuitive. Explore design ideas in a friendly environment. Try UXPin Merge.

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Complex Approvals – How to Design an App to Streamline Approvals

Complex Approvals

Complex approval processes refer to intricate and multi-step procedures that organizations follow to authorize or endorse certain actions, decisions, projects, or transactions.

These processes typically involve the review and approval of various stakeholders or decision-makers, each contributing their expertise or perspective before granting final approval.

Developers can create customized applications that automate and optimize the approval workflow. Building an app tailored to the organization’s specific needs can enhance efficiency, reduce errors, and improve overall transparency in the approval process.

Design a prototype of an approval app and share it with your stakeholders for feedback. Learn if you are building the right solution to their needs. With UXPin Merge, you can design fully functional and aesthetically-pleasing interfaces without designers. Try UXPin Merge for free.

Design UI with code-backed components.

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

What are Complex Approvals?

Complex approval processes are when business uses intricate, multi-step procedures to approve actions, decisions, projects, or transactions. You might deal with complex approval processes at work whenever you need several people to sign off on something before it can move forward.

Complexity comes from factors like the multiple of approval levels, record-keeping, the organization’s size and structure, and regulatory compliance.

In some industries, approval processes must comply with external regulations or industry standards. This adds an extra layer of complexity as organizations need to ensure that their processes align with legal requirements.

Similarly, comprehensive documentation of the approval process, including who approved what and when, is essential for accountability, audit purposes, and future reference.

What are Examples of Complex Approval Processes?

Examples of complex approval processes in various domains include:

  1. Budget Approvals: Organizations often have multi-tiered approvals for budget proposals. There’s a need to automate the submission, review, and approval of budget proposals. Other activities include tracking the status of proposals, notifying stakeholders, and generating reports.
  2. Product Development: When it comes to developing products, approvals required at different stages of new product development, involving departments like R&D, marketing, legal, and finance. To streamline product development, one would need to facilitate collaboration among departments, streamline document sharing, and ensure that all necessary approvals are obtained.
  3. Contract Agreements: Legal, finance, and executive teams may need to review and approve contractual agreements. Those teams would benefit from a centralized contract review process, version control, and automated reminders for approvals and renewals.
  4. Project Initiatives: Project proposals may need approval at various stages, such as initiation, planning, execution, and closure. It’s essential to manage project proposals, automate milestone approvals, and provide real-time project status updates.
  5. Leave Requests: Employees seeking approval for leave require supervisor and HR approvals. There are a few Leave Request Approval apps that simplify the submission of leave requests, automate supervisor approvals, and maintain a centralized leave calendar.
  6. Expense Reimbursements: Employees submit expense reports that need approval from managers and finance departments. There’s a need for a centralize place for submission of expense reports, automated approval workflows that integrate with accounting systems for reimbursement processing.
  7. Regulatory Compliance: Ensuring that business activities comply with external regulations and track regulatory compliance tasks, automate compliance checks, and generate compliance reports.

By leveraging technical expertise, developers can significantly contribute to the optimization of those complex approval processes. The result is a more streamlined, efficient, and transparent workflow that empowers organizations to make informed decisions while saving time and resources.

How to Speed up Complex Approval Processes

testing user behavior prototype click

To streamline decision-making in these processes, consider creating customizable workflow automation apps. These apps can include features such as dashboard view, notifications, integration with existing systems, and reporting tools.

To enhance the efficiency of complex approval processes, it’s crucial to implement a well-designed workflow automation app with a set of key features.

Build a centralized dashboard and data visualization UI elements

A centralized dashboard serves as the nerve center, providing stakeholders with a quick, comprehensive overview of the entire approval process. Through intuitive visualizations, progress trackers, and status indicators, the dashboard facilitates easy monitoring, ensuring that stakeholders stay well-informed at every stage.

Learn about choosing between dashboard and data reports in UI design.

Turn notifications on

Automation extends to communication with the incorporation of timely and automated notifications. Stakeholders receive alerts, either through email or in-app messages, keeping them informed about pending approvals. This not only ensures swift responses but also helps prevent bottlenecks that could impede the overall process.

Integrate with a database

Seamless integration with existing organizational systems and databases is paramount. This integration not only enhances efficiency but also ensures data consistency, eliminating the need for manual data entry across multiple platforms.

Generate reports automatically

Decision-makers benefit from the inclusion of robust reporting tools, providing valuable insights into approval trends, potential bottlenecks, and overall process efficiency.

Real-time analytics empower decision-makers to make informed and data-driven choices, contributing to more agile and effective decision-making processes.

Don’t ignore ease of use

The user interface plays a pivotal role in user adoption. Designing an intuitive and user-friendly interface facilitates smooth navigation for all users, regardless of their technical expertise. Prioritizing a positive user experience encourages widespread adoption across different departments.

Include app customization for end-users

Flexibility that is built into the app can help you accommodate to diverse approval paths based on the type of request. Allow administrators to easily modify workflows, adapting to the changing needs of the organization.

Build a responsive app design

Responsive design ensures a seamless experience across various devices, allowing stakeholders to engage with the approval process on the go. This adaptability contributes to the accessibility and convenience of the entire workflow.

Take care of onboarding

Lastly, comprehensive training resources and support materials are provided to users. Documentation and tutorials address common issues, enhancing user competence and fostering a positive experience with the approval app.

By implementing these functionalities, UX principles, and UI elements, your organization can significantly expedite complex approval processes, fostering efficiency, transparency, and collaboration among stakeholders. The deployment of customizable workflow automation apps ensures that decision-makers have the tools they need to make informed choices promptly.

How to design an app to streamline business processes

responsive screens prototyping mobile tablet desktop 1

Step 1: Define Objectives

Clearly outline the goals of your app. Identify the specific business processes you intend to streamline. Invite stakeholders to a meeting that will help you gather detailed requirements and understand the intricacies of the workflows involved.

Remember, you are building the app for other people and you want to make their lives convenient. So, you need to look at the project from their perspective and truly listen to their needs, expectations, and goals.

Decide how your app fits into the company’s existing software, so what you need to integrate it with, what data should it use, and more. And choose the appropriate development stack based on your project requirements. This includes selecting programming languages, frameworks, and databases that align with the app’s functionalities.

Step 2: Design a potential solution

Visualize the app’s interface and functionality with a prototype. Seek feedback from stakeholders to refine the design. Prioritize user-centric design principles during this step.

Consider your app interface from end-users’ perspectives, preferences, and pain points. Ensure that the design aligns with their expectations and enhances their overall experience. How can you do that? By testing the design. For that, you will need an interactive prototype. The best tool to create one is UXPin Merge.

With this tool, your prototyping will be 10x faster. Instead of devoting time to sketch a wireframe, you can drag and drop UI elements, such as buttons, input fields more from the menu and build a test-ready prototype. Once you are happy, you can deploy the design. Copying the code behind it is super easy. UXPin Merge makes you create interface with React components that you can copy into your workflow.

Step 3: Refine your idea

Show your solution to a couple of users and ask them if your app has everything they need. If not, write down their tips, and refine your design. Don’t take it personally if they don’t like your solution. They are not criticizing you.

Although it may not seem like it, it is the role of a designer to handle feedback and use it constructively. Learn from designers the art of feedback loops, feedback sessions, and user feedback. It will come in handy.

Step 4: Develop your app

Transitioning from app design to development involves converting the design into a functional application. With UXPin Merge, you have ready-made components to deploy in your workflow.

But apart from the interface, you need to ensure seamless integration with existing organizational systems and databases. Eliminate manual data entry by establishing data consistency across platforms, promoting accuracy and efficiency.

Work on the back-end development to create the server-side logic, database interactions, and application functionalities. Choose a back-end framework and database system that suits your project requirements.

Implement secure user authentication and authorization mechanisms to control access to different app features. This is crucial for protecting user data and ensuring the app’s integrity.

Integrate automated notifications via email or in-app alerts to keep stakeholders informed about pending actions, reducing bottlenecks.

Step 5: Launch and monitor the app performance

Once everything is in order, deploy the app to the live environment. Monitor the app’s performance closely during the initial launch period to address any unforeseen issues.

Offer ongoing support for users and administrators post-launch. Monitor user feedback, address issues promptly, and plan for future updates and enhancements based on user needs.

Streamline complex approvals with your skills

In conclusion, complex approval processes are intricate and multi-step procedures essential for organizations to authorize and endorse specific actions, decisions, projects, or transactions. In navigating these processes, the involvement of various stakeholders or decision-makers, each contributing their expertise, ensures a thorough review before final approval is granted.

By creating customized applications tailored to the unique needs of an organization, developers introduce automation that streamlines processes. This not only enhances overall efficiency but also mitigates the risk of errors, fostering a more transparent and collaborative approval environment.

Remember that effective product development starts with design. Design user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop UI builder that uses what is familiar to you — React components. Quickly test, improve, and deploy your design quickly. Try UXPin Merge.

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Top 10 Signup Page Examples That Will Make You Want to Redesign Your Own

sign up page examples 1

Many people underestimate the importance of a signup page and use a generic template to onboard new users. Signup pages are your organization’s first point of contact with a new customer, so designers should focus on the user experience just as carefully as they do with any other user interface.

We’re going to explore some of the internet’s best signup forms and why they matter. We’ll also show you how to build and test your signup forms using our code-based design tool.

Can your image-based design tool capture user inputs and validate that data? The problem with image-based design tools is they lack fidelity and functionality. With UXPin’s code-based prototypes, designers can capture user inputs, validate emails and passwords, create conditional formatting, and more! Sign up for a 14-day free trial and discover the endless possibilities with code-based design from UXPin.

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What is a Sign Up Page?

Sign up page is a page designed to collect information from users who wish to create an account or register for a service, website, or application. It is a crucial component of online platforms that require user authentication and personalized access.

Why Your Signup Page Matters?

Signup pages are a way for organizations to attract new leads or sales. It’s usually the first time a potential customer will interact with your brand, so it’s critical that you impress and delight new signups.

Signup forms are probably the least complicated UI element to design but the most challenging to entice people to take action. Designers must understand their target audience and UX psychology to overcome hesitancy and increase conversions.

There are no rules to creating the perfect landing page. A/B testing is crucial for registration form optimization.

Top 10 Signup Page Examples

Here are 10 excellent signup form examples to inspire your next landing page.

1. GetResponse

best signup page examples getresponse

GetResponse is an industry-leading email marketing and lead generation software with landing pages, forms, and other tools. You would expect such a company to have an excellent registration page, and they do! 

GetResponse ticks all the boxes when it comes to UX design principles; it is consistent, accessible, easy to digest, uses simple language, and provides feedback, to name a few. The page only has three form fields:

  • Full Name
  • Email
  • Password

Think of each form field as another reason why someone won’t sign up for your product or service. By reducing form fields, you increase conversion rates.

GetResponse also highlights its benefits on the signup page, reminding customers why they need this product and the problems it’ll solve. 

One feature you won’t often find on a signup page is an accessibility button to change the form’s background color marketing it more accessible for visually impaired users to read. GetResponse must know that their brand’s blue didn’t contrast well for people with visual impairments, so they added an accessibility button to fix it.

2. Flux

best signup page examples flux

Flux uses a full-screen signup form to onboard new customers. This strategy allows the user to focus on completing a single task without distractions. Even though Flux only requires users to complete three form fields, they break these up into steps, with a separate page for name, email, and password.

Flux also includes a list of requirements below the password field, so users know what length and characters they must use. As they complete each condition, it turns from red to green with a checkmark, so the user knows they have fulfilled it correctly.

3. Leadinfo

signup page examples leadinfo

The quickest way to get signups is to make it easy, which is precisely what Leadinfo does on its home page signup form. All Leadinfo require to onboard a new customer is an email address. While there is a risk that they might not complete the signup process right away, you have an email address to nurture the lead into a customer.

Leadinfo’s UI design uses typography and color to highlight a problem and how the product can solve it. The clever use of color draws a visitor’s attention to the effortless signup form or the live chat to engage with a sales representative–giving users options and making them feel in control.

4. Cleo

signup page example cleo

Cleo is an app-based product, so users can only signup via the iOS or Android apps. If a potential customer finds Cleo’s website using a desktop, they need to funnel that customer to download the app.

Cleo makes this easy with a dropdown animation revealing a QR code redirecting users to their preferred app store. They also provide links to Apple’s App Store or Google Play.

While Cleo’s example isn’t a signup page, it’s a great example of creating an immersive, on-brand experience for users to find your product and sign up.

5. Designmodo

sign up page examples designmodo

Managing users’ expectations and providing context are crucial for good UX design. Designmodo does this well with a three-step signup sequence that displays a progress bar above the form.

Users know what each step requires and approximately how long it will take them to complete the process. Another intelligent strategy about Designmodo’s signup page is to first ask for the user’s email. If the user abandons the signup sequence, they can try to win them back through an email sequence.

6. Salesforce

top signup page examples salesforce

Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM platform with an extensive suite of tools and products. The company requires a lot of information during signup, including company name, email, phone number, to name a few. Still, they offer a 30-day trial in return–with no credit card or obligation.

Salesforce uses compelling copy to highlight the product’s primary benefits and remind customers that they’re getting 30 days free. The CTA button even says START MY FREE TRIAL, so users know there is a reward for completing Salesforce’s lengthy form.

If you’re asking customers for a lot of information during signup, use value to incentivize the process. Most free trials last 7 to 14 days, so by offering 30 days, Salesforce creates a lot of value. They’re also an established brand with a lot of prestige, so customers are more willing to spend time completing Salesforce’s signup form.

7. Typeform

top signup page examples typeform

It’s impossible to have an article about signup pages without mentioning the master of the form, Typeform. Typeform’s immersive and intuitive forms make completing signups, or any form, an enjoyable experience.

Typeform only requires two fields to complete its signup sequence; email and password. The company also offers two social media options, Google and Microsoft. As Typeform is a business product, offering corporate-type social signup options makes more sense than Facebook or Twitter.

Typeform also offers users the opportunity to customize their data privacy with three options to opt in or out of specific communications below the newsletter signup. As this would create a busy signup interface, Typeform uses a dropdown menu to hide these until the user clicks “See options.”

8. Transmetrics

top signup page examples transmetrics

Providing social proof and testimonials on your sign up page is a fantastic way to tell people how the product or service benefits customers. Transmetrics uses a quote from a prominent European customer explaining the company’s excellent customer service and understanding of the logistics industry.

Transmetrics also uses simple language and bullet points to highlight the product’s key benefits. Lastly, the call to action button says “REQUEST A DEMO,” telling the customer exactly why they are filling out this form.

9. Glide

inspiring signup page examples glide

Glide’s email signup form is minimal and effortless. Users can signup using their Google account or email address. The product integrates with Google Sheets, so it makes sense to only offer one social network signup option.

The simple UI design uses a bright blue signup button, immediately drawing users’ attention to the center of the screen. Glide’s signup form can onboard a new customer smoothly and efficiently with two clicks.

10. PayPal

inspiring signup page examples paypal

As a financial service, PayPal must collect a lot of personal information during signup. If PayPal had to create a single signup form for its onboarding, it might overwhelm customers, resulting in high dropoffs.

To overcome this problem, PayPal uses a step-by-step process of capturing personal data. The company asks for users’ mobile and email first to follow up if the person drops off.

If you have to collect a lot of information, consider doing it in a step-by-step process and use a progress bar to show customers how many steps they must complete. You should also consider offering the option to save their progress to return later.

Prototyping Signup Pages With UXPin

Prototyping forms in traditional vector-based design tools is impossible. These tools don’t offer the functionality to create working inputs users can interact with.

UXPin is a code-based design tool, which means designers can build prototypes that capture and process data like a website or digital product. Designers can create actual signup forms with inputs that check for conditions and provide error messages.

For example, UXPin lets you create email and password validation. If the user forgets the @ or .com in an email input, designers can program an error message for the user to fix the problem. You can also include password conditions, like character count, letters, numbers, and symbols.

Once a user completes signup, you can welcome them with their name on the next page and include their personal information on a profile page. No image-based design tool offers the fidelity or functionality to prototype signup forms like UXPin!

Ready to give signup form prototyping a try? Here’s how in three easy steps:

  1. Sign up for a free UXPin trial.
  2. Download our working example of a signup form prototype.
  3. Drag and drop the .uxp file into your free UXPin account, and you’re ready to go.

Here is a preview of the signup form prototype you can edit and customize in UXPin.

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Best App Landing Page Examples and Why They Work

Best App Landing Page Examples

An app landing page is a dedicated web page designed to showcase and promote a specific application. Its primary purpose is to provide information about the app, highlight its key features and benefits, and encourage target audience to download and install the app.

App landing pages are an essential part of the marketing strategy for apps, serving as a central point for potential users to learn more about the app and decide to download it.

Are you an app developer? Create a beautiful and interactive app landing page design with UXPin Merge’s drag-and-drop features. Use React components that you can then copy to build a React-based app landing page. Try UXPin Merge for free.

Design UI with code-backed components.

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

What is an app landing page?

An app landing page is a special web page made to show off and promote a specific app. It’s like a virtual brochure that tells you all about the app – what it does, its cool features, and why you should get it. The main goal is to help people decide to download and install the app.

These pages are crucial for marketing mobile apps. They act as a central spot where potential customers can get all the details they need before deciding if they want to download the app to their mobile devices or computers. Essentially, it’s like a one-stop-shop to learn how the app works and make an informed choice.

In simpler terms, an app landing page is like a friendly guide that introduces you to an app, explains what it can do, and invites you to give it a try by downloading it.

Key elements of an app landing page

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Most app landing page examples use similar elements. These elements matter because they contribute to a positive user experience and makes the target audience understand what the landing page is for.

Standard UI elements are commonly used across various websites and apps. When users encounter familiar elements, they feel more comfortable and can quickly grasp how to interact with the content.

Certain UI elements have become industry standards. For example, having a prominent and clear CTA button aligns with users’ expectations. Meeting these expectations helps target audience find what they’re looking for without unnecessary confusion.

What are they? Let’s explore key elements of app landing pages in layman’s terms.

  • App logo: Placing the logo in the top left corner of the landing page is a common and effective practice. This aligns with the standard layout of many websites.
  • Hero image or video in the header: Eye-catching visuals at the top of the page help to introduce the app and draw the users in to scroll down for more information.
  • App description text: A concise and compelling overview of the app, including its value proposition, main functionalities, and high-converting benefits.
  • Feature highlights: Sections showcasing the key app features and functionalities of the app, often presented with screenshots of the app or icons to enhance scannability of text and boost messaging.
  • Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons: Prominent buttons encouraging users to download the app with a download link or take specific actions.
  • User testimonials: User reviews or any other form of social proof that describe typical use cases and opionions. Believe it or not, testimonials truly boost your conversion goals. Sometimes a great social proof is just showing the number of app downloads.
  • Social media integration: Links or feeds to the app’s social media profiles to encourage visitors to follow for updates and engage with the app community.
  • Compatibility information: Information about the platforms and devices supported by the app, such as iOS, Android, smartphones, tablets, etc.
  • Contact or support information: Providing ways for users to get in touch with the app’s developers or support team for inquiries or assistance.

By incorporating these elements, app landing pages create a user-friendly environment that aligns with user expectations, enhances usability, and encourages visitors to engage with the content and ultimately get the app.

Best app landing page examples

We prepared a list of high-converting landing pages for mobile apps that you can find at Google Play Store, Apple App Store, or web apps sold by popular SaaS companies. Let’s analyze what makes those landing pages effective.

Headspace

headspace app

Headspace is a meditation app and a great mobile app landing page example. It has a logo in the top-left corner, colorful app screenshots, and a value proposition as a H1. Its CTA button and pricing tiers are above the fold which definitely impacts conversion rates. What is above the fold? It is any content that is immediately visible on a webpage without requiring the user to scroll down.

What’s in it for you?

  • Don’t fear bold colors — Minimalist design is still on trend, but it doesn’t mean that your website should be black and white. Experiment with colors to make your site a delightful user experience.
  • Test if pricing is something that converts —SaaS websites usually highlight pricing on a dedicated landing page, but why not to try it above the fold. Run an a/b test to see if it works for your target audience.
  • Give users a sample of what they can expect — A couple of scrolls down and you can actually hear the recording of one of the meditations. It’s a great hook that draws people in.

MonopolyGo

monopoly go landing page example

MonopolyGo is one of the best selling mobile apps. It’s landing page is simple and to the point. Even though it’s downloaded by millions of people, the landing page creators decided to feature only three testimonials. It seems that it’s not a lot, but each review has a candid photo of a smiling person and a high energy description. Way to go, isn’t it?

What’s in it for you?

  • Boost excitement with an energetic animation — No header? It’s not necessary! Most people know what Monopoly is, but they don’t know how fun it is to play it. Encourage more interest with a high-energy animation of your product.
  • Put links to social media — If social media marketing is important to you and your potential customers, feature the links to it in a visible spot. Notice that for MonopolyGo, it’s not the footer, it’s a left-hand side of their site.
  • Chat option in the right corner —Give your target audience a possibility to reach out to your customer service. This way you’ll know what issues they have and what they expected to get from your site. Feedback matters!

WhatsApp

whatsapp app landing page

WhatsApp is a great example of website design that sells. It pairs great copy with heart-warming visuals to make you click the “Download” CTA. This is why aside from great UI design, you need to work with a copywriter who knows how to compose a high-converting copy.

What’s in it for you?

  • Focus on your value proposition —WhatsApp differentiates itself from other communicators by telling their potential customers that they’re a secure app. What is your value proposition and why should it be important to your users?
  • Use negative space to make copy sink in — WhatsApp makes a great use of whitespace and we think it’s because they want to make the text and visuals stand out. Let your copy breathe, so it can create the impact that you want.
  • Doodles —Headspace used bold colors, MonopolyGo video, and WhatsApp uses doodles to make their landing page more unique.

Vinted

vinted landing page of app example

Vinted is a platform for selling and buying clothes from people. It took ecommerce space by storm. It works on a premise that when you’re using the platform you are giving clothes a new life, and it plays well with a sustainability trend so popular in 2024.

What’s in it for you?

  • Candid photos — it uses photos from the platform on its landing page. Be careful with this one, because you need user consent to do it.
  • Navigation with categories —Vinted is in ecommerce category and it features navigation to communicate what you can expect from the platform.
  • Search bar — what happens when you type in what you’re looking for and click search? You get search results, and from this point you are one step away from buying an item and becoming a user. Since items are indexed, it boosts Vinted’s SEO rankings.

Create an app landing page design with UXPin Merge

You are one step away from creating a high-converting app landing page? Use our tips and log in to UXPin in order to use your knowledge in practice. Design a beautiful layout of your app landing page. Soon you’ll find optimized landing page templates in our app.

And if you are new to our site, we’re creating UXPin Merge, a drag-and-drop UI builder that helps non-designers assemble landing pages, apps, websites, and more 10x faster. Try UXPin Merge.

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Web-Based Application Development – Do’s and Don’ts

Web Based App Development

Web-based application development is the process of creating software applications that are accessed and run through a web browser. These applications can be designed to work on various devices and operating systems. Web-based app development process typically involves using technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with frameworks and libraries, to build interactive and dynamic experiences.

Build interactive web application prototypes and wireframes with a drag-and-drop UI builder. Use fully coded React components and move them around to create beautiful and interactive layout of your app. You don’t need a designer to design anymore. Try UXPin Merge.

Design UI with code-backed components.

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

What is web-based application development?

Web-based app development is the software development process of creating applications that users can access and interact with through a web browser. Unlike traditional desktop or mobile applications, which are installed on a user’s device, web-based apps are hosted on servers and need the Internet connection to run.

When working on web-based app development, programmers primarily use a combination of web technologies. HTML defines the structure of your content, CSS handles the presentation and layout, and JavaScript brings interactivity to the application. These technologies form the backbone of what’s commonly known as the frontend.

For the backend development, programmers likely use server-side programming languages such as Node.js, Python, Ruby on rails, or PHP, coupled with databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or other SQL database. The backend is responsible for processing requests from the frontend, managing data, and performing any necessary business logic.

Types of web applications

There are several types of web applications. We explored them in our previous article about making a web app from scratch. What you need to know is that you can encounter:

  • Single-page applications: Web-based applications that load a single HTML page and dynamically update the content as the user interacts with the app.
  • Multi-page applications: Web applications that consist of multiple HTML pages, with each page representing a distinct view or functionality, requiring full page reloads when navigating between them.
  • Progressive web applications: Progressive web apps (PWAs) provide a native app-like experience, offering features such as offline access, push notifications, and responsive design while being accessible directly through web browsers.

You also have static and dynamic web applications. To explore them, read our article about creating a web app.

What is a web application development process?

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Web application development process is a systematic approach to creating web apps. It comprises multiple steps that result in building a user-friendly web app. The process is similar to creating a mobile app: it has a design stage with a few iterations, development stage, and testing phase.

Whenever, design and developmenet teams want to add a new feature, they follow the same workflow as if they were building a new web app. They design a feature, iterate on it, and develop it. The same process gets replicated for web development for mobile devices.

The Do’s of web app development

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We’re creating a web app. It means that we need to follow a couple of principles regarding app user experience and user interface design as well as software development. We recommend you stick to those do’s.

Follow responsive design best practices

Responsive design is an approach to web app development that ensures a web application’s user interface and layout adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes, resolutions, and device types. The primary goal is to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience for end users.

Since your users can access your web through a wide range of devices, from desktop computers and laptops to tablets and mobile devices, you need to take care of responsive user interface design.

Some tips about responsive user interface design include:

  • Start with a Mobile-First Approach: Begin your design process by focusing on the smallest screens first, typically mobile devices. This approach ensures that your core content and functionality are prioritized for smaller screens and then progressively enhanced for larger ones.
  • Use Fluid Grids and Flexible Layouts: Implement fluid grid systems and flexible layouts using relative units like percentages and ems instead of fixed units like pixels. This allows your web content to adapt proportionally to the screen size, ensuring a consistent user experience across devices.
  • Use Media Queries for Breakpoints: Use media queries to set breakpoints at which your design will change to accommodate different screen sizes. Adjust your layout, font sizes, and other styles based on these breakpoints to provide an optimized experience for various devices.
  • Test Across Multiple Devices: Regularly test your responsive web design across a variety of devices and browsers. Emulators and browser developer tools can help, but real-world testing on actual devices is crucial to identify and address specific issues that may arise on different platforms.
  • Prioritize Content: Prioritize and organize content based on its importance and relevance to users. Ensure that critical content is accessible and prominent, especially on smaller screens where space is limited.
  • Typography Adjustments: Adjust font sizes and line heights to ensure readability on different devices. Consider using relative units for font sizes to ensure that text scales appropriately across various screen sizes.
  • Consider Touch and Gesture Inputs: Design with touch and gesture interactions in mind, especially for mobile devices. Ensure that buttons and interactive elements are appropriately sized and spaced to accommodate touch input.
  • Accessibility Considerations: Pay attention to accessibility standards. Ensure that your responsive design accommodates users with disabilities and provides a seamless experience for everyone, regardless of their abilities or the devices they use.
  • Performance Optimization: Optimize your website’s performance by minimizing unnecessary assets and reducing the overall page load time. Consider lazy loading images, minimizing HTTP requests, and leveraging browser caching to enhance the user experience.

Want to build an app wireframe that is responsive from the start? Follow our guide on how to do that with UXPin Merge and MUI components: How to Build a Responsive Dashboard?

Adhere to coding standards

Coding standards are a set of guidelines and conventions that developers adhere to when writing code. Coding standards act as a common language, ensuring that all team members write code in a similar manner. This consistency fosters better communication, minimizes misunderstandings, and allows developers to seamlessly switch between different parts of the codebase.

Additionally, when coding standards are followed, it becomes simpler for software developers to identify and fix issues. Debugging becomes a more straightforward process because the code is structured in a predictable way, making it easier to trace the flow of execution and locate potential problems.

Coding standards cover various aspects of coding, including naming conventions, indentation, formatting, and best practices.

Optimize images and media

Optimizing images is crucial for web-based apps because it directly impacts the app’s performance, user experience, and overall loading speed. Large or poorly optimized images can significantly increase page load times, leading to slower user interactions and potentially driving visitors away from a web page or application. Here are some ways to achieve optimized images and media:

  • Compression: Use image compression techniques to reduce the file size without compromising image quality excessively. Tools like ImageOptim, TinyPNG, or online services like Squoosh can help in compressing images effectively.
  • Resize Images: Ensure that images are resized to the appropriate dimensions for their display on the web app. If an image is larger than needed, resizing it can significantly reduce its file size. Use tools like Photoshop, GIMP, or online platforms to adjust dimensions.
  • Choose the Right File Format: Select the appropriate file format for each image. For photographs, JPEG is often suitable, while PNG is ideal for images with transparency. SVG is a good choice for simple graphics and icons. Each format has its compression and quality considerations.
  • Lazy Loading: Implement lazy loading for images, especially for those that are not initially visible on the user’s screen. Lazy loading ensures that images are loaded only when they come into the user’s viewport, reducing the initial page load time.
  • Responsive Images: Use responsive images that adapt to different screen sizes. This prevents unnecessary loading of large images on smaller screens and ensures a better user experience on various devices.
  • Content Delivery Network (CDN): Utilize a Content Delivery Network to distribute images across servers geographically. CDNs reduce latency by serving images from servers closer to the user, further improving loading times.

Leverage caching strategically

Caching is a technique used in web development to store and reuse certain data or resources, reducing the need to repeatedly request and retrieve them from the original source.

It improves the performance and user experience of web applications by minimizing the time and resources required to load and display content. Caching is particularly beneficial for frequently accessed or static data.

Use browser caching, server-side caching, and content delivery networks (CDNs) to reduce the load on servers and improve the overall speed of your web-based application.

Engage in Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD)

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, and it represents a set of modern software development practices aimed at improving the development and delivery process.

Continuous Integration is about automating the deployment process of software to staging or production environments. Continuous Delivery focuses on automating the deployment process of software to staging or production environments.

So, set up a CI/CD pipeline to automate the testing, building, and deployment processes. Continuous integration ensures that changes are merged seamlessly, and continuous deployment allows for faster and more reliable updates to your web application.

CI/CD is crucial for web-based apps because it enhances the speed, reliability, and collaboration aspects of the development and deployment process, ultimately leading to a more efficient and competitive development lifecycle.

The Dont’s of web app development

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There are a few no-no’s when it comes to web-based apps. Here are key things that front-end developers and designers need to avoid.

Inconsistent UI

UI consistency in web app development refers to maintaining a uniform and cohesive design across the user interface elements, visual elements, and interaction patterns throughout the entire application. It ensures that users encounter a predictable and harmonious experience as they navigate different pages and sections of the web app.

Consistency involves adhering to established design patterns, styling conventions, and interaction behaviors to create a seamless and intuitive user interface. Here are a few dangers of having an inconsistent user interface:

  • Confusing User Experience: Inconsistencies in the UI can lead to confusion among users. If elements like buttons, navigation menus, or color schemes vary across different pages, users may struggle to understand how to interact with the application, leading to a less intuitive and frustrating experience.
  • Higher Cognitive Load: Users must invest additional cognitive effort to adapt to an inconsistent UI. When design elements behave differently or have varying visual cues, users need to constantly readjust their mental model of the application, resulting in increased cognitive load and potentially hindering their overall experience.
  • Increased Error Rates: Inconsistencies may lead to higher error rates. Users accustomed to a certain interaction pattern may make mistakes when confronted with unexpected changes. This can result in unintended actions, frustration, and a higher likelihood of errors during the use of the web app.

If your UI is inconsistent, you need to redesign your app. Now! Check how other companies updated their UI quickly by using a modern component library that’s perfect for the web-based apps.

Poor usability

Usability encompasses factors such as ease of use, intuitiveness, navigation, and overall user experience. A web app with poor usability often presents challenges that lead to frustration, confusion, and an overall negative user experience.

Identifying poor usability in your web app involves assessing various aspects of user interaction and experience. Here are signs that may indicate your web app’s usability needs improvement:

  • High exit rates on key pages: If users are frequently exiting your web app on crucial pages, such as checkout or registration pages, it may signal usability issues. Analyze exit rates on important pages to identify potential roadblocks or confusing elements.
  • Frequent support requests: An increased number of support requests or inquiries related to how to use the web app may indicate poor usability. Users should be able to navigate and perform tasks intuitively without the need for extensive guidance.
  • Low task completion rate: Users might encounter difficulties in completing tasks, leading to task abandonment, they may leave forms unfilled, not convert to paid users or they won’t invite friends or coworkers to join them in app.
  • Limited user engagement: A lack of user engagement with key features or functionalities may suggest poor usability. Users might not be discovering or using certain elements, indicating that the design or placement is not intuitive.

Not handling users errors

Handling user errors effectively in web applications is crucial for providing a positive user experience and preventing user frustration. Web developers and designers should provide clear and descriptive error messages that convey the nature of the problem and suggest possible solutions.

The text should be written without technical jargon or complex terminology that might confuse users further. Communicate the error in a way that makes sense to the user. Another important thing is the error message placement. Display error messages in proximity to the specific field or area where the error occurred. This helps users quickly identify the problem and understand which part of the form or process needs attention.

Implement real-time validation for user inputs. As users fill out forms, provide instant feedback on whether their input is valid. This proactive approach helps users correct errors before submitting the form.

If you want to create a prototype that can test validation, use UXPin Merge for your web app design. It helps you quickly set up user input validation and test it with real users.

Lack of testing UI before release

The development team may forget about testing the UI before they release the first version of the app. Testing the user interface is crucial for identifying and addressing potential issues that end users may encounter.

Testing the UI early in the development process helps detect design flaws or inconsistencies that may have been overlooked during the design phase. Addressing these issues before the release saves time on redesigning app’s user interface.

Gather feedback from potential users through usability testing sessions. Observing how users interact with the UI can provide valuable insights into areas that may need improvement. You can also release a beta version of your web app to collect feedback, monitor user interactions, and identify any unexpected issues before the full release.

Neglecting cross-browser compatibility

Neglecting cross-browser compatibility is a common mistake in web development that can have significant repercussions on a website’s usability, functionality, and overall user experience.

Cross-browser compatibility refers to the ability of a website or web application to function consistently and effectively across different web browsers. Ignoring this aspect can lead to various challenges and user frustrations, as some users will not be able to use your app or they may encounter performance and layout errors.

Always test UI across various browsers (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc.) to ensure that your web app looks and functions consistently across different browser environments. This is crucial for avoiding potential issues specific to certain browsers. There are some tools that can help you with that.

Failing to provide documentation

Documentation serves as a crucial resource for understanding the codebase, facilitating collaboration, and ensuring the maintainability of the web app.

Without proper documentation, app maintenance becomes a challenging and time-consuming process. Documented codebase explanations, architectural decisions, and coding conventions help development team members understand the project more efficiently.

Well-documented code provides clarity on the intended behavior, reducing the likelihood of introducing errors during maintenance. Documented codebase guidelines and architectural documentation are also essential for scaling the app without any problems.

Overlooking security measures

Neglecting security can lead to severe consequences, including data breaches, unauthorized access, and compromised user trust. Since the app is based on web, it is susceptible to common cyber attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF). These attacks can lead to unauthorized access, data manipulation, and session hijacking, making identity theft protection a crucial aspect of any security strategy. To strengthen defenses, developers should implement session hijacking prevention measures such as using secure cookies, enforcing HTTPS connections, and regenerating session IDs after login or privilege escalation.

Neglecting security often results in a lack of incident response preparedness. Without a well-defined incident response plan, software developers and security teams may struggle to contain and mitigate the impact of security incidents promptly.

Build an interactive web application prototype with UXPin Merge

We explored do’s and dont’s of web application development. Do you feel inspired to build your own web-based app? If so, try our drag-and-drop UI builder, UXPin Merge and design with React UI components that come from MUI and other open-source libraries to move from design to development 10x faster. Try UXPin Merge.

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GUI Database — Don’t Miss Those Steps When Designing Your Own UI

GUI database

Web developers or database administrators, working with SQL databases streamline tasks such as querying the database, executing SQL code, generating reports, taking backups, and diagnosing application problems related to the database. Building a graphical user interface for your database can make database management easier.

In this article, we explain how you can create a user-friendly database GUI using React components for front-end design. By following our tips, even beginners or non-admin users will find your database intuitive.

Create interactive prototypes of your app GUI. No matter if your creating a web-based, mobile or desktop app, access a full library of essential React.js elements to build GUI with. Build interfaces with a code that you own for utmost security and independence. Try UXPin Merge.

Design UI with code-backed components.

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

What is a Database GUI?

Database GUI is a graphical user interface of a database. It helps visualize data and makes database management easy. With it, you don’t need to be skilled at database administration in order to use operate on database, because you have graphical elements such as windows, icons, buttons, and menus to interact with instead of using text-based commands or SQL queries.

If your users are not familiar with command-line interfaces (CLIs) or queries, you can create a database GUI for them to interact with. That’s one of the option. The other one is using database GUI tools.

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Popular database management systems, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, Redshift and Oracle, often come with their own GUI tools. Additionally, there are no-code tools that provide an SQL GUI for interacting with multiple database systems. Those tools are DBeaver, Navicat, DbVisualizer. They differ in pricing and functionalities, such as syntax highlighting, debugging, and more.

You can always design your own database GUI with drag-and-drop UI builder like UXPin Merge. Your SQL GUI can take many forms, from a mobile app to a web-based app or even a desktop application. This way you own your code 100% and you can store it on a secure server. Try UXPin Merge.

What Functionalities Database GUIs Have?

A typical Database GUI provides a user-friendly environment for tasks. Some of those functionalities include the following:

  1. Data Entry: Users can input, modify, or delete data in the database using forms or input fields.
  2. Querying: Users can create and execute queries to retrieve specific information from the database. This can often be done using visual query builders rather than writing SQL code directly.
  3. Report Generation: Users can generate and view reports based on the data stored in the database.
  4. Dashboard Navigation: Users can navigate through the database structure, explore tables, relationships, and other components visually.
  5. Administration: Database administrators (DBAs for short) often use GUIs to manage and monitor the database, including tasks like user management, backup, and recovery.
  6. Real-time Performance Monitoring: Users can monitor and analyze database performance. Plus, they can track resource usage, query execution times, and other performance metrics.
  7. Cross-Platform Compatibility: Support for different operating systems, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux.

These functionalities collectively provide users with a comprehensive set of tools to interact with databases efficiently, making database management more accessible to users with varying levels of technical expertise.

What Do You Need to Remember When Designing Your Own Database GUI?

Designing a Database GUI (Graphical User Interface) involves careful consideration of various factors to ensure a user-friendly and efficient experience. Here are key considerations to remember when designing your own database GUI:

Compile a list with requirements

task documentation check

Open a doc file or Miro board and brainstorm what you need from an SQL database. Write down the features in terms of Jobs-to-Be-Done framework. It will help you think from the perspective of using the Database GUI instead of enlisting nice-to-have features.

If you haven’t heard about this before, Jobs-to-Be-Done focuses on understanding the practical tasks or problems that we are trying to solve with a product. It takes a form of a statement, “When [situation/context], I want to [functional job], so that I can [desired outcome].”

In the case of SQL development, you may write down a following JTBD statement, “When I’m in an SQL editor, I want to check syntax and code completion, so that I can write accurate and efficient database queries without errors.”

This framework was popularized by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and his colleagues. But there are other tools that will help you come up with a list of requirements like a design sprint, design thinking workshop or interviewing the users.

Check out our article on CRUD apps to get inspiration for more JTBD statements.

Experiment with layout

lo fi paper prototyping screens

The list is done, so it’s high time you explore UI of your database GUI. You can use UXPin Merge for that. UXPin comes with a pre-built React components that you can drag and drop to find the perfect layout of your elements.

Visual exploration will help you understand what functionalities you need to highlight (a dashboard with columns and rows), which one don’t need to take a center page (admin stuff), and how many pages your database project requires.

With UXPin Merge, you’re not limited to an existing solution for integrating your data sources. You can build a UI and handle the backend later. Open-source, low-code platforms would speed up your app building workflow, yet UXPin Merge will help you create a fully customizable solution that you can scale in any way you want.

Read more about designing in UXPin in our walkthrough on “How to build a responsive data table.”

Follow design principles

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Design principles are fundamental guidelines that inform the intentional creation and organization of elements within a system or product.

They serve as a set of rules or best practices that guide the decision-making process during the design phase, ensuring a thoughtful and purposeful approach to solving problems and achieving specific goals.

  • Consistency: Maintain a consistent design language throughout the interface to provide a cohesive and predictable user experience. It relates to typography, color scheme, imagery, but also UX copy, and components.
  • Simplicity: In the world of design, less is more. It makes sense to have more pages than to pack tight your UI with features that users don’t need at this point. JTBD framework will help you decide on the information architecture of your site.
  • Clarity and Readability: Use clear and concise labels for buttons, fields, and menu items., choose legible fonts and appropriate font sizes and ensure proper contrast for readability.
  • Error handling: Implement mechanisms to prevent errors when possible and provide informative error messages with guidance when errors occur.
  • Efficiency: This is more of a UX thing than UI, but pay attention to task efficiency. Optimize workflows to reduce the number of steps required to perform common tasks. Consider providing shortcuts and quick access to frequently used features.

Responsive design

responsive screens prototyping mobile tablet desktop 1

A responsive design allows users to access and interact with the database GUI seamlessly across various devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. This adaptability enhances accessibility and accommodates diverse user preferences.

Users may need to manage databases or perform queries while on the go or from different devices. A responsive design ensures a consistent and user-friendly experience regardless of the device being used, improving overall usability.

A responsive GUI adapts its layout and functionality based on the screen size, providing an optimal user experience. This adaptation prevents issues such as awkward scrolling, distorted layouts, or elements being cut off, which can occur on non-responsive interfaces.

Consider scalability

scaling prototyping

Your data sources and formats will evolve, and so does your app. Think about the future and design your GUI in a way that it can handle large datasets and complex queries gracefully, ensuring optimal performance as the database grows.

The same goes with adding more features. It’s better to start with a Minimum Viable Product and work your way to a more complex solution than fall prey of a feature creep.

Rethink collaboration

team collaboration

Design welcomes feedback, and so should you. You may may have biases or overlook certain aspects of a project. Feedback from other people helps identify blind spots, allowing you to address issues you might not have considered.

You’re not the only person who will use your database GUI, so show your design to others. Check if they can understand the interface that you are designing and ask them for feedback.

Feedback acts as a quality control mechanism. By collecting feedback, designers can catch errors, inconsistencies, or usability issues that may have been overlooked during the design process, contributing to a more polished and refined final product.

Test with users

testing user behavior prototype click

Testing your database GUI prototype with users is a critical step that offers numerous benefits and contributes to the overall success of your product. Here’s a compelling argument for why you should conduct user testing:

  • Feedback on Design Choices: Users can provide valuable feedback on specific design elements, layout, and features. This feedback helps you understand which aspects are working well and where improvements can be made, guiding further design iterations.
  • Early Detection of Issues: User testing enables the early detection of potential issues before the product is launched. Addressing problems in the prototype phase is more cost-effective than making changes post-launch, saving time and resources.
  • Optimization of Workflows: Understanding how users navigate through your GUI allows you to optimize workflows and streamline tasks. This can lead to increased efficiency and productivity for users interacting with the database.

There are a couple of ways you can test your prototype. We recommend you read about task analysis that you can easily perform once you build a UXPin Merge prototype.

Refine your design

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Analyze the results of usability testing. Identify areas where users experienced improvements, as well as any unexpected issues or challenges. Based on the feedback received, refine the design further. Iterate on the changes, addressing any remaining issues or incorporating additional improvements suggested by users.

Don’t forget to document the design changes systematically. Create updated design documentation, including wireframes, user flows, and any revised specifications. This documentation serves as a reference for developers and other stakeholders.

Build a prototype of your database GUI

In this blog post, we explored the essentials of designing a Database GUI for efficient database management. Starting with the benefits for developers and administrators, we highlighted the user-friendly approach using React components and tools like UXPin Merge for interactive prototypes. The Database GUI, a graphical interface, simplifies tasks such as data entry, querying, and administration, catering to users with diverse technical backgrounds.

We delved into popular database management systems and GUI tools, emphasizing the option of designing a personalized GUI with UXPin Merge for complete control and security. If you want to design a database GUI with UXPin Merge, try it for free.

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