The aesthetic–usability effect gives UX designers fascinating insights into human behavior and why they must avoid prioritizing usability over visual appeal. Striking the right balance between form and function plays an important role in building a successful product.
A digital product’s aesthetics is the primary driver to entice users, while good user experience and usability retain customers. Apple is a fantastic example of this theory in practice. Apple’s products look sleek and attractive and deliver an exceptional user experience.
Even with Apple’s myriad of issues, including broken cables, terrible customer service, and mediocre product releases, Apple customers are loyal and quick to forgive–the aesthetic–usability effect might be one way to explain this loyalty.
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What is the Aesthetic-Usability Effect?
The aesthetic-usability effect is a psychological occurrence discovered by researchers Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura, studying human-computer interaction (HCI) at the Hitachi Design Center in the 90s. Studies found that humans perceived aesthetically-pleasing products with usability problems as more usable than better-performing ones with less appealing visual design aesthetics.
Before prioritizing form over function for your next redesign, it’s crucial to note that the aesthetic-usability effect works on first impressions. As users use a product more, the usability issues (and even aesthetics) become annoying and frustrating.
The aesthetic-usability effect is also limited to minor usability issues–problems that aren’t obvious to users when they first use the product. If your app crashes, takes too long to load, has broken links, or has other frustrating problems, the aesthetic-usability effect probably won’t help.
Don Norman’s Nielsen Norman Group (NN Group) notes a study where users initially found the beautiful hero image on a website appealing, only to revise their opinion to “annoying” the second time when they battled to navigate and complete tasks.
Designers must also consider that beauty is subjective across cultures and demographics. Color schemes, typography, words, symbols, and other UI elements carry different meanings to various user groups. For example, a Korean user might perceive a UI as less appealing to someone in the United States.
The key takeaway is the aesthetic-usability effect works to entice users but won’t retain them if the product is difficult to use. Designers must use UX research to determine what users consider aesthetically pleasing.
Verbalizers: more influenced by words or verbal associations
Imagers: more influenced by images and aesthetics
A 1999 study on these two groups found that, interestingly, “user preference was significantly different between imagers and verbalizers, but that of the usability factor was not.”
Why Are Aesthetics Important for Interface Design?
As we see from the aesthetic-usability effect, great usability is not enough to entice people to use your product or even like it when it performs well. Finding a balance between form and function is crucial for product design, especially for startups or businesses entering a new market.
Competitive advantage
The first thing the aesthetic-usability effect tells us is that visually-appealing products and UI design provide a competitive advantage. Products that look great and perform well have a better chance of attracting new customers.
More tolerant users
Another key insight from the Hitachi Design Center’s study is that users are more tolerant of beautiful design. As long as you’re making a conscious effort to fix usability problems and communicating this to customers, they’re less likely to abandon your product–but don’t count on this retention lasting!
This “affect” could explain why users are more forgiving of usability issues when experiencing positive feelings toward a beautiful user interface. If designers solve these usability issues, they can leverage the aesthetic-usability effect and positive attitudes to enhance a product’s usability, creating a positive holistic user experience.
The Aesthetic-Usability Effect & User Testing
Designers must be mindful of the aesthetic-usability effect during user testing because it can bias the results. As we saw with the NN Group’s website study example, a user’s first impression was positive but changed the second time they used it.
Designers must observe user behavior carefully during testing because someone’s feedback might be positive, but they struggled at certain moments while completing tasks.
An NN Group article, First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users states, “To design the best UX, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior. Users do not know what they want.”
The article goes on to say how usability study participants will often rationalize their behavior, which could influence poor design decisions.
To avoid bias from the aesthetic-usability effect and other influences, designers must use multiple data points, including usability testing, interviews, analytics, user research, etc., to get a holistic picture of the design and user pain points.
Designers must also consider how the aesthetic-usability effect will impact stakeholder feedback and the possibility of favoring one design choice over another because it looks better.
How to Apply the Aesthetic-Usability Effect Principle in Product Design
There is no one thing designers can do to leverage the aesthetic-usability effect. Instead, designers must use a holistic approach to visual design, considering multiple factors influencing a product’s appeal.
Color Scheme
Your product or website’s color scheme plays a crucial role in beauty and aesthetics, resulting in positive feedback from users. Conversely, colors that clash immediately elicit negative emotions.
Conversation found, “According to color harmony theory, bright blue and red colors that they use for their promo campaign wouldn’t necessarily match their main brand color, purple.”
While color preferences differ from person to person, colors that clash significantly impact a user’s first impression. Designers must also pay attention to images and other visual content to reduce conflicting contrasts wherever possible.
Cluttered UIs
The ability to read and absorb content plays an essential role in aesthetics. Cluttered UIs, small illegible text, and too many options can overwhelm users, making a user interface less attractive.
Designers must prioritize content, create clear visual hierarchies, and use whitespace to separate UI elements as a foundation for aesthetically-pleasing design.
Whitespace
If you scroll through Behance or Dribbble, you’ll notice that the best designs use whitespace for aesthetics. Apple uses whitespace to perfection throughout its products and marketing touchpoints.
If you scroll through Apple’s homepage, you’ll notice how the tech giant uses generous whitespace throughout–usually with centered content to focus user attention. Apple also uses a predominantly black and white color scheme, with blue for links/CTAs, and the occasional red accent.
Consistency
Design consistency plays a vital role in usability and aesthetics. Consistency enables users to think less because they can find UI elements faster and predict outcomes.
Designers can enhance a product’s consistency by creating a design system. Design systems don’t only solve design inconsistencies but improve cross-functional collaboration and reduce time to market.
Motion
Microinteractions and animations are also crucial characteristics of aesthetics and usability. Interactive components breathe life into a digital product, giving users vital feedback as they navigate user interfaces.
Avoid Pitfalls of The Aesthetic-Usability Effect With UXPin
One of the challenges with prototyping is that design tools don’t have the same fidelity or functionality as the final product. Prototypes look beautiful but don’t accurately represent the user experience, adversely impacting the feedback and results during user testing.
The problem is that designers are trying to get accurate user feedback with tools that render vector graphics for a product developed in code. They can design beautiful UIs that deliver excellent results during testing but fail to meet user needs and expectations after release.
With UXPin, designers get the simplicity of a design tool with the fidelity and functionality of code. Instead of vector graphics, UXPin renders code, allowing designers to build prototypes comparable to the final product.
This increased fidelity and functionality mean designers can leverage the benefits of the aesthetic-usability effect using UXPin and avoid the pitfalls user testing might not reveal with an image-based prototype.
Get meaningful feedback at every stage of the design process with UXPin’s high-quality prototypes. Design beautiful UIs and reduce usability issues to deliver positive user experiences to your customers. Sign up for a free trial to explore UXPin’s advanced design, prototyping, and testing features.
Many organizations struggle to free themselves of legacy systems and the headaches they possess. These outdated ecosystems present many challenges, including user experience and digital innovation.
The burdens of legacy technology are why challenger banks can compete with traditional banks, adopt sophisticated technology, and deliver products to customers significantly faster.
This article explores the challenges of legacy systems and their adverse impacts on business and customer experience. We also look at how FinTech companies outperform traditional financial service providers without these legacy burdens and what the latter can do to modernize.
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What are Legacy Systems?
Legacy systems are hardware, software, and other outdated technology organizations still use. The company that built the legacy system is usually no longer in business, or they’ve stopped offering updates and support for the product.
Without updates and support, the organization must employ IT experts to maintain and operate the legacy system. The talent pool for these systems is small, so labor is expensive, and they often have to fabricate hardware replacements at high costs because parts aren’t readily available.
Legacy systems also require a significant amount of space. Many organizations operate on systems that are 30-50 years old. The hardware for these legacy systems is bulky, requiring significant real estate to operate and maintain efficiently. Institutions must also worry about data integrity and ensuring they don’t lose everything when a system crashes–and legacy systems do crash!
Legacy systems are still widely used in the banking sector and government institutions. Not only are legacy systems expensive to maintain, but they present significant security risks.
According to a Forbes article, most US Federal Government systems are outdated. The US Treasury is one of the oldest systems at 51 years old, closely followed by Health and Human Services at 50.
Legacy Systems and User Experience
These technical issues present a challenge for UX designers trying to design a good user experience for a back-end held together with adhesive tape and bubble gum. Legacy systems offer several critical challenges for product teams:
Poor performance: front-end applications must wait for API (application programming interfaces) calls to legacy systems
Scalability limitations: legacy systems impede innovation
Poor cross-platform experience: restrictions on what users can do with mobile banking apps vs. desktop applications
Budget constraints: legacy banking systems are expensive–consuming valuable resources that could go to UX and digital product innovation
Silos and bureaucracy: make it challenging to compete with fast-moving FinTech startups and institutions that have embraced technology
Security constraints: legacy systems are more vulnerable to attack, adding more complexity and limitations
What Makes FinTech More Successful?
FinTech products solve the same problems as organizations running legacy systems but can compete because they have fewer constraints.
Here are some ways FinTech outcompetes multinational financial institutions with decades of experience and expertise.
1. FinTech moves fast
Speed to market is one of FinTech’s greatest strengths. With modern technologies, efficient workflows, and no silos or bureaucracy, FinTech product teams can innovate and deliver projects fast.
FinTech companies are also free to test and adopt new technology, like machine learning, blockchain powered by a web3 rpc provider, and artificial intelligence, which significantly enhance product quality and customer satisfaction.
This efficiency makes app-first investment products like Robinhood, and digital banking providers like Monzo, Chime, and Nubank, to name a few, successful. They offer clients a comparable financial product through sophisticated applications they continually innovate.
Traditional financial institutions battle to compete because they’re slow to market and are always two steps behind faster, agile FinTech organizations.
2. User-centric
FinTech organizations adopt a user-centric mindset for decisions and innovation. They understand user needs better than traditional financial institutions because they’re more in tune with modern digital software development, specifically, user experience and design thinking.
This user-centric approach enables FinTech organizations to prioritize customer needs and focus on core banking products that meet expectations–creating better trust, adoption, and retention.
3. Better data analytics
Data integrity and quality are significant issues for legacy system financial institutions. Legacy systems prevent holistic real-time analytics, which slows decision-making and innovation.
Conversely, modern FinTech organizations have high-quality real-time end-to-end analytics allowing them to identify issues and opportunities.
These valuable insights enable stakeholders to make educated decisions aligned with the company’s vision, roadmap, and customer expectations.
This deeper understanding of customer behavior enables FinTech designers to prioritize products and services that meet user needs while identifying unique business opportunities.
FinTech organizations are also more adept at remote work environments, allowing them to draw from a global talent pool and onboard much faster.
Traditional financial institutions suffer from silos and, due to regulatory requirements and company policies, take longer to onboard talent and build teams.
How Designers Can Help With Modernizing Legacy Systems
1. Measuring and reporting
Measuring and reporting are vital components of modernizing legacy systems, including:
UX audits: identify usability issues linked to legacy systems and measure the annual cost of inaction
Service safari: get team members to use your products and competitors to gain insights from a user’s perspective
Using these methodologies is just the first step. Design teams must use these insights to present quantitative data to stakeholders. For example,
what is the cost of poor user experience from legacy systems, and what are the potential returns for modernization?
When Talabat’s product team battled to get investment for a design system, they built a business case around the costs of front-end debt. The team measured the time it took to develop a UI with and without a design system. The results demonstrated significant losses for Talabat’s front-end debt, convincing stakeholders to invest in the product’s design system.
Your problem and solution must include numbers to support your business case. Stakeholders want to see metrics and KPIs to assess:
The state and scale of the issue
How your solution improves these numbers
2. Prioritizing effectively using design thinking
Designers can use design thinking to prioritize projects and identify opportunities that maximize business value. Finding the balance between desirability, viability, and feasibility is an effective research technique for innovative products that deliver sustainable long-term growth and success.
Desirability: what do customers need vs. want? Needs are more valuable because people can’t live without them.
Viability: can the company afford it, and does it make business sense?
Feasibility: do you have the resources to build it? Is it right for the business? And, how long will it take to deliver?
Finding the sweet spot in this trifecta can maximize business value while solving customer needs. To be successful, the entire organization must embrace design thinking and user experience principles.
Design advocacy and design thinking workshops are crucial in getting buy-in from team members and stakeholders and steering them towards a modern, user-centered mindset.
As legacy-constrained institutions adopt these design thinking principles, it gets harder to justify “the old way of doing things” at the expense of users and the business.
3. Creating a single source of truth
Many organizations, including those on legacy systems, still operate without a design system. Even the “modern” digital payment giant PayPal only adopted a design system for its internal products in 2019!
Design systems ensure there’s an organization-wide single source of truth. Streamlining product development workflows and maximizing cohesion and consistency reduces usability issues while allowing designers to focus on solving user problems rather than building components for every project.
Although a single source of truth won’t solve your company’s legacy challenges, it’s a step towards modernizing workflows and reducing time-to-market–a significant issue for slow-moving financial institutions.
Merge also revolutionized PayPal’s development process and scaled design output without employing more UX team members–a key factor for organizations struggling with budget constraints!
Synced design and development
PayPal’s UX Lead EPX, Erica Rider, chose Microsoft’s Fluent UI design system. The DS team created custom components and templates, so designers only had to drag and drop elements to build user interfaces. As Erica calls it, “a ‘snap-together’ type design.”
PayPal used Merge to sync its Fluent UI React library to UXPin, so designers had all the same components. They used React props to set styling and interactivity constraints which designers adjust via UXPin’s Properties Panel.
Streamlined design handoffs
Design handoffs in Merge are seamless, almost non-existent–a far cry from the chaotic mess many organizations deal with when releasing new products and features!
With designers and programmers using the same component library, most front-end development is copy/paste and adjusting props to meet designs. UXPin provides JSX code, so designers can copy that too!
Minimal designing and coding from scratch reduce errors, technical debt, and time-to-market while enhancing collaboration and user experience.
Are outdated business processes and legacy systems affecting your UX team’s ability to compete and meet customer expectations? Create a single source of truth to enhance product development workflows and deliver better user experiences to your customers with UXPin Merge. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.
Card UIs appear in many digital products, websites, and enterprise applications. Understanding card layout, visual hierarchy, and basic best practices are crucial for designing great card user interfaces.
This article explores card user interface design, the anatomy of cards, common use cases, and design inspiration for your next project.
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A card can be as simple as a title and image, such as this one from Google Maps.
Or, more complex, like this card from Instagram with an image, logo, dropdown/overflow menu, multiple actions, a comment section, and a date stamp.
Designers generally use cards to display a collection of content rather than a stand-alone item. These cards tell users that the content is related–like images in your Instagram feed or the latest blog posts on a website’s homepage.
Card Anatomy
We’ve borrowed this helpful dissection from Google’s Material Design depicting a card’s anatomy. Not every card will have these elements in this layout, but it’s an excellent illustration of the typical items designers use to create UI components.
Container: every card must have a container to house its content. These containers create separation between cards and surrounding content.
Thumbnail: an avatar, logo, or icon, usually displaying ownership or relation. Instagram uses this thumbnail for the user’s profile pic.
Header text: the card’s name or title. For a blog post, this might be the article’s H1 title.
Subheading: a subheading may contain additional information, like the date or location.
Media: cards often contain a relevant image or video. The Google Maps card above show pictures of Central Park and The Metropolitan Museum of Art on each card. Cards can have a single media item or carousel with multiple images and videos.
Supporting text: a summary or description of the card and its contents.
Buttons: CTAs with text (Read more, Add to cart, Buy now, etc.).
Icons: actions using icon buttons (like, share, etc.).
Buttons and icons allow users to perform various actions, but cards don’t need these actions to be interactive. Designers can make the entire card a link to a piece of content (a blog post) or embed actions (a double tap to like an Instagram post).
4 Types of Card UI Designs
There are many advantages of card UI designs, but one of the most important is the ease in recreating them in unique ways that will convey a website’s personality. There are a variety of card types, and when looking at the most popular and effective, the following four styles show up most consistently.
1. Pins
Based on the Pinterest platform, Pins are easily the most recognizable card layout. While 72 percent of internet users will access the web solely with smartphones by 2025, Pinterest is already accessed via mobile devices by 80 percent of their users. Unfortunately, the quick growth in popularity of this style of card UI was its downfall. Sites using Pins today often appear unoriginal.
2. Flat Design
Microsoft took a step away from the skeuomorphism employed in its early software designs and instead embraced bright colors and simple visuals. When looking at popular card patterns, their interface was likely the earliest widespread example most people were introduced to. Since that time, however, these cards have evolved to better reflect modern tastes.
3. Masonry (Grid)
One of the easiest card UI patterns to understand and browse is the masonry-style framework. These cards are arranged in a logical order, and they’re typically displayed in neat grids featuring equal spacing between cards.
4. Magazine Style
You once would only see Magazine Style interfaces on news and entertainment websites, but its popularity has pushed its use into other types of online platforms. Even content-heavy domains – such as portfolios and blogs – have taken to using this type of card. The layout merely features a text tag or teaser image that links to a full article on another page.
Regardless of the style of card UI being utilized, the main point is to showcase a large amount of content in a way that’s easily digestible to users without the potential of overwhelming them.
Common Use Cases for Cards UI Design
We see cards everywhere, from web design and mobile apps to games and streaming services. Here are some common use cases for card UI design and the problems they aim to solve.
Media cards
Designers use media cards to display visual content for social media posts or articles. The media (image or video) and title (headline) are prominent to attract attention and engagement. Most news websites use media cards to display their articles–like this example from the BBC’s homepage.
Modal cards
Modal cards are similar to media cards but present the user with several actions on tap/click. Streaming services, in-flight services, and car infotainment UIs use modal cards to display TV shows, movies, and other content.
These streaming cards generally feature an image of the program’s poster with a title. When the user clicks/taps a card, a modal appears with several options, like play, add to favorites, rate, etc.
Product cards
Product cards are optimized for selling products and services. They usually have a media item, product title, price, and CTA (Buy Now or Add to Cart).
Product cards might include additional information to create FOMO and entice shoppers, including a sale/discount tag, review score, and availability. This example from the Local Shopify theme displays the typical UI elements designers use for eCommerce product cards.
List cards
List UIs often use cards to display content like music playlists, contacts, tasks, etc. List cards generally feature a title, subtitle, and image (perhaps a checkbox for task cards). Designers might include a menu icon or swipe interactions to reveal the card’s options (edit, delete, archive, etc.).
This list card example from a Spotify playlist shows the artist/album image, song title, and artist’s name. The three-dot icon to the right opens a menu with several options.
Data cards
Data cards display analytics, graphics, and statistical information on an app’s dashboard UI. These UI cards are most common in enterprise design, but they also appear in consumer products like activity trackers, budgeting apps, and banking apps, to name a few.
Real estate listings and booking platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com use similar UI card layouts:
Listing title: number of rooms or type of accommodation
Subtitle: location or distance from the area you’re searching
Price: purchase/rent/per night
Description: 1-3 sentences describing the property or icons highlighting key features (rooms, bathrooms, etc.)
Star rating (booking apps): guest reviews
Favorite icon button: adds the property to your favorites
CTA: Book or Contact
These property cards allow users to scan many options as quickly as possible. Clicking back and forth is time-consuming, creating a poor user experience. Designers must use UX research and user interviews to find out what data user value most.
Advantages of Card UI Design
As with any digital tool currently available, you’ll find those who absolutely love user interface cards and those who prefer other methods. If you’re still on the fence, check out the following advantages and why they can help you reach a wider audience while improving the user experience.
1. Intuitive Usability
Click and drag manipulation makes designing a card user interface simple for you, but the overall concept also provides ease for your users. It’s easy to decipher the information presented on card at a glance, and the variety of projects it can be used for (e.g. art, commerce, literature, etc) is seemingly limitless.
2. Ideal for Aggregated Content
If your website aggregates any type of content, the card UI is one of the best options on the table. This interface design makes it easy for users to find the information they’re looking for without being bogged down by what appears to be endless content.
3. Easy to Browse
Regardless of the project type, the ease in which card designs allow browsing cannot be disputed. Cards are easily viewed as a page is scrolled, and you can make certain elements stand out by increasing their sizes relative to the surrounding content.
4. Shareable
Pinterest is the sole case study necessary to prove how shareable card UI designs are. These are essentially the digital equivalent of a business card. The visual design shows users exactly what you want them to see without forcing them to digest unnecessary content.
5. Versatility
You understand your users better than anyone else, so you know what they expect from your content. Whether they’re looking for minimalist or elaborate displays, these cards can create just that. You can choose the level of complexity that works best.
6. Easy Manipulation for Personal Creativity
The material design of your website or mobile app can be easily manipulated with card patterns. This makes it simpler to add your own personal creativity to the design, and since this allows better brand presentation, it improves the overall user experience.
Disadvantages of Card Design
There are also drawbacks to card UI design, but understanding these in advance can help you avoid the most common issues. It all comes down to how you implement the usage of the design patterns, so don’t let these potential problems deter you from what could be a great improvement on your website.
1. They Can Be Played Out
Card interfaces are a type of experience design, but users have been experiencing them for a while. If you’re not original in your presentation, the people visiting your website could see these as non-creative and played out.
2. Require Nuanced UX Design
You can do just about anything with card UI tools, but you must remain nuanced in their presentation. It’s great to be able to provide detailed information to your users, but if this isn’t done subtly, the design may seem unprofessional.
3. Risk of Cluttered Feel
Your landing pages may have a cluttered feel if you don’t use appropriate negative space. Focus on your design patterns and ensuring the cards don’t bleed over into each other. This can take the potential for a great user experience and completely destroy it.
7 Best Card UI Practices
There are many strategies used to design effective card user interface patterns, but some of these practices are so essential that every professional will advocate their use. The following were presented by Carrie Cousin in her free ebook on web design trends.
Negative space: Effective card UI designs are all about organization, so make sure to use sufficient negative space (e.g. padding, borders) to avoid a cluttered screen.
One card, once concept: The cards you use are meant to simplify your site’s structure. Don’t accidentally undercut this focus by adding too much complexity to your cards.
Suitable images: Most images used on cards are small, so only utilize clear pictures. Also make sure they’re cropped to display appropriately where they’ll be used.
Simple typography: The text on card UI designs will be small just like the utilized images, so maintain legibility with simple typography.
Be unique: Since it’s one of the most popular user interface designs, you need to stand out when using cards. This could include anything from adding video, animated effects or new color schemes. We’ll discuss this more below.
Consistent grid: Ensure that your grid has the same spacing between cards while utilizing breakpoints and respecting various card sizes.
Apply Fitt’s Law: Check our Interaction Design Best Practices guide for an in-depth explanation of Fitt’s Law. When applied to cards, it dictates that the entirety of the card be clickable rather than just the image or text. This simplifies user interaction.
Your job is going to get more difficult as your card UI designs get smaller. This makes it imperative for you to properly apply the fundamentals of design in order to convey your message to users.
Personalizing Cards
As one of the main benefits of user interface card designs, it’s important to know how to take advantage of personalization strategies. It’s possible, for instance, to change the size of any specific card. This can depend upon how much content you want to display or whether the goal is to prioritize one card over another.
By shrinking or expanding any card UI pattern, you can dictate how much information is going to be displayed. You can also control whether just the text or image shows, the size of specific elements, and many other variations. This will greatly influence the overall personal style of the layout.
You’ll also find that many designers opt to play with animation in their cards. Oftentimes the animation only occurs when the user hovers the cursor over a card, and this tells the user that the card is a clickable feature.
Some sites even go as far as letting users manipulate the card UI themselves. This is typically only an option on mobile websites, but desktop sites are increasingly offering the ability. Users can move cards around on their own or even stack various designs on top of each other for easier navigation of a page.
Cards Design UI in Action
Here are five card UI tips and design inspiration for your next project.
1. Create visual hierarchy
The first step for card design is to create a visual hierarchy–what content matters most? It’s a good practice to structure cards with the most important content as high or large as possible. Color, whitespace, and fonts are also effective for creating separation and hierarchy.
For example, most product cards feature a large, attractive image, followed by the title and CTA. The price is slightly smaller, but its proximity to the eye-catching image and surrounding whitespace makes it stand out as the customer scans the card. This information is most likely to get the user to take action.
2. Minimize content
Too much content results in messy cards and increases cognitive load. Designers must reduce UI elements and, most importantly, keep text to a minimum.
As UX Designer Andrew Coyle states in this article, “The card should provide just enough information to help a user determine if they should further engage.” Andrew shows how reducing text to a maximum of 100 characters, or three lines, creates a cleaner aesthetic that’s easier to digest.
3. Differentiate actions
Another great tip from Andrew Coyle is clearly differentiating the primary and secondary actions. The best option is to use a filled button for your primary action and a text or flat button for the secondary, as displayed in Andrew’s example.
Material Design calls the primary action the card itself since most cards are clickable and don’t need CTAs. Supplemental actions belong in the card’s footer, including buttons and icons, as displayed below.
If you have more than two supplemental actions, Material Design recommends using an overflow menu to keep the card clean and uncluttered.
4. Create responsive card layouts
One of the most significant benefits of cards is their responsiveness. Designers can easily create a comparative user experience across multiple viewports.
The key is maintaining visual hierarchy while resizing and aligning cards to fit desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. This example from Material Design shows mobile and desktop/large tablet versions of the same card. Notice how the image, title, and call to action catch the eye in both designs.
5. Use one swipe gesture per card
Swipe gestures allow designers to hide actions, thus keeping cards clean and minimal. Multiple gestures (including an image carousel) can create confusion and usability/accessibility issues.
This example from Material Design demonstrates how multiple gestures create confusion, particularly for users with cognitive and dexterity disabilities.
Prototyping Cards With UXPin Merge
With UXPin Merge, design teams can import a UI component library from a repository to prototype and test using the same interactive components, including cards, which engineers use to develop the final product.
Merge cards include responsive layouts, buttons, typography, colors, images, icons, interactivity, and other properties defined by the design system so designers can focus on building and testing UIs–avoiding the time-consuming task of designing cards from scratch!
Designers can use UXPin Patterns to combine static UI elements and other Merge components to create new cards and promote them to the design system. Patterns are also helpful for creating multiple card states, allowing for quick changes during user testing or stakeholder meetings. Discover how component-driven prototyping with UXPin Merge can enhance your card design to create better user experiences for your customers. Visit our Merge page to find out how to request access.
Form inputs allow users to engage with digital products, brands, and other users. Choosing the appropriate input field and structure is crucial for designing a good form UX so users can complete tasks efficiently.
This article looks at individual input elements, the problems they solve, and how UX teams use them. We also provide tips on designing form inputs and common mistakes that could introduce usability or accessibility issues.
Increase prototyping speed and testing capabilities with fully functioning form input fields using UXPin. Bring interactive components to UXPin and assemble your prototypes, using those elements as a single source of truth between designers and engineers. Achieve parity between design and code. Explore UXPin Merge.
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What are Form Inputs?
A form input (form field) is a UI element for capturing user feedback and data. Input types or form controls include checkboxes, date pickers, radio buttons, text inputs, toggles, and selects/dropdowns. Forms must also have a submission method like a submit button, link, or keyboard action (enter).
What are Form Input Attributes?
Form input attributes create rules and context for users. These attributes also provide the appropriate controls–like displaying a numeric keypad on a mobile device for a phone number field.
Five essential HTML form input attributes UX designers must pay attention to:
Required: means the user must complete the input to submit the form
Disabled: an input state that prevents a user from making changes–usually until they perform another task or for “readonly” inputs
Type attribute: the type of input that defines the formatting–for example, a password type hides the characters while an email type requires the @ symbol and domain extension (.com, .co.uk, etc.).
Label: tells users what the input is for–i.e., Password, Name, Email, etc.
Helper Text: provides an additional label for context and accessibility.
Types of Form Inputs
Here are several common form inputs and how designers use them.
Text Input
Text inputs (or text input fields) allow designers to capture a wide range of information, most notably names, emails, passwords, addresses, and other text-based user data.
If you need a user to enter information that’s longer than one sentence, it’s better to use a text area over a text field. Text areas are larger and allow more text–like the message section of a contact form.
Date Pickers
Date pickers provide a format that makes it easy for users to select a day, month, and year. They also ensure that users use the correct separators like commas, backslashes, and dashes.
UX designers have several date picker UI options and configurations. Choosing the right one depends on the user, device, and operating system (iOS, Android, Windows). This article offers helpful tips on designing the perfect date picker.
Selects/Dropdowns
Selects or dropdowns allow designers to present users with a collection of choices. Dropdowns work best for fixed variations or options–like a list of countries or t-shirt sizes. For long lists like countries or states, providing a search field allows users to find their choice quicker.
These dropdowns give users choices while ensuring they provide an accurate answer. For example, misspelling a country or state could result in an eCommerce order not reaching the customer.
Checkboxes
A checkbox performs two primary functions:
Allows users to make two or more selections
Provides a method to acknowledge legal requirements–like accepting terms and conditions or email newsletter opt-ins
Radio Buttons
Radio buttons perform a similar function to checkboxes but only allow one choice instead of multiple. For example, choosing a shipping option or answering yes/no questions.
Toggles
Toggles or toggle switches are basic on/off (boolean) form inputs. Switches offer users a quick method for making yes/no, on/off decisions. If you’re looking for an example, both Android and iOS mobile devices use toggle switches in their settings.
File input
File inputs allow users to upload images and documents. UX designers must use helper text to tell users which format the file input will accept, i.e., PNG, JPG, PDF, etc.
Understanding Form Input States
Input states allow UX designers to communicate with users through color and messages. The example below from Material Design Form shows how designers can use states for context and guidance.
Inactive: an input where the user has entered information
Focused: highlighted to show the user’s current selection
Activated: a completed input
Hover: shows desktop users that this is an interactive input when they move their cursor over it
Error: alerts the user to a problem–i.e., an incomplete field or incorrect information
Disabled: tells the user they can’t interact with the input
Every input element offers similar state variations to help users navigate and complete forms.
Using Form Input Prefixes and Suffixes
Prefixes and suffixes help users enter the correct information and format. For example, if you need the weight of something, adding lbs or kg suffix tells users explicit instructions for entering the right numbers.
UX designers can also use dropdowns for prefixes and suffixes to allow users to enter the data in a familiar format. For example, United States users might choose lbs and Canadians kg.
Prefixes are most commonly used for county code selection to capture the correct telephone numbers.
Why Good Form UX is Important?
Forms offer significant business opportunities, but poor design or too many form inputs can hinder user experience, adversely impacting conversions.
The first rule for good form UX is only requesting the information necessary for users to complete a task. For example, an eCommerce checkout form needs a customer’s full name, delivery address, email, contact number, and payment details (including billing address if different from the delivery address).
While capturing your customer’s age and gender might be valuable for marketing purposes, this additional form data adds to the completion time, is intrusive, and may prevent people from completing it.
The same rule applies to any form. Do you need a user’s name to create a new account, or will an email for verification suffice? UX designers must reduce form inputs and avoid capturing irrelevant data as a foundation for a good form user experience.
How to Design Great Form Inputs
1. Use short, descriptive input labels
Input labels must be short, descriptive, and fully visible. This example from Material Design shows how long labels can confuse users.
2. Use an appropriate color contrast
Form inputs are not the place for branding or creative color schemes. Choose a background color that contrasts nicely with the placeholder and input text.
3. Convey input requirements
Passports can cause confusion and frustration if UX designers don’t tell users the field’s requirements. UX Designer Salim Ansari shows how to design a password input field with explicit instructions.
Adding a “Show” button allows the user to double-check they have entered everything correctly, avoiding a potential time-wasting error.
4. Distinguish between required and optional
Telling users which fields are required and optional can reduce errors while allowing people to choose what they want to share. The standard practice is to add an asterisk (*) for required fields, but many designers place (required) in brackets next to form labels to be more explicit and help with accessibility.
UX designers must also consider the impact optional fields have on cognitive load and conversions. If a form field is optional, should you include it at all?
5. Put placeholder text
There is some debate about placeholders and their usage. UX Designer Andrew Coyle (formally Google, Flexport, Intuit) outlines several scenarios in this article about the dos and don’ts of placeholder text.
“It is tempting to provide text help for complex forms or omit input labels to improve aesthetics. However, employing placeholder text to do so causes many usability issues.” – wrote Andrew Coyle in the linked article.
Some highlights from Andrew’s article:
Don’t use placeholders or inline labels in place of labels
Don’t use placeholders in place of helper text
Use a lighter color shade for placeholder text to differentiate from the entered text
Placeholders should not disappear when a user clicks inside the input field, only once they enter the first character
6. Structure inputs to reduce thinking
Structured inputs tell users exactly what data and format you want. It also reduces thinking to complete forms faster. This example from Andrew Coyle shows a typical telephone number input field in a US format with an area code and two parts for the number.
7. Enable autocomplete
Autocomplete (autofill) allows users to complete forms much faster, especially for addresses–like using the Google Maps API to find an address.
If a user has an account, using this data to autofill a form saves significant time, increasing conversions while creating a positive user experience.
8. Use default values with caution
Default values offer similar benefits to autocomplete, allowing users to complete forms faster. However, default could result in errors or confusion. For example, location tracking to set a default value for a user’s country might be incorrect if they’re away from home or using a VPN.
9. Design mobile-friendly input fields
Mobile-friendly or responsive design is crucial for good form UX. Designers must use one-column layouts and optimize all form elements for touch/tap interactions.
Design Fully Functioning Form Inputs in UXPin
The problem with using a design tool to prototype input fields is that they don’t provide the same fidelity and functionality as code, limiting what designers can test during the design process.
With UXPin, input fields, including text inputs, function as they do in the final product. Instead of rendering static images like most design tools, UXPin renders HTML, CSS, and Javascript, giving designers the superpowers of code without writing a single line!
These superpowers enable design teams to build form prototypes indiscernible from code for accurate, meaningful feedback from usability studies and stakeholders.
Variables allow designers to capture user input data and use it elsewhere in the prototype, like personalizing a welcome message or populating a user’s account profile.
This example sign-up form created in UXPin shows how designers can use an email variable to personalize the confirmation screen after form submission.
Design teams can take form input testing to the next level with Expressions. In the same example, we see dynamic error messages when users don’t complete a form correctly.
You can also use Expressions for form validation, computational components, and matching password criteria to create realistic prototype experiences.
Use UXPin Merge and Import UI Components
Stop designing form inputs from scratch. Find ready-made components, such as Material Design forms, and enjoy their full interactivity and function thanks to UXPin Merge. It’s a technology that allows you to share a single source of truth between designers and devs, so the work of putting forms and other UI design elements doesn’t get duplicated by two teams. Visit Merge page to learn more.
Did you know that 80% of users delete an app if they don’t know how to use it?
They don’t reach out to the customer support team, nor do they research the instructions.
They simply remove it and move on to the next one.
While this is a harsh statistic, it highlights just how crucial the user onboarding experience is. If you fail to properly teach your users how to make the most of your product or service, they will take their business elsewhere.
How can you counter this? In this article, you’ll learn what UX onboarding is and why it’s so important to get it right. You’ll also read about the six tips that will help you create a great user onboarding experience for your product.
Want to see if your design idea for an onboarding user journey is successful? Use UXPin to build an interactive prototype of your your UX onboarding and see how users respond to it. Iterate on your idea, pass it developers, and enjoy an improved onboarding flow. Try our prototyping tool that makes the work faster.
Build advanced prototypes
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What is UX onboarding?
UX onboarding is the process of introducing new users to your product in a way that educates and delights them, setting them up for success from their very first interaction.
Technically, it’s a series of flows after the signup process, usually as screens or contextual cues within the app, that guide the user to the most important product features. This sort of a product tour highlights product’s values, and does so in the most engaging and quickest way possible.
Let’s imagine you’ve just downloaded a new app.
A good UX-focused onboarding flow would be one where you’re guided through each of the app’s core functionalities. The walkthrough would explain how everything works and how you can use these features to improve your life or work.
On the other hand, a poor onboarding experience – especially for a complex product – would throw you in at the deep end. You’d be left to figure everything out for yourself. An app experience like this would likely frustrate you and quickly lead you to give up.
With that in mind, it’s important to understand that an effective onboarding process is about more than fancy video tutorials or pop-up instruction manuals. It’s about reducing any chance of error that could portray your product in a bad light and making the entire adoption process smooth.
Why is it important to build an onboarding flow for users?
To answer this question, it’s worth putting yourself in your users’ shoes. If they’re using your product for the first time, they might be feeling any (or all) of the following:
Apprehensive
Intimidated
Overwhelmed
Excited
Curious
Your job is to design an onboarding experience that gently eases them into your product so they feel confident, understood, and supported every step of the way.
Make sure this happens the first time they use it. Here are some more reasons why this process is essential.
First impressions only happen once
A study by IPSOS reveals that there are three factors behind what we call a “first impression”. These are relevance, differentiation, and the price paid.
So, your onboarding flow needs to circle around proving that you’re relevant to the user’s needs, goals, and challenges. Secondly, it’s about showing what makes you unique, i.e., explaining what you’re better at than your competitors. The third aspect is subjective – given what they’ve seen, it’s up to your users to decide if the product was worth the price they’ve paid.
To help users navigate through the app
As a product designer, it’s your role to ensure that users can freely move through your app. The more complex the information architecture and the more features, the more important it is to build an effective onboarding sequence.
Let’s refer to the usability testing analogy here. Notice how user testing sessions feature tasks like “Go from the home page to your account settings and change your invoice details” or “Find the option to change the ingredients from US cups to grams”. These questions are important, as designers want new users to ease into the platform. So, it’s important to create an onboarding flow that shows how users can get from point A to point B. Doing so will help prevent confusion and user frustration.
To clearly convey your app value
While it might seem like a paradox, the more your app or platform can do, the higher the risk of certain users feeling overwhelmed. This doesn’t mean your app has to be simple and only offer one core feature. You can provide a complex app, but what matters is that your onboarding process makes it easy for them to find what they need and achieve the goal they came here for.
For example, say that you offer a suite of 10+ productivity tools, but a new user has signed up just for the time tracking feature. Upon logging in, they should be able to go right to it, but they might get distracted by all the other modules they don’t need (at least not yet).
Effective UX onboarding will help direct them to the right module quickly, all the while gently inclining that they can get much more value from your full offer.
To extend user lifecycles
A Salesforce study has found that there are two factors that can bring the user lifecycle to an abrupt end. 50% of respondents have admitted that they leave a business that:
fails to anticipate their needs
offers an app that isn’t easy to use.
These two risks can be minimized by your onboarding experience. Firstly, a good onboarding flow will showcase how your app can benefit the user. Secondly, it can give them a quick product tour and create a great product experience right after the account creation.
Beside those two points, app onboarding can increase retention rates and prevent churn, two metrics that product teams are concerned about.
To increase user engagement across the board
Taking all of the earlier points into account, a good onboarding experience will improve user engagement. This creates a whole range of benefits. From bringing value to your target user base and increasing conversion rates, to boosting app retention and even reducing customer support costs. Spending time on your onboarding process saves and makes you money.
Overall, it helps your product become as successful as it can be.
How do you design an onboarding experience?
With the importance of the UX onboarding experience fresh in your mind, let’s get actionable and talk about the onboarding flow itself. Whatever medium your process is in, these are six tips you have to bear in mind.
1. Understand whom you are onboarding
This is critical for any business decision, especially when we’re talking about UX onboarding. Ask yourself the following questions:
Who is your target user?
What are their needs, wants, and pain points?
How much do they know about your product?
The answers will inform your design decisions moving forward.
If you’re not sure where to get your answers from, do your research.
If you already have an existing product, look at your sales and existing user base. Conduct a customer satisfaction survey or NPS survey. Or, if you’re launching a new product and don’t have any user data yet, conduct market research. Look into similar businesses or niches.
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to get to know your target users better!
Ultimately, you must take one step at a time. Start by understanding who your users are before building out a user onboarding flow that assumes what they want.
There is no one-size-fits-all onboarding template you can turn to. You have to tailor it to your target market. We will discuss this next.
2. Personalize and optimize your flow
Personalizing the UX onboarding experience is about more than adding their name to an email or a virtual walkthrough (although that’s a nice touch). We’re talking about using the data you’ve collected to focus their onboarding on the features that matter the most to them.
The goal is to make the user feel like this experience has been designed just for them.
And it’s not as difficult as it might sound.
If you’re a SaaS business, for example, you can show new users different features of your product based on their role. For example, let’s assume that you’ve created a CRM software for sales, product, and marketing professionals. If the new user is a marketing specialist, guide them through the features that are most relevant to their role.
3. Don’t overdo it with the number of screens
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is overwhelming your users with lots of screens and information.
The UX onboarding experience should be short and sweet. Give users enough information to get started and nothing more.
You can always provide more info later on, in the form of tooltips or customer support. In fact, you should constantly be testing and adding new content to your onboarding flow based on user feedback.
Despite what the term might make you think, user onboarding is not always for new users only. Your existing users will also need a quick explanation of the new features and updates you’ve provided. Therefore, always design your UX onboarding flow with both of these user groups in mind.
4. Onboarding must align with the product
If your product is sleek, minimal, and professional, the onboarding must be sleek, minimal, and professional, too.
Think of your UX onboarding experience as an extension of your product. Everything from the colors you use to the tone of voice should reflect what your product is about.
The whole purpose of an onboarding process is to get your first-time users into using your product. It’s about them slipping into the value of your product, feeling your brand, and, ultimately, building loyalty.
If you’re distracting them with colors and content that don’t make sense, you’re not going to achieve this. User experience onboarding is not a time to get creative; it’s a time to be consistent.
Make sure your onboarding flow aligns with the product and its UX design. This way, your user can familiarize themselves with your app or service as early as in the onboarding flow. Next, they can transition into using the product with as little friction as possible.
UXPin is ideal when it comes to getting this process right.
Product designers can use UXPin to quickly bring their onboarding ideas to life and build out a prototype of the onboarding sequence. You can share these prototypes with the team to collect feedback at any stage of the onboarding process.
With multiple design iterations, you can easily test and evaluate each step and screen, until you’ve designed the perfect UX onboarding experience for your users.
5. Give users the option to skip the onboarding flow
While some users will appreciate an in-app onboarding experience, others will prefer to skip it entirely and find their own way around your product. This will be particularly the case if your desktop or mobile app has a simple information architecture and/or if some of your users are tech-savvy.
Take a simple project management board like Trello, for one. High chances are that your users have used similar platforms in the past and will understand how a Kanban board works. And even if they haven’t, the drag-and-drop feature is fairly self-explanatory.
So, add a clear “skip” button so that your new users can jump straight to using your product, at any step of the onboarding sequence.
6. Create an external onboarding sequence
Your UX onboarding experience doesn’t have to live inside your product only.
In fact, it’s often more effective when you balance having an in-app flow, and then accompanying that with an external tutorial. For instance, you could send out an automated email sequence that you divide into chapters and send out over a number of days. You’ve probably experienced this with products you use in your own life, especially if you operate in the B2B industry.
Again, you don’t want to bombard your users with too much information, but instead, give them a little nudge in the right direction.
The great thing about an external onboarding UX sequence is you can be a lot more flexible with the content and design. It’s also an opportunity to show your brand’s personality in a way that may not be possible inside the product.
But don’t think you’re only restricted to email.
You could also create a series of social media posts or even blog articles that new users can engage with to learn more about your product.
Consider where your target audience can be reached best, and target them there.
7. Don’t overuse words–swap them with graphics
Your UX onboarding experience should be as visual as possible. Words are definitely powerful tools. However, your screen has limited space, and users are experiencing depleting users’ attention spans. So, convey as much information as possible by leveraging graphics.
Make use of images, videos, and even animations to guide your users through your UX onboarding experience. For example, instead of a written description, you can record a 10-second video where you show how the user can download their invoice.
By using video and images where applicable, you simplify the onboarding process and, as a result, make it more effective.
Design an Onboarding Flow in UXPin
An effective UX onboarding experience is crucial to the success of your product, and if you click away from this guide with one thing, let it be this:
Your onboarding process must provide value.
If your product is the beach on a summer day, your onboarding is the GPS directions to get there. Make it simple for the best results.
And this is easy thanks to UXPin.
UXPin is a state-of-the-art prototyping tool that enables you to create prototypes and easily share them with the rest of your team. If you’re serious about creating an onboarding experience that will engage and educate your users, check out UXPin today.
We partnered with UXPin users dotSource to demonstrate how an agency working on multiple products, each with its own design system, leverages Merge technology to create a single source of truth between design and development.
Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.
Who is dotSource?
dotSource is a German-based digital product consulting and development agency that is “transforming companies into digital champions.” It has developed and implemented scalable digital products for marketing, sales, and services since 2006.
dotSource has established itself as one of Europe’s leading digital agencies with brands like ESPRIT, hessnatur, Ottobock, TEAG, KWS, BayWa, Axel Springer, C.H.Beck, Würth, and Netto Digital, trusting in the company’s vision and expertise.
dotSource Design Team and Process
dotSource uses a human-centered design process for its projects regarding UX design, consulting, audit, and conversion optimization. Designers focus on future users for concept creation and design solutions.
The company’s iterative design process ensures designers balance user needs with business goals while ensuring every project meets usability requirements and technical constraints.
What we love most about dotSource is their passion for sharing UX knowledge. Check out the company’s free eBook, User Experience Design Best Practices.
We now hand over to dotSource to explain how they use UXPin Merge to create a single source of truth for their product development projects while eliminating redundant work, enhancing cross-functional collaboration, and improving user experience.
Fighting Chaos with a Single Source of Truth
Promoting new patterns and components to a design system is chaotic, with many redundant processes. Most design system releases require updating in at least three places:
Instead of a “single source of truth” that gives “three single sources of truth” for every UI component–this seems counterintuitive and increases errors. If the design system’s update process and technologies don’t align, the team ends up with redundant work because a single change requires three updates.
Such an update process introduces a high risk of UX debt. UI kits and documentation become outdated if the design system team doesn’t respond to changes fast enough. As UX debt piles up, so does the effort to find and work through it.
The best way to circumvent these issues is to sync design, code, and documentation through a realsingle source of truth where:
There are no inconsistencies
One change automatically syncs design and code
Documentation is always up to date
Seamless collaboration between design and development
Single Source of Truth Should be Code-Based
Once a design system component is converted to your preferred design tool’s format, it’s subject to the limitations of image-based prototyping–resulting in a disconnect between design and development. The image-based component no longer has the fidelity, functionality, and interactivity afforded by HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Switching to a code-based design workflow is the only way around these image-based limitations. A code-based prototyping tool like UXPin with Merge technology enables this workflow by rendering code (instead of vector graphics), just like a browser.
In UXPin, UI components look and behave exactly as they do for developers, effectively bridging the gap between design and development–a real single source of truth.
We use UXPin’s Storybook integration, which allows designers to use our design system’s Storybook components in UXPin’s design editor. The result: a perfect synchronization of code, design, and documentation, making it possible for:
Designers to participate in QA and help developers identify bugs
Close collaboration between designers and engineers
With this UXPin Merge workflow, we have overcome redundant processes and eliminated UX debt from design system updates. UX consistency is no longer an issue, and we have no design drift.
UXPin Merge–a single source of truth at work
dotSource’s design and delivery teams have relied on UXPin for several years. UXPin’s Merge technology allows us to integrate React libraries through their Git Integration or Storybook for other frameworks, including Vue, Angular, Ember, etc.
The design system team can use React props or Storybook Args to define component properties and set constraints. For example, using a color property for a component’s primary, secondary, and disabled states. These three options appear as a dropdown in UXPin’s Properties Panel.
Setting these constraints eliminates inconsistencies and increases efficiency because designers never have to think about properties or basic interactivity–everything is “baked into” the components.
One centrally maintained component library used by designers and engineers
No designing or coding from scratch (during the product development process)
No design drift
Flawless consistency
Seamless designer/developer collaboration with almost no handoff process
These reusable components include styles, code, and rules defined by the design system, enabling UI consistency across every touchpoint. The design system must be flexible, easy to maintain, and scalable to achieve this successfully.
Another crucial prerequisite, according to dotSource: all stakeholders must be onboard! They must see the benefit of using a design system and its efficiencies. They’ll be quick to point out that your “single source of truth” requires managing three vital components, increasing the possibility for drift and debt.
The only way to create a single source of truth is through a code-based design workflow and tools like UXPin Merge and Storybook to sync design and development while simultaneously updating documentation–one change automating three updates.
Thank You, dotSource!
We want to thank dotSource for sharing their experience as an agency using UXPin Merge to improve designer/developer collaboration and create a single source of truth for its product development projects, and continuing to spread knowledge about UX design on their blog.
dotSource uses UXPin Merge’s Storybook Integration. Here are some resources to learn more about how these technologies can benefit your product development workflows:
UXPin Merge has a solution for product development teams at every level of maturity. Our npm integration is excellent for leveraging open source component libraries to build minimum viable products, add new components to an existing design system, or create a design system from scratch.
Organizations have three options when syncing a design system:
After the initial setup, every repository update automatically syncs to UXPin, notifying design teams of the new version. UXPin’s Version Control allows designers to choose when to change to the latest release and switch to earlier versions if needed.
Better Prototyping and Testing
One of UXPin Merge’s most significant benefits is the ability to build fully functioning prototypes that look and feel like the final product–prototypes that previously required front-end developer involvement.
These fully functioning prototypes allow designers to test every aspect of the user experience, increasing a design project’s usability scope and effectiveness.
Designers can present accurate replicas of the final product to stakeholders who are able to interact with prototypes and deliver meaningful feedback.
“There’s a lot more confidence from everyone (including designers, C-suite, directors, and developers) about what the final product will look like, the user experience, and interactivity–giving us higher quality feedback from stakeholders.” – Erica Rider UX Lead EPX @ PayPal
Join the code-based design revolution with a component-driven solution from UXPin Merge. Enhance design project workflows, increase cross-functional collaboration, and create seamless design handoffs to reduce time to market while delivering outstanding user experiences.
Maximizing productivity is vital for UXers and product managers who are often under tight project deadlines. Startups and small teams also seek UX productivity tips to maximize limited resources.
Whether you suffer from procrastination or just want to increase your value as a UX designer, this article offers actionable advice to optimize your UX team’s productivity.
Streamline UX workflows with the world’s most advanced design tool. Try component-driven prototyping and 10x your productivity today. Discover Merge and see what it can do for you and your team. Find out more.
Reach a new level of prototyping
Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.
What Does it Mean to be Productive as a UX Designer?
Being productive as a UX designer means maximizing your output efficiently. While this statement applies to any profession, it’s essential for UX designers and DesignOps practitioners because they often have to demonstrate Design’s value.
Some examples of what UX productivity means include:
Implementing systems to spend less time onboarding
Effective use of design sprints and brainstorming sessions to solve big problems fast
Creating channels for cross-functional collaboration to maximize output and minimize errors, drift, and rework
Busy vs. Productivity
Sadly, there are many distractions plaguing our lives. These distractions are disguised as work, like email, pointless Zoom calls, Slack, etc. You can attend to these distractions and get nothing done all day–busy, not productive.
Productivity is about delivering outcomes that bring you closer to achieving goals. Productive UX designers help the organization meet its UX strategy and product roadmap vision.
7 UI/UX Design Productivity Hacks
Some of these productivity hacks apply to UI/UX designers, while others are more general and could apply to any profession.
1. Avoid starting from scratch
There is a misconception that it’s a UX designer’s job to make pretty UIs. UX design is less about visual design and more about user experience design–solving human problems.
When UX designers spend time creating components and user interfaces from scratch, they reduce their productivity, even though they’re doing design-related work.
UXPin has built-in design libraries so designers can build screens and layouts using user-tested components and design patterns. They can customize these components to meet product/brand requirements and save them to UXPin’s Design Systems, where designers can share libraries, set permissions, and create documentation.
2. Component-driven prototyping
Component-driven prototyping is the next iteration of adopting a design system. Designers use ready-made interactive components from a repository to design UIs. These UI elements include styling (color, typography, spacing, etc.) and constraints set by the design system, so designers only have to drag and drop to build products and features.
These interactive components allow design teams to build exact replicas of the final product, so usability participants and stakeholders can interact with dynamic, immersive prototypes. These advanced prototypes deliver meaningful feedback and actionable insights UX designers can use to maximize project outcomes.
Companies like PayPal, Iress, and TeamPassword use UXPin Merge to sync repository components to UXPin’s design editor, creating a single source of truth across the organization.
Merge, and component-driven prototyping significantly increased PayPal’s productivity, where product designers build UIs 8X faster than before!
3. Control of your workflow
Omkar Chandgadkar, a Senior UX Designer at Amazon Alexa Smart Home, created a design offerings framework to maximize his team’s planning and productivity.
Omkar’s team applies this framework to project intake and backlogs to quickly identify the next steps, assign resources, and begin work. The framework has three product offerings:
Horizons Class Project: creating and executing a product vision for the next X years (long-term projects)
Mountains Class Project: an end-to-end design project for launch within 12 months (medium-term projects)
Plains Class Project: optimizing user experience and fixing usability issues (short-term projects)
With a clearly defined design offerings framework, UX teams can maximize productivity by:
Reduce calls and meetings at project intake
Developing a roadmap for projects (shared product management tools like Trello, Asana, Airtable, Notion, etc.)
Assigning resources in advance
Identify resource issues early and make preparations–i.e., hiring new talent or contractors
Create specialized teams–i.e., a “Plains Project Team” that specializes in fixing usability issues
4. The DesignOps mindset
Implementing DesignOps creates operational efficiencies, which ultimately leads to increased UX productivity. The DesignOps mindset helps designers together to get impactful things done.
Many people see DesignOps as an enterprise UX solution, but even startups and small businesses can apply the mindset and principles. DesignOps is about standardized tools, templates, workflows, and policies for design-related tasks. When everyone follows the same protocols, UX teams increase collaboration, consistency, productivity, and quality outcomes.
In this article on DesignOps strategy, the four stages of DesignOps maturity. Initially (stage 0), no one is responsible (usually startups and small teams), but the UX team has tools and processes to maximize productivity.
By stage three, the DesignOps team has an established structure with a DesignOps leader and DPMs managing and optimizing operational processes.
The ultimate goal of DesignOps is to remove operation work from UX teams to focus on user experience and solving problems, thus maximizing Design’s effectiveness and productivity.
Designer/engineer collaboration is crucial because these teams must work together to deliver projects with different tools and constraints. Poor cooperation between these departments leads to design drift, friction, UX debt/technical debt, chaotic design handoffs, and project delays, to name a few.
Working to increase designer/engineer collaboration will only produce positive outcomes:
Airbnb:created the Design Language System–“Since the design language and code are often shared, we can now build and release features on all native platforms at roughly the same time…engineers and designers now share a common language.”
In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport outlines the importance of distraction-free work sessions. Deep Work is the practice of shutting off the outside world to focus on completing tasks and projects.
Cal provides several examples of the most successful people in history using Deep Work. In tech, the most famous example is Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Bill takes regular 7-day sabbaticals (Bill’s “think weeks”), where he retreats to a cabin with books and research materials to think about ideas and solve problems.
Retreating to a cabin is not a luxury most can afford, but there are some things UX designers can do to go deep and achieve comparable results:
Disconnect: set periods (90-180 minutes) of work where you completely disconnect from team members, family, social media, and all digital communications.
Plan: to avoid the internet and its many distractions, try to gather the research you’ll need before each session. This planning also limits time wasted trying to find materials, maximizing your focus on the task at hand.
Prioritize: set goals for each session with a to-do list. Cal recommends setting challenging goals so that it forces you to push to get things done!
Cal also highlights the importance of boredom–even in your personal life. For example, when waiting in a queue or enjoying downtime, our first instinct is to reach for our phones to check social media and other news feeds. Fighting this urge will train your brain to focus better during Deep Work sessions.
Sit or stand: switching to sitting and standing every 30 minutes “can reduce neck and shoulder and back pain and even help augment some of the positive effects of exercise.”
Time It Right: Andrew outlines three phases your body goes through during the day. Planning the type of work you do during these times can significantly impact performance and productivity.
Screen placement: ensuring your screen is straight ahead or slightly elevated will raise your alertness. If you’re constantly looking down, “neurons related to calm and sleepiness are activated,” making it difficult to focus.
Background noise: white, pink, or brown noise can help with focus during 45-minute sessions. Binaural beats (with headphones) are also effective in “increasing certain aspects of cognition, including creativity, and may reduce anxiety.”
Work environment: different spaces are more optimal for specific types of work, “consider using different locations: rooms, buildings, indoors or outdoors to help access specific brain states and the types of work they favor.”
Andrew’s podcast, Huberman Lab, is full of fantastic insights about how the brain works and optimizing your performance, focus, and productivity.
UXPin–The Ultimate Productivity Hack for UX Designers
Better prototypes result in meaningful feedback from usability testing and stakeholders, leading to high-quality design project deliverables and a faster time to market.
Revolutionize your product development workflows with advanced prototyping from UXPin. Introduce reusable components into prototyping and build interactive hi-fi designs faster than ever. That’s the best productivity hack you can implement as a designer. Read more about UXPin Merge.
Incorporating cognitive friction to improve user experience sounds like an oxymoron, but it can have positive effects in the right circumstances. Friction is vital for protecting users and ensuring they don’t complete tasks accidentally.
The more familiar users get with a digital product and design patterns, the more likely they are to work on autopilot, leading to errors and nonreversible actions. Cognitive friction is a strategy to avoid these issues and improve the user experience.
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What is Cognitive Friction?
Cognitive friction in UX occurs when a user interface or feature forces users to stop and think, increasing cognitive load. It can also refer to instances where features aren’t intuitive or don’t function as they’re supposed to.
These “roadblocks” prevent or interrupt users from completing tasks, causing frustration that ultimately leads to product abandonment and fewer conversions.
UX designers are taught to avoid these scenarios and reduce decision-making by creating seamless, uninterrupted user experiences, getting users to an end goal as efficiently as possible.
6 Types of User Friction in UX Design
We have identified six primary types of user friction in UX design:
UI friction – cluttered user interfaces and incorrect design pattern usage
Interaction friction – UI elements aren’t intuitive and don’t function as expected
Language friction – incorrect word choice and poor instructions
Input friction – challenges completing forms
Navigational friction – poor navigation, unnecessary steps, broken links, etc.
System friction – slow load times, crashes, and other performance-related issues
Here are three common examples where design decisions cause cognitive friction.
Example #1. Broken links
Broken links commonly cause cognitive friction. Users think they’re navigating to a specific feature, but the link either doesn’t work or takes them elsewhere. Frustration compounds when there is no way to navigate back or they must repeat a task.
Example #2. Hiding features
It’s not uncommon for companies to make it difficult for users to downgrade a paid plan or delete their accounts entirely. The hope is that the user will give up and keep their subscription. Searching for hidden features is time-consuming and frustrating, leading to distrust in the product and brand.
Example #3. Unnecessary steps
Companies often collect excessive data or create unnecessary steps for tasks. These additional interactions mean users spend more time completing tasks and forms than they should.
For example, asking for a customer’s age, gender, and income bracket on an eCommerce checkout form might help with future marketing initiatives, but it’s intrusive and creates a point of friction. Additionally, misusing accordions, confirmations, dropdown menus, and other interactive UI elements adds unnecessary steps and interactions.
When is Cognitive Friction Good?
Here are four instances where UX designers intentionally create friction to improve user experience.
Two-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a fantastic example of designers creating friction to improve cybersecurity. 2FA adds an extra step for user logins or confirming critical functions (like bank payments) to reduce the risk of someone other than the authorized user from completing these tasks, providing a robust security layer that works alongside a user’s primary password management tool.
Many products use apps like Google Authenticator or a one-time pin sent to a user’s email or mobile. The user must enter a six-digit code to complete authentication.
2FA creates additional steps but keeps people safe for high-risk products and tasks.
Confirmation dialogs
Designers often use UI dialogs or modals to confirm critical nonreversible actions–like deleting something or navigating away from a page with unsaved content. For example, “Are you sure you want to delete this project?”
While some people find these dialogs annoying, they’re quickly swayed when it prevents them from accidentally deleting a project that took many hours to create!
In some instances, UX designers create additional steps within the modal to prevent mistakes–like typing “DELETE” to confirm. This added friction forces users to stop and think about what they’re doing to prevent someone from mindlessly completing a critical nonreversible action.
User and task verification
Many products use validation systems to confirm a user has access to a given email address or mobile number. In this example, users are asked to verify their email addresses from UXPin’s sign-up form prototype.
Designers also use friction to verify the user made critical account changes. This example from Netflix shows an email sent after users change their mobile numbers. Users must click “Verify Phone” for the changes to take effect. This friction prevents unauthorized changes to someone’s account details.
System loading
Many digital products and websites use friction via loading icons and other microinteractions when a system is loading or working. This feedback tells users to wait while the system is busy.
It’s important that UX designers only use these microinteractions when it’s 100% necessary and never allow them to last more than a few seconds. If your product takes more than five seconds to process a task, you might need to work with the engineers on performance optimization.
When is Cognitive Friction Bad? (And solutions for improvement)
Cognitive friction is generally bad, and it’s a UX designer’s job to pinpoint these issues and find solutions. Here are four common examples of bad cognitive friction and how to reduce or eliminate them.
Design inconsistency
Design consistency is an essential UX design component. It helps create familiarity, making user interfaces and interactions more predictable and easier to use.
Design inconsistency creates friction resulting in usability and accessibility issues. For example, if a sign-up sequence uses a green button to proceed to the next step and randomly uses red on one UI, users must stop to think about whether or not this red button will perform the same action as the green.
Creating a design system or UI kit is a trusted methodology for improving design consistency. When product teams use the same library of approved components, there are fewer errors, and designers have to do less thinking (friction) themselves.
Too many steps
Designers must think of every step in a task, no matter how essential, as a point of friction. UX teams can use usability testing and user interviews to understand the customer journey and identify areas for improvement.
Sometimes these improvements will come from optimizing the UI components and input fields to reduce actions rather than removing steps. For example, is it better to use a dropdown or buttons for a product’s size options?
This example uses a dropdown, meaning users must click/tap twice to choose a size. This process is particularly challenging for users on mobile devices and people with dexterity issues.
In this second example, designers use buttons, so users only have to click/tap once to make a selection. Different process, same result, one less step, and reduced friction.
This example might seem like a small change, but finding similar improvements reduces overall friction and gets users to their end goal faster.
Unfamiliar patterns
Designers use internationally recognizable design patterns to solve fundamental usability issues. For example, everyone expects a hamburger icon will open the primary navigation. Using the hamburger to activate another feature or a different icon causes confusion and friction.
These patterns are essential in complex products where users must learn how to use the system. If they also have to learn to use new UI patterns, this adds to the learning curve, creating more cognitive friction.
Poor communication
Designers communicate with users through text, color, visual hierarchy, UI elements, images, and video, to name a few. Understanding user needs and how they absorb content is critical to effective communication and reducing friction.
A fantastic example is how UXPin uses multiple elements to communicate with users in its documentation.
The heading, Adding States, describes the task.
The explanation uses short sentences and plain language.
A blue highlight and text tell users which feature to click while blocks created to look like keys on a keyboard show the shortcut.
A video provides added context to help users who learn better through visuals.
UXPin’s docs make it easy for designers to quickly absorb the instructions to apply to their projects.
Effective communication throughout your product, from button labels to documentation tutorials, reduces the mental effort required to complete tasks.
Reduce Friction During the Design Process With UXPin
Reducing friction during the design process is often challenging for UX teams. Design tools don’t provide the same fidelity and functionality as code, making it hard to prototype and test effectively.
UXPin is powered by code, enabling designers to build complex user interfaces and components that look and feel like the final product. The tools, features, and design canvas look the same as any other design tool, but the results are significantly better.
Higher quality, realistic prototypes result in meaningful feedback from user testing and stakeholders–allowing designers to improve with every iteration.
Designers can test complex user journeys like fully functioning checkouts or forms that capture extensive data with multiple steps–sequences that often cause cognitive friction!
Improve your product design projects, reduce usability issues, and enhance your product’s user experience with quality prototyping and testing in UXPin. Sign up for a free trial to discover all of UXPin’s advanced features.
Website footers are essential UI patterns. They guide visitors to important content while providing an excellent opportunity to add business value and connect with new customers.
This article explores website footer design, do’s and dont’s, expert examples, and best practices to inspire your next web project.
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What is a Website Footer?
A website footer is a UI pattern at the bottom (or footer) of a website or application. Footers are important website components because they display helpful information, including navigational links, contact details, policies, copyright info, and social media links, so users can learn more about your business.
Link the primary header navigation; a website footer appears on every page so users can always access the links and content. Even though it sits at the bottom of a web page, footers are vital components for users and business goals.
What is the Purpose of a Footer?
How designers use a website footer depends on the business and content. Most websites use the footer for secondary navigation–important links that can’t fit in the website header like about, product docs, resources, etc.
With GDPR, CCPA, and other legal information, websites must include certain policies, like privacy, terms of use, etc. Designers usually have these links in the footer, so users always know where to find them.
Sales Benefits
Many UI/UX designers also use website footers for business purposes like a product CTA or capturing leads via contact page or a newsletter signup form. Footers help users to navigate to feature pages, best-selling product categories or more information about services.
Marketing Benefits
Many marketers also use website footers for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes. There are a couple of SEO benefits of footers:
Help with boosting pages you want to rank
Homepage links carry weight, meaning search engines see these internal links as important and prioritize accordingly
Increases the likelihood of clicks, thus reducing bounce rates which improve domain authority and rankings
What Should a Footer Include?
Again, it depends on the website. An eCommerce website will have different priorities for the footer to a blog. Here is a list of items you might include in a footer:
Navigation links
Brand engagement and messaging
Testimonials
Copyright
Navigation Links
There are several types of navigation links businesses include in the footer. These include:
Utility links: contact information, phone number, email address, physical address, customer service contacts, privacy policy, terms of use
Doormat navigation: A copy of the main navigation for convenience (might be unnecessary for sticky headers)
Sitemap: Links to multiple topic/product categories
Brand Engagement & Messaging
Another common use for a website footer is brand engagement and messaging–links and footer content that encourage people to connect with the company, including:
Social media icons
Social feeds with several latest posts (usually Instagram or Twitter)
Brand logo
Brand slogan or vision (1-3 sentences)
Email signup
Testimonials
Some brands use the footer for testimonials and reviews. They might even include a Google Business or TrustPilot widget displaying their star rating. These UI patterns are excellent for social proof and creating interest in your product or service.
Copyright
The copyright symbol and notice at the bottom of a footer tell visitors that you own the website’s content. It’s not a legal obligation, but it is common practice to inform people that you plan to protect your rights to the content.
6 Footer Design Examples
We’ve chosen six footer design examples from different industries to show how designers create layouts that align with business goals and user needs.
The key takeaway from these examples is how different industries prioritize links and content. Each example also uses a clean, minimalist layout to help visitors find information quickly.
UXPin – Saas Footer Design
We decided to use our UXPin website as a SaaS footer example. You’ll notice we use a sticky header, so our primary navigation is always visible to desktop users.
UXPin’s footer includes key company, product, and marketing information. Customers often want to know how UXPin, an advanced tool, compares to popular image-based competitors, so we’ve included several product comparison links.
Other essential footer links for SaaS products are documentation, tutorials, educational content, and other helpful resources. UXPin also includes a language selector, social links, and policy information.
The media giant primarily uses its footer to display different 30+ language versions of the website with a separate section for popular news topics. The very bottom of the page features links to legal information, policies, contacts, and advertising with the BBC.
The clean layout is easy to read, allowing users to find content and links fast.
Asos – eCommerce Footer Design
Global eCommerce brand Asos uses a simple footer design with social media buttons, payment methods, and helpful links. Most important for eCommerce are links for delivery/returns policy, order tracking, and special promotions–in Asos’ case, they promote student discounts, gift cards, and Black Friday.
As a listed company (ASOMY), Asos must provide investor information and corporate responsibility.
Lastly, as a global eCommerce brand, Asos shows customers which store they are viewing and a link to change to another region and currency.
Zorro Design – Agency Footer Design
Agencies generally use their websites for two purposes:
Showcase their work
Generate new leads
US-based Zorro Design uses a black and white footer design with a bright yellow CTA taking users to a contact form. Zorro’s designers have designed the footer perfectly, so the CTA sits in the center of the screen, with lots of surrounding whitespace screaming “CLICK ME!”
Lastly, Zorro places its logo and slogan to the left with several key links, including recent work, contact, about, and social media buttons.
Zorro’s footer design is clean and uncluttered, allowing users to absorb and find content quickly.
Alex Lakas – Freelancer Footer Design
Like agencies, freelancers need a portfolio website to showcase their work and get clients. Product Designer Alex Lakas uses his website footer primarily to connect with potential clients/employers and designers through his social channels.
As a remote worker, Alex also uses flashing text to tell visitors where he’s currently working–in this case, it’s Los Angeles.
Alex’s dark/light mode switcher is a nice touch for a UX design portfolio, showing he’s mindful of web accessibility. He also has links to past work and a contact page.
Booking.com – Travel Footer Design
Booking.com is one of the world’s biggest online travel agencies, with over 28 million accommodation listings in more than 70 countries. Booking.com’s goal is to sell accommodation, but they also want to onboard new properties, so their primary footer CTA is to “list a property.”
The website’s footer also features its five most important links using a large bold typography to stand out. Customers also have several search categories, including regions and accommodation options, for customers to find their ideal destination faster.
As a listed company (NASDAQ: BKNG), Booking.com includes links to all necessary investor and corporate information.
At the bottom of the page, Booking.com features several logos of the company’s holding group, Booking Holdings Inc.
How to Design a Footer?
Prioritize Links
The first step to designing a great footer is prioritizing your links. Designers must consider user needs and business goals to create something meaningful and helpful to visitors.
Less is More
Cluttered UIs always perform poorly. They’re difficult to digest and can confuse users. Reducing UI elements, links, and text can help drive traffic to your most important content–which takes us back to point one, prioritize your links properly!
Use a Single CTA
A single CTA helps guide visitors to your most important task or business goal. Footer designs are usually two-tone, often black and white, providing the perfect background for a bright-colored CTA to pop and grab people’s attention.
Make Footers Mobile-Friendly
Mobile-first design is crucial for website footers. On a desktop, you may have 3-4 columns, while on a smartphone, you have one. The more columns and links, the more users have to scroll to find content. Place your most important links and content in the first column, so users see this first.
Use Hierarchy to Display Importance
The examples from Booking.com, Zorro Design, The BBC, and Alex Lakas used visual hierarchy to show users their most important links. Different sizes, colors, and weights are effective techniques for displaying importance.
Stay Compliant
Legal information like policies and disclaimers are crucial for modern web design. Designers must research their company’s obligations regarding where and how to display these links.
For example, financial and investment products in some countries must display their disclaimer information in the footer, so it’s always visible to customers. See this footer example from Chase Bank.
Branding Opportunities
Your website’s footer is a fantastic opportunity to connect users with your brand’s touchpoints, like social media, newsletter signup, and company links.
Be Helpful
Users often scroll to a website footer looking for help like documentation, tutorials, blog, and other resources. The UXPin footer design is a perfect example of providing multiple resources to educate customers about our products.
Designing Footers With UXPin
Create beautiful, interactive, responsive website footers in UXPin. With UXPin, designers can build prototypes with code-like functionality to improve user testing and get better feedback from stakeholders.
UXPin also includes built-in accessibility tools, including a contrast checker and color blindness simulator to test designs on the flying without leaving the canvas.
Deliver better products faster with UXPin–the world’s most advanced code-based design tool. Sign up for a free trial and deliver better user experiences to your customers with UXPin.
Merge’s npm integration gives design teams more control to import fully functional component libraries from the npm registry. The benefit of designing prototypes with a component library is designers get full functionality and fidelity without writing a single line of code!
If you’re unsure what any of this “npm stuff” means, don’t worry, this article will explain everything you need to know, including how to create an npm package for your design system.
Deliver projects with minimal design or coding from scratch using UXPin Merge. Visit our Merge page for ways to import your company’s design system and discover the endless possibilities of component-driven prototyping in UXPin.
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If you’re not technically proficient, you’re probably wondering, “what is a package?“
A package contains files and code required to run an application. There are two types of packages:
Dependencies: third-party packages needed for an application to work
devDependencies: packages engineers use during development (tools, automation, testing, etc.)
For example, if you want to build an application featuring Google Maps, instead of writing everything from scratch, you install the google-maps package and write a few lines of code to display a map and location.
For this article, we’ll focus on dependencies, more specifically component library packages. Here are some resources if you would like to go deeper into the technical aspects of packages and npm:
Anyone can create a package and publish it to the npm registry. You will need basic programming skills and an npm account to upload your package.
What is Component-Driven Prototyping?
As a designer, you’re probably wondering, “why do I need to know about packages and npm?” One of the things you can store in a package is a design system’s component library.
Engineers can install the design system’s component library in their project’s dependencies and write a couple of lines of code where they want these UI elements to appear. And, with UXPin Merge’s npm integration, design teams can use these components too.
UXPin Merge allows designers to import a design system from a repository for prototyping. Design teams use visual UI elements in UXPin and can move them around the canvas as any other design element created using lines and shapes.
The only difference is Merge components have code behind them, so designers enjoy the same fidelity and functionality as engineers. With designers and engineers using the same component library, design handoffs are seamless with minimal designing or coding from scratch.
Component-driven prototyping in UXPin allows design teams to build accurate replicas of the final product, significantly enhancing usability testing and stakeholder feedback.
There are several ways you can sync a design system to UXPin using Merge, but for this article, we’ll focus on how to publish your component library to the npm registry and import it into UXPin using the npm integration.
How to Turn Your Design System into a Package for the npm Registry
With UXPin’s new npm integration, designers can import their product’s design system into UXPin via the npm registry. If your design system doesn’t have a package, follow these steps to create one.
If you want to keep your design system private (only visible to people you authorize), you’ll need a paid npm account. Alternatively, you can upload a public package that anyone can install and use for their projects.
Step 2. Check your npm version
Private packages must use npm version 2.7.0 or greater. You can check which version your system is running by executing the following command in your terminal:
You must test your package to ensure it’s bug-free by executing the following command:
npm install my-package
(replace my-package with the name of your package)
Step 5. Publish the package
Again, we recommend following npm’s documentation for publishing private packages. Once you have completed these steps, your package should be visible on the npm registry by visiting its assigned URL (usually ending with your package name):
https://npmjs.com/package/*package-name
(replacing *package-name with the name of your package)
Step 6. Import the package’s components into UXPin
Once you have completed the steps above, you can import your component library into UXPin using the npm integration. The process will be similar to importing the MUI open-source library described in this step-by-step tutorial.
Using the Merge Component Manager (MCM), you can import each component and its associated properties (defined as React props in the design system package).
Design teams can scale the design system using UXPin Patterns, allowing you to combine multiple Merge and non-Merge UI elements to create new components and templates. Engineers can convert these patterns into code and add them to the package repository, making them available for designers to import via MCM.
UXPin Merge & npm integration Resources
Here are some more resources to get you started with component-driven prototyping in UXPin.
Many designers ask when trying to come up with the best way of presenting data: Are we designing a dashboard or report user interface? As with everything in product development and UX design, it depends on the user’s needs!
Understanding the difference between dashboards vs reports is crucial for presenting the right data visualization to the right people to make data-driven decisions. Some people value granularity, while others want a snapshot of key performance indicators (KPIs).
This article defines dashboards and reports and why UI designers would prioritize one over the other. We also share some examples to demonstrate how these UIs visualize data differently.
Design fully functioning, immersive dashboard and report user interfaces with live data using UXPin Merge. Sync ready-made data visualization components to test interfaces with stakeholders and end users. Visit our Merge page to find out more and how to request access.
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What are Dashboards?
Dashboards are user interfaces that visualize multiple data sources (or reports) through numbers, graphs, and charts–typically on one screen, but some are scrollable. A dashboard can visualize one data set theme, like users, or summarize multiple data points for a high-level business performance snapshot.
What are the Benefits of Dashboards?
The most significant benefit is that dashboards can visualize large amounts of data on a single screen. Users can instantly identify issues or successes to investigate further.
For example, a sales executive notices a 20% revenue increase from the previous month. They can then investigate to uncover the cause of the significant bump in sales:
Which products performed best?
Was there a particular promotion responsible?
Which sales team generated the most revenue?
Real-time dashboards are also crucial for many industries, like manufacturing, logistics, fulfillment, and live sports analysis, to name a few. Users can monitor these real-time dashboards to respond to issues or predict outcomes.
Dashboard Examples
This sales dashboard from Barly Vallendito via Dribbble is an excellent example of a specific dataset theme (sales). The dashboard displays multiple data sets for the month, including:
Total sales
Average order value
Conversion rate
Best performing countries
Top selling products
Line graph plotting daily sales
Datapine’s manufacturing dashboard example displays production stats for an electronics company, aggregating data from many sources. These production dashboards typically feed real-time data so companies can react to issues immediately. The “Quick Stats” section is particularly important because it tells managers about operating capacity vs. order volume.
The manufacturing dashboard also feeds production managers sales and return data, so they can react to what’s happening in other parts of the business. For example, if they suddenly see a spike in Laptop A10 460M sales, they can order additional parts and take precautionary measures to ensure the relevant machines run optimally.
Dashboards also appear in B2C products like this activity tracker example from Outcrowd. The dashboard displays the user’s step count, average heart rate, step comparison chart, calories, and sleep. A second dashboard allows users to see their current progress vs. their daily goals.
These comparison dashboards are common for many digital products, consumer and enterprise, because they allow users to track performance and make adjustments to meet goals and targets.
What are Reports?
Reports are comprehensive datasets from a specific time period. They are more granular than dashboards, allowing users to dive deep into the data to pinpoint trends and events.
A report can be a single page or hundreds of pages long, including data tables, graphs, charts, and other visualizations. For example, a sales report might include a chart plotting daily sales for a week with a table displaying every transaction below it. Analysts can use the chart to identify anomalies and the table to drill down into the data for an in-depth analysis.
What are the Benefits of Reports?
Reports allow users to get a deeper understanding of data and identify causes. Analysts can run reports on different data points within a set to uncover trends, issues, and opportunities.
For example, a sales report might include data about the transaction (products, prices, total cost, TAX, shipping, etc.) and customers (names, addresses, sales history, etc.). Analysts can filter and sort this sales report to understand:
UX teams can use this data to understand customers better, update UX artifacts (user personas, user journey maps, etc.), and ultimately create a better user experience that aligns with the company’s business goals.
Report Examples
This report UI from Sharon Kalarikkal on Behance is a fantastic example of marketing efforts relating to revenue. Users can add or remove metrics at the top to generate custom reports.
A small visualization summarizes the data table below. The user can change the date range, filter, and sort the table for data analysis. There are also options to share, save, and export the report.
This report UI from Inflectra displays a software development project’s functional and system requirements. The report shows high-level business intelligence and allows users to drill into individual tasks via a dropdown. They can also filter, sort, and manipulate data using multiple tools.
These reports are common in project management software, allowing users to monitor projects and product roadmaps.
Ismail Hossain’s dairy inventory report is an excellent example of a report that, at first glance, looks like a dashboard. This type of report confuses many people, leading to the use of dashboard and report interchangeably.
Ismail’s UI design is classified as a report because it answers how and why–users have access to the supporting inventory data. If it were a dashboard, you wouldn’t have all the supporting data behind each metric.
Ismail’s mockup is a concept, so not all the data matches up, but it gives you a good idea of how people confuse dashboards and reports. If there were more products, the inventory would be scrollable so users could visualize all the data.
Dashboard vs. Report
Designers must understand users’ data needs to determine whether the dataset requires a dashboard or report. In most cases, users will probably need both, but understanding their needs will help prioritize the UI and menu options accordingly.
A simple way to start is to think of the key differences between dashboards vs reports is:
Dashboards answer what–what is this month’s sales and revenue?
Reports answer how and why–how did we achieve those figures, and why didn’t we meet our target?
Dashboards are easy to digest, while reports are more granular, requiring users to spend more time analyzing the data. There is no “better option.” Choosing a dashboard vs. a report boils down to your users and how they want to visualize data.
When to use a Dashboard?
Dashboard designs are best for summarizing data, preferably within a single desktop view. C-suite and executive stakeholders prefer dashboards because it gives them a quick snapshot of what’s happening and whether the organization is on track to meet its goals.
Dashboard UIs are also preferable for B2C products, like automotive UIs, activity trackers, banking apps, social media apps, etc. These dashboards provide users with snapshots of their activities which they can analyze further using reports, statements, transactions, and other data lists.
When to use a Report?
Reports are best for users who want to research and analyze data. Business analysts, data scientists, marketers, finance teams, and team leaders are all business users who value granularity.
They want to know precisely what’s going on and why so they can present findings to stakeholders, measure performance, recommend strategies, and guide decision-making.
Live Data Visualizations Using UXPin Merge
Prototyping dashboards and reports in image-based design tools are restrictive, and designers battle to get meaningful, accurate results.
Without functioning graphs, charts, data tables, and other visualizations, usability participants and stakeholders can’t interact with the prototypes as they would in the final product. Designers must rely on UX engineers or front-end devs to build code prototypes–a time-consuming and resource-hungry process!
With UXPin Merge, designers can import fully functioning data components and templates to create prototypes that look and feel like the final product. Design teams can add real data to these data components or use an API via IFTTT for live-data prototyping.
Prototyping dashboards and reports are one thing. Collaboration between designers and engineers with complex data components is another challenge altogether!
UXPin Merge facilitates smooth collaboration between designers and engineers because they work with the same component library hosted in a repository–a single source of truth bridging the gap between design and development.
Merge streamlines the design handoff process because engineers already have the components. It’s as simple as using the component library to copy the design team’s prototypes. Less friction. Faster time-to-market.
There are loads of web accessibility guidelines designers and engineers must follow when designing a website or application. It can be overwhelming to digest them all or know when to use the different levels.
This article simplifies the official web content accessibility guidelines with a web accessibility checklist for designers. We also explain the difference between WCAG 1.0 and 2.0 and the different levels (A, AA, and AAA).
What is the Purpose of an Accessibility Checklist?
A web accessibility checklist provides designers and engineers with a list of considerations for designing a website for people with disabilities and assistive technology.
Team members can reference the checklist against designs and code to ensure they meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
What is the Difference Between WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 1.0?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) must update and evolve with technology. Each update adds new guidelines that align with new devices.
Aside from the guidelines, there are also two iterations of the WCAG system. The first iteration, WCAG 1.0, used guidelines and checkpoints with priority 1, 2, or 3.
In 2008, WCAG 2.0 changed from checkpoints to level success criteria. The system we currently work with has:
Four design principles
Multiple guidelines within each principle
Testable success criteria levels A, AA, or AAA for each guideline
According to official documentation, WCAG 2.0 provides several key improvements:
Applies to more varieties of technologies and devices
Designed to evolve with future technologies
Requirements are easier to test with automated testing methods & human evaluation
Input and collaboration from the international community
Improved support material and documentation to make guidelines easier to follow and implement
3 Success Criteria Levels of Accessibility Compliance
WCAG 2.0 introduced three success criteria levels (or levels of conformance) to evaluate each guideline based on the product’s intended purpose and target audience.
Level A – Basic
Level AA – Acceptable
Level AAA – Optimal
WCAG Level A
Level A ensures websites meet the bare minimum accessibility standards. Level A compliance addresses core issues and elements to make websites more accessible, like responsive design, non-text alternatives (icons), keyboard navigation, and video captions, to name a few.
WCAG Level AA
Level AA covers a broader range of UI elements and best practices to ensure everyone can use your website. Most government websites worldwide require WCAG Level AA so that everyone in the population can access public content and services.
The idea is that able-bodied users and those with disabilities can digest content and complete tasks with a comparable user experience, functionality, and efficiency.
Some Level AA requirements include:
color contrast ratio (i.e., 4.5:1)
Alt text for images and icons
Navigation for all technologies
Accurate form field labels
Properly structured heading tags
Variable text size functionality
Assistive technology-specific requirements.
WCAG Level AAA
Level AAA is the highest conformance level, ensuring the maximum number of users can navigate your website and digest its content. As the Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C) notes on its website, “It is not recommended that Level AAA conformance be required as a general policy for entire sites because it is not possible to satisfy all Level AAA Success Criteria for some content.”
Designers should use Level AAA if the website or content caters to a specialized audience. The guidelines for Level AAA impact styling significantly (color contrast 7:1) and require sign language interpretation for audio and video.
Website Accessibility Checklist for Designers
We’ve selected the most important WACG guidelines for designers. These guidelines apply to visual elements, but these often relate to HTML elements, so designers and engineers must collaborate on accessibility. You can find the complete list of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 on the official W3C website.
Content
Use descriptive link labels (Level A) – buttons and links must provide users with context. For example, a button that says “Click Here” is meaningless and might be misleading. See Info & Relationships SC 1.3.1.
Lower secondary reading level (Level AAA) – text must be in “plain language” free of jargon, idioms, slang, metaphors, sarcasm, and other complicated terms, ideally at an 8th-grade reading level. See Reading Level SC 3.1.5.
Text formatting (Level AAA) – text must not be justified (aligned left or right according to the language) with the ability to resize up to 200% without assistive technologies. Users must also have control over the foreground and background colors–i.e., dark/light mode switching. See Visual Presentation SC 1.4.8.
Test designs on specialized screens & devices (Level A) – visually impaired users use high contrast or inverted color modes. It’s important to test how content performs under these conditions. See Use of Color SC 1.4.1.
One H1 tag per page – the H1 header tag must describe what the overall webpage or article is about.
Structure headings in a logical sequence – nested headings must follow the conventional order of H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. For example, you would never have an H2 followed by an H4 and then an H3. You should never skip a header tag either, like going from an H2 to H4 instead of H2, H3, and then H4.
Headings and labels must describe a topic or purpose – headings and labels help users, and assistive technologies, like screen readers, find and digest content easier.
Non-text content must have a text alternative – images, icons, etc., must have descriptive alt text or a text alternative. Furthermore, if the image has text, this must be included in the alt text.
CAPTCHA – websites must provide alternative confirmation methods when using CAPTCHA, like human verification or text-based authentication, for example.
Decorative non-text content – alt text for images and media that are purely decorative must use “null” so that assistive technologies ignore this content.
Text alternatives for graphical representations – Graphs, charts, and other graphics must include text alternatives so assistive technologies can read them.
Choose the appropriate HTML markup – lists must use ol, ul, or dl syntax relating to the content and have a list’s appearance (or structure) so as not to confuse users.
Controls
Controls include all navigable UI elements like links and buttons.
Opening a new tab or window warning (Level A) – users must know if a button or link opens a new window or tab using text or an icon. People with cognitive disabilities often get disorientated when a new tab/window opens unannounced. See On Focus SC 3.2.1.
Focus states (Level A) – controls must have focus (or hover) states, so users (including those with assistive technologies) know when they’ve selected a link or button to activate. See Focus Visible SC 2.4.7.
Make links recognizable (Level A) – designers must use a combination of color and underline styling so users can quickly identify links. See Use of Color SC 1.4.1.
Use “skip links” (Level A) – skip links allow assistive technologies and keyboard users to bypass navigational menus and other blocks to jump straight to a web page’s content. See Bypass Blocks SC 2.4.1.
Forms
Form labels (Level A) – designers must label every input for visual reference and use the HTML ‘label’ tag for assistive technologies. See On Input SC 3.2.2.
Error messages (Level A) – place error messages above the corresponding input field with clear instructions for users to fix the problem. See Error Identification SC 3.3.1.
Message states (Level A) – don’t rely solely on color for error, warning, and success message states. Adding an icon or text can help visually impaired users identify the type of error state. See Use of Color SC 1.4.1.
Multimedia
Disable autoplay by default (Level A) – autoplay can be problematic for users with cognitive disabilities or seizure disorders. See Audio Control SC 1.4.2.
Remove seizure triggers (Level A) – strobes or flashing video can induce seizures. W3C’s documentation recommends no more than three flashes on a web page or video. See Three Flashes or Below Threshold SC 2.3.1.
Transcripts for Audio (Level A) – including transcripts in the audio description allows hearing-impaired users to digest audio content. See Non-text Content SC 1.1.1.
Color Contrast
Test color contrast for text (Level AA) – use a contrast checker and color blindness tester to ensure visually impaired users can read body text and UI elements. See Contrast (Minimum) SC 1.4.3,
Text contrast for non-text (Level AA) – non-text elements like icons, form inputs, etc., must be distinguishable for visually impaired users. See Non-text Contrast 1.4.11.
Mobile and Touch
Avoid horizontal scroll on mobile (Level AA) – horizontal scroll can be difficult (or impossible) for users with hand or finger disabilities. W3C provides guidelines for horizontal and vertical scrolling. See Reflow SC 1.4.10.
Website orientation (Level AA) – websites must be visible in any orientation for mobile and tablet devices. See Orientation 1.3.4.
Ensure adequate target sizing (Level AA) – there’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to activate a link or hitting the wrong one because they’re too close together–test targets with a wide range of hand and stylus sizes. See Target Size SC 2.5.5.
Extra Web Accessibility Resources
Web accessibility can seem overwhelming at first, but there are many helpful resources to help find and test your user interfaces.
Streamline your web accessibility testing with UXPin’s build accessibility tools, including a contrast checker and color blindness simulator. Sign up for a free trial to discover how code-based design can enhance your prototyping and testing to deliver more inclusive user experiences.
Automotive UX is one of the most rapidly evolving and exciting user experience disciplines. It requires designers to shift their thinking from keeping users engaged to designing for safety.
This article explores the exciting world of automotive UX and six key challenges designers must overcome to deliver safe yet enjoyable driving experiences.
Design, prototype, test, and iterate at a higher fidelity with greater functionality for accurate, meaningful results. Visit the UXPin Merge page to discover how component-driven prototyping can enhance your UX projects to deliver better user experiences for your customers.
What is Automotive UX?
Automotive UX is user experience design for the automotive industry. As more parts of a vehicle’s interior get digitized with car interfaces for control, so does the demand to make these UIs user-friendly and intuitive.
Touch screens are replacing knobs and dials in most cars, including gas and electric vehicles. Many cars also have voice user interfaces (VUI) which require careful UX design to ensure they’re safe and user-friendly.
UX UI Design Role in the Driving Experience
As cars evolve, so do user needs regarding the driving experience. Drivers no longer want to get from A to B; they want features that enhance the journey to make it more enjoyable–especially in cities where people spend hours commuting morning and evening.
Some features that enhance the driving experience include:
As people move away from car ownership to micro rentals (hourly or A-to-B car hire), we’ll likely see dedicated apps installed on the car’s touchscreen so users can start and end rides.
Ultimately, cars will become another Internet of things (IoT) gadget that integrates with a network of devices rather than a stand-alone mode of transport.
Automakers also mount these in the steering wheel dash for drivers and rear headrests for passengers.
The first challenge UX designers must overcome is the design mindset. Traditional UX design looks for ways to keep users engaged, whereas automotive UX must achieve the opposite and keep drivers focused on the road.
Car user interfaces must be clean and minimal with large text, toggles, and buttons so users can use them with no more than a glance. UX designers must work with interior automotive design teams to match the user experience to the driver’s reach, line of sight, left vs. right-hand drive, etc.–all elements that could impact driver safety.
2. Infotainment Systems
Behind these touchscreens are infotainment systems, providing details about the vehicle and journey as well as entertainment, including music, radio (analog and digital), cameras, device connectivity, audiobooks, video streaming, weather, and more.
In cars with multiple touchscreens, front and back, UX designers must think about the user experience for each differently. It’s essential to display vehicle and journey information for drivers, but backseat passengers have different priorities, like being entertained during their trip.
These differences mean design teams must decide which infotainment features are available to drivers and passengers, what the priorities are, and the impacts on navigation and information architecture. Designers also have to consider safety–should drivers or any front screens have access to video streaming that could distract from the road?
3. Balancing Personalized User Experience With Shared Mobility
Every driver has a preference for seat position, mirror angles, and stereo setup. Car interfaces add another dimension of personalization, which can get complicated with shared mobility.
Getting a seat in the correct position is relatively simple, but what about the screen’s primary view preference, device connectivity, climate control, navigation, and infotainment?–all of which take time to set up.
UX designers must look at ways to personalize the driving experience while building features to accommodate multiple users. Creating user profiles is a good solution, but what about car-sharing services and rentals? Downloading these settings from a smartphone or smartwatch might be a better option, where the car sets everything up as soon as it connects to the driver’s device.
4. Safety Features
Safety is the foundation for every automotive UX design decision. Instead of capturing the user’s attention, the goal is to design UIs and present data a driver can consume with a glance.
UX designers must collaborate with automotive design teams to understand safety systems and how to present these to the driver, for example:
Lane assist–changing lanes and alerting drivers when they’re straying
Environmental sensors–telling drivers when they’re too close to other cars and objects
Speed warnings
Seatbelt notifications
Designers must also consider which user interactions promote safety and in which situations. For example, voice commands might be the best option while driving, or the driver can use a swipe gesture to change displays without taking their eyes off the road.
5. Driving Assistance
Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are standard in most high-end vehicles nowadays, but simplified versions are slowly making their way into midrange and budget cars. These systems can perform simple tasks, like alerting you when you drift out of your lane to full autopilot–as we see with the Tesla range–complete with multiple sensors and cameras.
A Telsa can drive itself with all this data, but what if the driver has control and the vehicle’s systems detect a potential accident? While engineers focus on developing AI systems that avert accidents, UX designers must decide how they interact with the driver safely.
To do this successfully, designers must have a deep understanding of the Human-Machine Interface (HMI) and how interaction design impacts the driving experience and safety.
6. Designing From Scratch
One of the biggest automotive UX challenges is that designers must design from scratch for every model. Screens, buttons, features, dials, locations, and even operating systems often change with each release, so designers must rethink their designs from the ground up each year–significantly more challenging than going from iPhone 12 to 13!
Designers must also consider more screen sizes and viewports. Most vehicles use custom-fitted screens but also offer mobile apps that control the car’s system and features. They must prioritize features, layouts, and information architecture differently for in-vehicle and external applications–each with the potential to change annually!
Cars also stay on the road much longer than people keep mobile devices. For example, Apple released the iPhone 5 in 2012, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone still using one in 2022. Conversely, many people drive cars 10, 20, or even 50+ years old.
While this isn’t an issue for cars built 50 years ago, newer models with touchscreens and other technology must be maintained and updated. UX designers must constantly innovate for new models while future-proofing designs to maintain older systems.
Faster Prototyping With UXPin Merge
Keeping up with the fast-paced automotive industry means designers must prototype, test, and iterate faster and with a higher degree of accuracy. With limited time, they also need better cross-functional collaboration and fewer errors.
UXPin Merge allows you to sync a design system hosted in a repository with UXPin’s design editor, so the entire product development team uses the same components. Any changes to the repository automatically sync to UXPin, notifying designers of the update.
With UXPin’s Version Control, designers can switch to an older version of the design system, perfect for maintaining older products–like the infotainment system for a 2019 car.
Scale Faster Prototyping With Patterns
One of the challenges with maintaining a design system is promoting new patterns and waiting for engineers to code them.
With UXPin Patterns, design teams can omit the development phase and begin prototyping with new patterns immediately. They can also save different component/UI states as patterns, allowing them to make quick changes during testing to iterate faster.
Smoother Design Handoffs
Design handoffs in Merge are smoother and faster because designers and engineers use the exact same component library.
The most significant benefit for organizations–faster time-to-market. A crucial factor for the fast-paced automotive industry.
Meaningful Feedback
Better prototypes result in meaningful, actionable feedback from usability testing and stakeholders. With a library of ready-made components, designers can make quick changes, test, and iterate faster.
“It’s been so helpful for us to have these high-fidelity prototypes built with UXPin. We build high-fidelity prototypes much quicker, and we get immediate feedback after the session. If there’s something we can fix immediately, we make that change before the next participant and get feedback much faster than before.” Erica Rider, Senior Manager for UX – Developer tools and platform experience at PayPal.
Face-paced automotive UX requires a rapid prototyping solution. UXPin Merge gives product development teams a platform to streamline the design process and deliver projects faster with higher quality and accuracy. Visit the UXPin Merge page to learn more and how to request access to this revolutionary technology.
Design leadership isn’t about micromanaging every little step. Rather, a good design leader is able to provide impactful direction for their team. How exactly does a design leader encourage a positive and meaningful product design work environment?
Let’s start by taking a look at the key steps to take for managing a design team successfully and what to avoid when building a cohesive team.
If you’re looking for a prototyping tool that will help your team to optimize their workflow and communicate better, we have something for you. Try UXPin Merge, a powerful technology that makes your team achieve a higher level of design maturity in no time. Read more about UXPin Merge.
Reach a new level of prototyping
Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.
Start with a design department audit
Just like you start with auditing UX design, look back at your design team goals. Having a roadmap in place will help you more clearly see what you need to achieve in regard to design goals at your organization. This roadmap will help you get there with fewer bumps in the road.
Your next step will be to audit your design team structure as a whole. You’ll want to take inventory of who you have on your team and confirm what their strengths and weaknesses are. Taking stock of these things is helpful to see if you have enough team members with the appropriate skills needed to achieve company goals.
Team meetings are an excellent way to gain a deeper understanding of your team as a whole. Furthermore, a design team audit will go a long way in determining how well overall day-to-day operations will go.
Auditing will help crystalize your team structure and will help to specify the role of all team members and the capacities in which they are expected to complete their roles. Clarity helps give everyone a higher sense of purpose and consistently set them to task without confusion or hold-ups.
Identify and acknowledge your wrongdoings
As a design team leader, you’ll need to apply an honest mindset when managing your team. Inherent assumptions and old assumptions are par for the course when working in a leadership role, however, external output is extremely valuable when working in a close team atmosphere.
Don’t be afraid to ask for external input in the form of team member feedback. This could be an anonymous survey or an all-hands call to gather information from those you work with every day.
While it can be tough to hear difficult feedback, taking direct note of such input will only help strengthen your team as a whole. Poor leadership manifests in a variety of different ways. Maybe your team has expressed that you repeatedly fail to set clear goals for the team or perhaps you tend to micromanage employees.
Whatever the shortcoming may be, be willing to identify and acknowledge where you can use a little work as a design lead. No one is perfect, you and your team members included.
Write a plan on what needs to be done
Equally as important to a successful team as improving leadership style and making a plan are the factors related to project management. This goes hand-in-hand with design audits. Questions you’ll want to take stock of: Do you need to hire more people? If so, can you tell which skill gaps in your current team structure need to be filled?
An adjacent item would be to run a skills gap assessment. Ask your team members what skills they feel good at. By requesting directly, you’ll likely find skills that weren’t readily apparent or might come in handy for future design projects.
If the specialized skills you need aren’t available locally, expanding internationally with EOR services allows you to hire top design talent from anywhere without the administrative burden of setting up foreign entities or navigating complex international employment laws
During any one-on-one or group meetings with your team members, you can ask them about the skills they’re determined to develop. This will help you plan out how their desired career path can integrate with the competencies of your design team as a whole. Offer ways for your team members to hone and develop their skills in order to close any skill gaps.
During the planning stage, it’s important to note if you’re successfully building the design team during the recruitment and hiring process. Take note of any areas in which you might be falling behind. Ask yourself:
Are you seeing a high candidate drop-off rate?
Do your new team members continue to ask repetitive questions during the onboarding process?
Consider these questions and other potential improvement areas such as task distribution, management of workload, and consistent performance.
Decide how you will measure the results
Once you’ve taken stock of these items and implemented specific changes, you’ll want a solid plan as to how you’ll be evaluating said implementations. You’ll need it to measure whether or not the changes you’ve implemented have been successful.
When assessing the overall success of your results, ask yourself:
Did you solve the problem? – Design isn’t simply graphics and color palettes. At its core, it’s all about facilitating interactions and problem-solving through creative channels. If you identified a real problem (such as poor employee retention) and provided a better solution (more open communication and feedback) then you can count that as a success.
Did you improve the process? – Design doesn’t always have to be about supplementation. Rather, you might identify steps that were redundant and unhelpful during your research. Good design leadership might also mean cutting down or taking away what isn’t working. If you made a process more efficient through various channels of development, then congratulations, pat yourself on the back. Another success!
Did you open yourself for feedback? – Design success is just about the personal growth of employees and management alike. This can be shown through effective communication. A difficult skill to master, accepting feedback and open communication is one that every good leader should have. Shelve your pride and open yourself up to honest feedback. You and your team will all be better for it.
The recommended measurement methods will depend on the specific area you’re planning to improve. For example, if you were hoping to measure your own design leadership qualities, you could run a quantitative survey like an employee Net Promoter Score which is a metric that helps gauge how employees feel about the place at which they work.
Running surveys like this allows you to see how your score has changed over the course of three or six months. This is simply one avenue you can take but it is a common way to look at employee satisfaction.
For example, perhaps you want to improve your team member retention rates and avoid employee turnover. After taking the necessary steps needed for proper employee retention, you can measure how the average tenure has changed since the implementation of certain action items.
Or maybe you’d like to measure the number of tasks your team was able to successfully complete within a 2-week timeframe, you can compare these metrics on a bi-monthly basis. Measurements can be approached through Fibonacci sequence points which provide a realistic way to approach a variety of influencing factors.
Start transformation processes
Now you’re able to start streamlining how design teams work. Encapsulating the above steps and implementing them might look as follows:
1-on-1 meetings: holding one-on-one meetings are a great way for team lead and team members reports to connect individually on pressing issues and develop strong relationships. They also help ensure that employees feel like they’re valued contributors of product teams and that they are working successfully toward goals as well as improving their skill set. One-on-ones should not be used as status updates, rather, they should serve as a platform to give regular feedback and foster career growth and learning new skills.
Daily standups: whether you call them daily stand-ups or team huddles, the idea is the same. You want your entire team to feel informed and connected. This helps measure progress, highlight necessary areas of improvement or outstanding issues, and where the team stands in terms of work completed.
Team building activities: a variety of activities exist to help build morale and spark teamwork. They’re helpful exercises for bringing communication to the forefront and allowing a free flow of product team collaboration and an encouraging the best work atmosphere. This is especially valuable for remote or distributed teams where physical office interactions are limited. In such cases, many leaders also choose to get a virtual office—not only for mail handling and a professional business address but also to offer access to meeting spaces, receptionist services, or simply to build credibility in new markets. Team building helps product managers and employees alike learn more about each other outside of a traditional workplace setting. Your activity might be something fun and engaging like an escape room or a day at the golf course.
Growth and collaboration are crucial to a team’s success. As outlined in the first pillar of our DesignOps eBook, the well-being of a team of designers should be at the forefront of your management plan. The above steps are simply a few suggestions that can help your team thrive and feel cared for.
Don’t miss out on the power of iterations
Growth isn’t a linear process. Remember to check in with the members of your team on a regular basis. This will help you see what seems to be working and what techniques haven’t quite landed. Allowing you to pivot from there.
Again, ask your team members for honest feedback. This can be done either during face-to-face meetings or in a survey. Fostering an openly communicative environment is ideal for a well-running design process and product development workflows. Employees that feel noticed ultimately feel valued. Remember to focus on clear points of action, rather than generalities. Drill down to specifics and everyone will be better for it.
If you decide to go the survey route, make sure not to overdo the frequency. Firstly, the time frame in which you’ve gathered data might be too short to draw relevant conclusions. Secondly, you don’t want to ask team members to evaluate your decisions on a frequent basis, as it could come across that you’re unsure of your design leadership capabilities. Be sure of the direction you’re taking as a design lead and your team will appreciate it.
Iterate and experiment with improvements to your team collaboration and design team management methods. Remember: proper design team management is a marathon, not a sprint. Cultivating a good team takes trial and error.
Lead your team to success
The first pillar of design operations deals with the core of a good business: people. If you want to support your people, you need the right tech stack for the job.
UXPin Merge is such technology. It allows your team to bring your devs’ interactive components to the design editor and build prototypes that are easily understood by stakeholders, product managers, and above all else, developers. Bridge communication gap and strengthen the workflow in your organization. Read more about UXPin Merge.
Design systems can be very confusing and complicated if you don’t fully understand the terminology associated with them. It’s important for designers and developers alike to be on the same page for the most effective communication efforts.
For this reason, we have comprised some key terms along with associated applications and examples to provide a clearer understanding of design systems.
UXPin helps you build interactive prototypes and manage design systems like no other prototyping tool in the market. Build consistent interfaces 10x faster and speed up development that stays in line with your designs. Manage a complete library of interactive elements in UXPin Merge. Find out more about it.
Design System
Definition: A design system is a set of standards, best practices, components, and rules that define a design project’s approach to creating websites in a certain style or brand identity. A style guide, for example, is often included as part of the design system. A pattern library of samples and the real assets – fonts, images, CSS frameworks, JavaScript libraries, and so on – all components needed to complete the final product.
Application: Front-end developers and designers use these to replicate designs through pre designed components and elements. The elements can be repeated and reused, which saves teams a ton of extra time. By including guidelines within these systems, some entry-level designers may find them as useful educational references.
Definition: Components are the building blocks of a design system. They can be small (e.g., buttons, icons) or large (e.g., navigation systems, carousels). A core aspect of components is that they’re designed to be as simple yet as flexible as possible so that they can be used in multiple instances.
Application: Companies use/reuse components to create patterns within their systems and to improve user experiences. Overall, components improve the quality and effectiveness of workflows. Many design systems will have component libraries that help designers and developers share UI elements that have interactivity and responsiveness build into them.
Definition: A design system requires a governing model that acts as a set of rules. These are required to manage all components within a project. They might pertain to visual design (e.g., animation, colors, typeface) or refer to a more complicated aspect of a project, like the personality or style of the branding or writing.
Application: These act as guidance for decision-making processes through preset standards to be followed throughout a design system. They help keep design teams on track and moving in a consistent direction. Teams commonly follow them for advice on how to achieve goals. An effective foundation will provide a clear framework for the team’s ideal system.
Definition: A single source of truth is a reference point between designers and developers that help them make their product consistent. Design systems, or particularly component libraries serve as a great single source of truth that product designers, product managers, and devlopers can use when building products.
Application: Teams that struggle with removing silos, front-end UI debt or misalignment can develop a single source of truth as the first attempt to bring the whole team closer. They start with building coded UI component library that they can share across the whole product development process.
Definition: A prototype refers to a sample version of a product (or its specific aspect), used by designers to test the solution out before launch. It is used to test or de-risk ideas, simulate the final product, address any assumptions, and eliminate concerns towards any other elements of its conception quickly and inexpensively. This allows the designer/s to work on the project, making modifications or adjustments in direction on the end goal if necessary.
Application: Designers will commonly use prototypes to test their product and gain user feedback during an initial trial period prior to an official launch taking place. This helps them save money by testing the product for inefficiencies, which saves time and resources in the long run.
Definition: A component library is a collection of UI components that can be reused across multiple projects. It typically includes code, documentation, and guidelines on how and when to use each component.
Application: Component libraries help ensure effective communication and collaboration between teams. They provide a quick access point for reference guides and stored, reusable components. Front-end developers can use these to help reduce cross-browser and cross-device incompatibility. In addition, component libraries eliminate the need to convert design to code, which lowers code duplication.
Definition: Material Design is a visual language that Google developed in 2014. It’s based on the principles of how materials exist and interact in the physical world. Many companies have since adopted Material Design as their design system of choice.
The language aids in the development of digital experiences for platforms like Android OS, iOS, Flutter, and websites. The structure makes the technique for creating components such as grid-based layouts, animations and transitions, padding, responsive compositions, dimensional depth effects, and more straightforward.
Application: Material Design is used by designers to optimize the user experience through 3D effects and lighting/animation features in GUIs. The approach helps eliminate confusion among users and provides consistency. For designs, it’s a key feature for animations and getting feedback on graphics.
Definition: A design language is a set of rules, guidelines, and best practices that govern the design of a product. A strong design language will make a product more consistent, cohesive, and easy to use. It also defines the overall visual identity of a brand.
Application: Design language helps teams follow a specific set of rules and methodologies. It makes the design process run smoothly without inconsistencies or unnecessary confusion. By creating a set of standards to follow, users can feel more comfortable navigating designs that feel familiar to them.
Example: Apple’s human interface guidelines are a design language that governs the design of all their products.
Usability
Definition: Usability measures how easy it is for users to accomplish their goals when using a product. A product with good usability is tested through five criteria – learnability (i.e., a soft learning curve), efficiency, satisfaction (how satisfied users are after interacting with it), memorability, and the number of errors users make.
Application: Usability helps designers and developers measure how well they are adhering to the needs of their users. It is an approach that assesses the effectiveness, efficiency, and appropriateness of a system and helps to identify how easily users will be able to solve any potential problems on their own.
Definition: Typography refers to the practice of arranging type (letters and text) to ensure the copy is clear, aesthetically attractive, and supports the content and design. Variables within typography include font size and style, as well as spacing and the length of copy on a line and page.
Good typography should be invisible—the user should be able to focus on the content, not the typeface.
Application: Good typography carries a myriad of benefits for designers and developers. It is perhaps one of the most important elements of a design system and helps communicate things like tone, sentiment, and the overall message. Typography will typically be used to draw a reader in while providing legibility.
Definition: Icons are visual symbols that represent a concept, action, or object. They can be used to help users navigate a product or to provide additional information about a particular element on the screen.
Application: Designers use icons to help users quickly navigate through a system with graphical representations. Icons are a great tool because they help free up space for other things since they’re typically quite small. They’re also an ideal tool for marketing efforts to add visual appeal.
Definition: Spacing is the use of empty space to separate elements on a page. Good spacing can make a product more legible and easier to use. Spacing can be implemented across all aspects of a product, from the margins and gutters to the spacing between lines of text.
Application: Clear and concise spacing helps developers and designers maintain an aesthetically pleasing atmosphere for users. Spacing is typically very deliberate in the way that it is placed throughout a system. It allows for things like optimal readability, consistency, and harmony across a design system.
Grids
Definition: Grids are a system for organizing content on a page. They can be used to create structure and hierarchy or to divide a page into sections. Grids can be implemented in various ways, from simple columns to more complex multi-column layouts.
Application: Grids help designers develop a user-friendly system that’s low-cost and provides consistency across multiple devices. Grids are typically designed in one spot then reproduced in other areas of a design system. Overall, they’re a great tool for designers to use for organizing information and providing precision.
Style Guide
Definition: A style guide is a document that outlines the rules and guidelines for the design of a product. It includes information on typography, color, iconography, and more. A style guide is an essential tool for maintaining consistency across a product. It’s a must-have if you’re working on a design system.
Application: Style guides are generally used for entire teams to work together more cohesively. It allows designers, project managers, and developers to stay on the same page with project expectations. In addition, teams can utilize style guides to quickly transition new hires and get them up to speed with a particular project.
Definition: A UI Kit is a collection of graphical user interface (GUI) elements that can be reused in digital products. A UI Kit typically includes buttons, icons, input fields, and other basic elements that can be used to build user interfaces.
UI kits usually come from companies or design teams who want to share their work with others. They can be a great starting point for new projects or a way to speed up the development of an existing project.
Application: Most commonly, UI kits have two primary uses, which include prototyping and mobile and website design. They’re especially useful for rapid prototyping where design functions are shared with developers, stakeholders and designers while a design is still in production. UI kits are especially useful for designers with no coding experience.
Definition: Patterns are recurring solutions to common problems. They can be used to solve design challenges in a variety of ways, from layout to interaction. Within most design projects, patterns will be used to help with the structure and flow of the product.
Application: Patterns are commonly used for better consistency and for saving time by helping a team run more efficiently. By producing design patterns that are familiar to users, a team’s message and overall goal can be better focused on. Patterns make coming to decisions much easier due to the predictability that they bring.
Definition: Properties are the characteristics of an element that define its appearance and behavior. In CSS, for example, properties include things like color, font size, and margin. In HTML, this could be used to make an element bold, italic, or a certain color.
Application: Some designers can find benefits from visual properties such as image-rendering, drop-shadows, border-radius cascading style sheets (CSS), or linear gradient to help improve design tasks. They might also use properties (like bold or italics) to emphasize a set of text, so users can quickly identify keywords.
Definition: A pilot is a miniature, self-contained version of a larger project. Pilots are often used to test new ideas or approaches before investing in a full-scale implementation.
They can be a great way to get feedback on a design system before committing to a full rollout and will typically be used by a smaller team or group of users.
Application: A developer might put together a testing group for a new video game that has yet to be released. They will allow the group to offer feedback for the game and offer any helpful suggestions for improvements. Pilot projects are a great way to identify mistakes and mitigate risk prior to an official launch.
Tokens and Variables
Definition: Tokens and variables are used to store values that can be reused throughout a product. In CSS, for example, variables can be used to store colors, sizes, and spacing values. Tokens and variables can be a great way to maintain consistency across a product.
They can also make it easier to make changes to a product since you can update the values in one place and have those changes propagate throughout the solution.
Application: Tokens and variables are helpful for designers who are looking to make an update to their system or put together an entirely new project. They’re also helpful for maintaining future updates and managing a system that spreads across multiple platforms. For those using Material Design, tokens are optimal for features like dynamic color.
Definition: Classes are used to group elements together. HTML elements, for instance, can be grouped together by their class attribute. Classes can be used to create reusable components or to apply styles to multiple elements.
You could create a class for all of the buttons on your site. This would allow you to style all of the buttons in the same way and make it easy to update the styling if you want to change it in the future.
Application: By classifying certain elements on a site, designers can ensure that similar tasks are simplified in the future. This, in turn, saves time by making future updates quicker. In design software, designers can quickly group elements through a keyboard shortcut to optimize future processes.
Binding
Definition: Binding is the process of connecting an element to data. In HTML elements can be bound to data using the data-* attributes. This allows the element to display the data in a specific way.
Binding is a powerful way to create dynamic and interactive user interfaces. It can be used to build things like data tables, form controls, and charts.
Application: Binding is commonly useful by front-end developers to link components to variables. This can also be done by linking variables to components, which is also referred to as to-way-data-binding. Some developers will use binding techniques to link a user interface and the data that it shows.
Definition: Slots are used to insert content into a component. They are a great way to reuse components and to make sure that your content is always up-to-date. Among others, by using slots you could create a slot for your site’s navigation and insert the latest links into it whenever the content is updated.
Application: Slot components help product designers by customizing certain components to save time with their designs. They help reduce the complexity of projects in order to make them more flexible. Many choose customized design system libraries with slot components, for example.
Definition: Events are used to trigger actions in a product. HTML elements, for instance, can be given event attributes that will cause them to respond to user input. They are a powerful way to create interactive user interfaces and be used to trigger things like modals, forms, and navigation.
Application: Events have a variety of applications, such as marking the start and end of a visitor session, obtaining visitor profile data, and changing a visitor audience level. Many applications allow users to access an events summary via a system dashboard. This report can usually be filtered to show most relevant data.
Framework
Definition: A framework is a collection of code that can be reused to build software products. They can include aspects of a project like libraries, tools, and best practices.
Frameworks can be a great way to speed up the development of a product. They can also make it easier to maintain a product over time. They are helpful for both small projects and large enterprise applications.
Application: Teams will commonly use frameworks to facilitate an in-depth analysis of certain issues and come up with a plan of how to take prompt action. Frameworks are an important part of any design system because they allow users to identify new insights at any given point in a design process.
Definition: A reference site is a website that provides information about a specific topic. You can use it to learn about new technologies or to find solutions to common problems.
Reference sites can be a great way to get started with a new technology or to troubleshoot an issue. They can also be an excellent resource for finding more information about a topic.
When designing a product or service, most teams will develop a reference site to ensure that everyone is using the same terminology, components, and processes.
Application: Reference sites are usually the first touchpoint for someone looking for a specific design system. These are posted by teams to make important information accessible in one centralized location. These generally include a component library along with a set of guidelines.
Design System Governance
Definition: Design system governance is the process of managing and maintaining a design system. This includes things like setting up standards, creating documentation, and enforcing rules.
Application: Design system governance is important for preparing a system for change. It ensures that everyone is following the same standards. Governance is key to managing requests and keeping track of decisions. For this reason, many teams use it for better collaboration efforts and contributions.
Definition: A design system graveyard is a collection of abandoned or outdated design systems. This can be a great resource for learning what not to do when creating a design system. When a design system is no longer being used or maintained, it is said to have been “put to rest” in the design system graveyard. This is usually because the product or service that it was created for has been discontinued or because the team has moved on to a new system.
Application: Designers and Developers can benefit from the design system graveyard by studying it and educating their teams on what not to do if they want to keep their system afloat. Some also find it effective to utilize the graveyard to construct alternative designs from abandoned data.
Definition: CSS Modules are CSS files which define, by default, animation and class names. By using CSS modules, you ensure that your CSS code is consistent across projects.
They are a great way to manage CSS in large projects. They can also be used to create reusable components that can be applied across multiple projects.
Application: CSS modules are commonly used to build element styles more granularly. They help developers write more legible, maintainable code and are ideal for situations where application styles are expanding. When they expand, the likelihood of two classes ending up with identical or similar names increases, so these modules help developers combat this issue.
Definition: Storybook is an open-sourced tool that can be used to develop and test UI components. It allows for the creation of isolated environments for each component. The software can be used to generate static documentation for a component library.
Storybook lets designers test out different variations of a component to see what works best. It also offers the ability to generate documentation for a design system.
Application: Storybook helps designers and developers collaborate more cohesively. It’s used to locate inconsistencies through connecting common tools that designers use with the different tools that developers use. For example, Storybook connects components of JavaScript with (e.g., React) with prototyping tools like UXPin. Even more, the platform allows for UI review and feedback to be in one centralized location.
Definition: Also known as a design system maturity model, this refers to the way to measure the progress of a design system. It can be used to track the development of a system and to identify areas that need improvement.
There are four stages of design system maturity: initial, foundational, comprehensive, and integrated. Each stage has its own challenges and characteristics. These include;
Stage one – Style guides.
Stage two – HTML & CSS.
Stage three – Design & code components.
Stage four – Fully integrated.
Application: Design system maturity models are commonly used by companies to help them follow a more cohesive, consistent system. Their effectiveness vastly outweighs traditional models; therefore, they reap more promising results. The models help teams handoff a design with ease knowing everyone is on the same page, and, for this reason, it is especially useful for designers and engineers alike.
Definition: Atomic Design is a design system methodology, which is based on the idea of modularity and reuse. Atomic Design is made up of five stages – atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages.
Application: One of the best uses for atomic design is gaining the ability to seamlessly switch between abstract to concrete. It allows users to switch and see their interfaces broken down to their atomic elements. Furthermore, atomic design breaks down the process of combining those elements to reach a final experience.
Definition: An atom is a design model that refers to the smallest unit of a system. In other words, it is the most basic building block. All atoms have the same structure and cannot be divided into smaller parts. Design-wise, this could refer to a simple component like a button or a form field.
Application: Atoms help designers and developers break down components into their smallest form (e.g., button). They can be matched with other components to form things like molecules or organisms (see below). They’re ideal for combining into molecules to make web pages.
Examples: buttons, inputs, labels
Molecule
Definition: A molecule is a design model that refers to a group of atoms that are bonded together. Molecules are slightly more complex than atoms but still considered basic building blocks. A step up from atoms, a molecule could be a button with an icon or a group of form fields.
Application: Molecules help teams build more complex structures out of existing atoms. For example, a profile molecule would be comprised of an avatar element and name label elements. Overall, molecules are great for bringing different elements together to form unique groupings.
Definition: An organism is a design model that refers to a group of molecules that are bonded together. Organisms are more complex than molecules but are still considered to be basic building blocks. An organism could consist of an element like a header, footer, or search form.
Application: The organism stage of atomic design helps take the process one step further from molecular level. It allows designers and developers to utilize it as a component that can be reused across numerous designs (although it is not yet a completed design).
Repository
Definition: A repository is a collection of code that is used to manage a design system. This can be used to store and share components, templates, and other assets. A repository can be hosted on a server, or it can be stored locally. Respectively a Design System Repository is a collection of code that can be used to manage a design system. It contains all of the assets needed to create and maintain a system.
Application: Designers use repository hosting services, such as Github, to access and store resources. Programs like Github are helpful because they save code, store it, allow it to be shared with team members. This makes collaboration efforts simple and seamless.
Definition: A Git repository is a type of repository that is used to manage code. It is a distributed version control system that allows for collaboration on code. Git repositories can be used to store and share components, templates, and other assets.
Application: Designers use GIT by identifying versions of their code, which can be accessed at any time. GIT is effective throughout every step in a project’s lifestyle because it keeps track of any changes that take place along the way. They are generally tracked via snapshots or paper trails.
Definition: Also referred to shortly as NPM, it is a collection of software tools built in the JavaScript programming language. It acts as a type of repository that is used to store and share code. NPM packages are frequently used to share components, templates, and other assets.
Application: While, as a designer, you don’t need to understand the intricacies of how NMPs are built, it’s worth knowing that you can use them in tools like UXPin to facilitate your work on user interface designs. Namely, you can use NPM packages to import UI elements from component libraries and, as a result, design interfaces with ready-to-use elements directly from the code.
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