Author: UXPin

UXPin is a web-based design collaboration tool. We’re pleased to share our knowledge here.

How to Prototype a Dashboard?

How to prototype dashboard 1

We often associate dashboard design with enterprise products. But dashboards are everywhere, including social media applications, games, and even our mobile devices. These dashboards show users critical information in a succinct visualization that’s easy to digest.

Let’s explore dashboard UI design and prototyping plus some best practices to ensure you create amazing dashboard user experiences for your customers.

UXPin is an advanced code-based design tool allowing you to create accurate dashboard prototypes for meaningful, actionable feedback from usability participants and stakeholders. UXPin’s Merge technology helps bring teams together by allowing them use a single source of truth in the product development process. Learn more about UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

What is a Dashboard?

A dashboard is a user interface element that allows users to visualize important information (like analytics, status, statistics, reports, etc.), complete administrative tasks, and tweak settings. 

The user interfaces for your mobile phone or desktop settings are dashboards. If you’ve ever used WordPress, Shopify, or another CMS (content management system), the admin UI is a dashboard. Your online banking user interface is a dashboard.

Dashboard Types

Choosing a dashboard design depends on the functionality and information you want to give users. There are four types of dashboard UI designs:

  • Analytical: Displays data visualizations
  • Operational: Shows real-time or short-term data
  • Strategic: Visualizes long-term goals with KPIs and status
  • Tactical: Displays high-level performance monitoring 

Type 1. Analytical Dashboard UI Design

Product designers use analytical dashboards to simplify and display vast amounts of data. These dashboards show a high-level overview of data in single numbers or graphical representations.

Analytical dashboards generally look at historical data so users can identify trends to make predictions or decisions. For example, a marketer will use an analytical dashboard to analyze key demographics, user locations, and traffic sources to create a marketing strategy.

Type 2. Operational Dashboard UI Design

Operational dashboards show real-time or short timeframe data so users can monitor a system or operations. The data on operational dashboards changes regularly, often in real-time, relating to data-source changes.

Operational dashboards usually display operation-critical information near the top–where most users’ eyes focus on first. For example, a logistics manager will use an operational dashboard to monitor real-time warehouse activities and respond to potential issues.

Type 3. Strategic Dashboard UI Design

A strategic dashboard allows users to track performance against KPIs towards long-term goals. These dashboards summarize complex data so users can identify strengths and weaknesses.

Strategic dashboards usually display a goal, current status, and the projections required to meet the target. Strategic data might also include previous periods or years. For example, a sales manager will use a strategic dashboard to view performance on sales targets and compare the previous year, quarter, month, week, and day to track progress.

Type 4. Tactical Dashboard UI Design

A tactical dashboard is a strategic/operational hybrid, allowing users to monitor performance towards an objective–like completing a project.

Tactical dashboards allow users to visualize overall and segmented performance to guide strategies and decision-making. For example, a project dashboard shows overall progress and which tasks the team must still complete. The tactical dashboard will also flag potential issues, like missed or upcoming deadlines, for a project manager to follow up.

Check out this article from Datapine for more information and examples on dashboard UI types.

Dashboard UI Design Elements

UI Designers use several key elements to display different types of data. These graphical representations make it easy for users to visualize and compare information.

Data Tables

Data tables (similar to an Excel sheet) are important in dashboard design because we can use them to create other UI elements like charts, gauges, pies, and graphs. Tables usually take up a lot of space, so designers place these on secondary pages where users can analyze the data behind a visualization.

Bar Charts

Bar charts are fantastic for comparing data on a timeline–like monthly revenue. The visualization of varying heights means users can instantly compare different data points.

Pie Charts

Pie charts visualize data distribution across multiple points that make up a whole. We often see pie charts in Expense Management Software and expense tracking applications because they allow users to visualize their expenses and see where they spend the most.

Graphs

Graphs are most helpful in tracking performance or trends over a specific period. The lines make it easy to see which way a trend is moving and changes at various key intervals (like months of a year).

Gauges

Designers can use gauges to display progress or status. A progress gauge can include a numerical value/s, giving the user two visualizations for better clarity.

Designers can also use gauges to indicate status when monitoring a specific system. For example, a warehouse management system might use a gauge to display the packer’s current performance towards meeting a daily target with poor, below average, acceptable, and optimal. If the indicator drops below acceptable, the manager can investigate and attend to any performance issues.

Metrics or Numbers

Designers can use metrics to show a key value or support a visualization–for example, a number representing the current revenue.

Metrics are most effective when they stand alone, making it easy for users to digest the information and reducing cognitive load.

Dashboard UI Design Process

The Data School’s eBook, Dashboard Prototyping and Feedback, outlines a four-step dashboard design and prototyping strategy. We’ve modified this slightly to include a comprehensive six-step end-to-end dashboard design process:

  1. Review
  2. Sketch
  3. Feedback
  4. Prototype
  5. Test
  6. Design Handoff

Step 1. Review

designops picking tools care

The first step is to review the research to define your dashboard’s goals and requirements. Designers must align the user’s needs with the available data to determine how to structure and prioritize the design.

Make a list of the UIs and elements you’ll need to start sketching. Arranging these elements by importance will help prioritize your dashboard UI.

Step 2. Sketch

lo fi pencil

Designing dashboards is complex and time-consuming. It’s crucial that designers sketch and refine ideas before committing to high-fidelity mockups and prototyping.

Designers use sketches to determine how best to represent the data. If you have multiple graphics on a single UI, sketch them in isolation before combining them on a single paper screen.

 The Data School’s eBook recommends asking two questions as you sketch:

  • What decisions does the user need to make?
  • What does the user need to know to make those decisions?

Dashboards are busier than most other UI layouts, so keep data to a minimum. If you have lots of critical data, consider categorizing the information and splitting them over two or more pages.

Step 3. Collect Feedback

team collaboration talk communication ideas messsages

Feedback from team members and stakeholders is essential before designers commit to digital mockups and prototypes. This input can help improve designs and iron out issues before the time-consuming digital process. 

Keep in mind that there might be a few rounds of iteration before proceeding to the next step.

Step 4. Prototype

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Use paper prototypes and notes, create your wireframes, digital mockups, and prototypes. We recommend using a component library or UI kit, so you don’t have to start from scratch.

UXPin features built-in design libraries, including Material Design UI, Bootstrap, and Foundation–excellent libraries for dashboard prototypes.

You can also sync your design system or a component library to UXPin using Merge. UXPin powered by its Merge technology is an excellent choice for prototyping dashboards because it allows designers to build fully functioning graphs and charts–an impossible task with image-based design tools.

Step 5. Test the prototype

testing user behavior

Prototyping and testing is an iterative process. UX designers must test prototypes comprehensively to ensure usability issues don’t affect the final product.

It’s important to get feedback from end-users and key stakeholders to ensure designs meet users’ needs while maximizing business value.

Step 6. Handoff the design

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Dashboard design handoffs are complex and tricky. We recommend following this design handoff checklist to streamline the process and improve collaboration between designers and engineers.

Dashboard UI Design Best Practices

Here are some user interface tips for good dashboard design.

Prioritize Content

It’s important to ask users what data matters most during the research phase to guide the design process. Try to separate data between “mission-critical” and secondary, so you know how to prioritize and arrange content. Read about UX Content Strategy.

Less is More

Always look to reduce your dashboard layout as much as possible. Dashboards UIs are busy, which can severely impact cognitive load and usability.

Mobile-First UI Design

It’s easy to make a dashboard look great on a desktop. The real challenge is creating a mobile-friendly dashboard. Adopting a mobile-first dashboard design strategy can help solve two problems:

  • Making your dashboard accessible for mobile users
  • Reducing UI elements

Be Consistent

Consistency is essential for any UI, but for complex dashboard designs, it’s vital! A design system can help keep typography, colors, spacing, layouts, and other UI elements consistent throughout your design.

Double Margins

In 10 Rules for Better Dashboard Design, designer Taras Bakusevych recommends using double margins and white space to separate content. It’s difficult to read when content touches the margins or is too close together.

Don’t Scroll!

Taras also says one of the biggest design mistakes is making dashboards scrollable. Summarize as much as possible, move it to a new screen or create tabs so users can switch between content.

Be Flexible

It’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all dashboard layout. Users will have different needs and priorities even within an organization or individual project.

Providing the functionality for users to arrange their dashboards to meet their needs creates a positive user experience while solving the one-size-fits-all challenge.

Design Dashboards Using UXPin Merge

UXPin Merge will allow you to design dashboard UI accurately. Instead of prototyping static designs, designers can assemble dashboard UI using pre-made functional components that will behave like a real dashboard that was built by a developer.

Build your first dashboard UI using true components that come from your dev’s library. Simply drag and drop ready-made elements to build fully functioning dashboards and other user interface elements. 

Discover Merge

Web Design Tools for Fast and Efficient Design

web design tools

Building a website is more accessible than ever. There are tons of web design tools catering to everyone, from newbies to professional designers and developers.

We’ve put together a list of the best website design tools and we organized it into three categories (feel free to jump to the section that best describes your web design tool needs):

  • Beginners: No experience with design or web development. You rely on templates and drag-and-drop tools to build and host your website without coding or design.
  • Intermediate: You have some design or development experience, but you’re looking for the best content management system, tools, plugins, and integrations to complement your skills.
  • Expert: You have a product team, UX/UI designers, and engineers, but you’re looking for tools to optimize collaboration and streamline workflows.

UXPin is an end-to-end code-based design tool for wireframes, mockups, prototypes, testing, design systems, documentation, and more. Sign up for a free trial and discover how code-based design can enhance your UX workflows to deliver superior user experiences for your customers.

Build advanced prototypes

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

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Web Design Software for Beginners

user choose statistics group

These beginner web design tools will allow you to build a professional website or minimum viable product without any design or coding experience.

1. Squarespace for Websites

Cybernews recently named Squarespace one of the best website builders for small business, and it’s easy to see why. Squarespace is a popular no-code website builder and content management system for people with little or no web design experience. Many freelancers, including professional designers, also use Squarespace because the platform is so user-friendly.

Squarespace is a better option than popular no-code web builders like Wix or Weebly because it offers more functionality and the ability to scale.

You can choose from a wide range of professionally designed templates to customize to meet your needs, like changing colors, fonts, layouts, and assets. Squarespace features one-click hosting, so your website is live as soon as you’re ready. You can also purchase a custom domain or use an existing one from another platform, like GoDaddy or Google Domains.

2. GetResponse

GetResponse is an all-in-one business solution with a website builder, landing pages, email marketing, conversion funnels and automation, signup forms, webinars, and much more! If you’re looking for an affordable, comprehensive web design tool, it doesn’t get better than GetResponse.

GetResponse also has a Free-Forever Plan, including one website, one landing page, forms, and email marketing for fewer than 500 subscribers. The platform features a drag-and-drop editor for websites, email template builder, and forms, so people with no design or coding experience can manage the technical aspects of their business.

3. Bubble for Web Apps

Bubble is a fantastic no-code platform for building web applications. You can’t deploy Bubble apps to mobile app stores like Apple App Store or Google Play, but users can access them through desktop and mobile browsers.

You can build a Bubble app from scratch or choose from hundreds of templates for apps, including chat/forums, social media, project management, accounting, property listings, holiday listings, and more.

Bubble also has many plugins and integrations to extend your app’s functionality or integrate with other digital products. 

4. Glide for Web Apps

Glide is similar to Bubble but uses Google Sheets or Glide’s Data Editor for content management and database hosting. Like Bubble, Glide apps are only accessible through the browser, but users can download the application directly to their device, bypassing device app stores.

Intermediate Web Design Software

design prototyping collaboration interaction

Here are four tools for designers, product managers, or developers to enhance their web design projects. 

1. Strapi for Content Management

Strapi is an open-source headless Node.js content management system you can use with almost any tech stack, website, web, or mobile application. This versatile CMS integrates with many programming languages and front-end technologies, including, React, Vue, Gatsby, Next.js, Flutter, and others.

Strapi is an excellent alternative to popular content management systems like WordPress, Drupel, and others because you’re not confined to a specific programming language, like PHP or Javascript. You can use any tech stack with Strapi for eCommerce sites, static web pages, blogs, and applications.

Contentful offers similar features to Strapi, but it’s not open-source with high monthly subs.

2. Ghost for Publishing

Ghost is an open-source content management system that also offers hosting plans. Ghost is designed specifically for publishers–like bloggers, magazines, subscription sites, etc.

With a focus on publishing, Ghost doesn’t have the same complex dashboard layout as WordPress and other content management systems. The headless CMS is far more lightweight, with a beautiful user interface that’s easy to navigate. Ghost comes with SEO features built-in, so you don’t need extra plugins or integrations.

Some major tech companies use Ghost, including Unsplash, DuckDuckGo, Airtable, freeCodeCamp, CloudFlare, and many others.

3. UXPin for UX Design

UXPin is a code-based end-to-end UX design and prototyping tool with advanced features allowing you to create UI mockups and prototypes with higher fidelity and functionality.

You can work with UXPin in the cloud or download the software to your Windows or Apple desktop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgkz9CQV_PY

Some of UXPin’s advanced features include:

  • Auto Layout: Allows designers to distribute, size, and align elements fast. UXPin’s Auto Layout works on Flexbox principles, making it easy for engineers to understand at design handoff.
  • Components: Reusable UI elements designers can use to build consistent digital products. You can also share Components through UXPin’s design system feature.
  • Design Systems: UXPin’s Design System feature lets you build, manage, share, and scale a custom design system with a style guide and documentation. Several built-in design libraries, including Material Design UI, iOS, and Bootstrap, allow you to start prototyping immediately.
  • States: Create multiple States for a single component with different properties to replicate CSS and Javascript interactions like hover, tap, active, disabled, etc.
  • Variables: Capture data from user inputs to take actions or use the information in other parts of your prototype–like a personalized welcome message or populating a user’s profile page.
  • Expressions: Take Interactions to the next level with Javascript-like functions that allow you to create code-like dynamic prototypes. With UXPin’s Expressions, you can update a shopping cart, validate forms, or check passwords meet specific criteria–functionality that’s impossible to achieve with traditional image-based prototypes.

Check out how UXPin stacks up to traditional image-based tools like Adobe XD, Figma, InVision Studio, Framer, and Sketch. 

Sign up for a free trial to explore all of UXPin’s advanced design, prototyping, and testing features.

4. Google Web Designer

Google Web Designer (GWD) is a free graphic design tool for creating HMTL5-based videos, animations, and motion graphics. Designers can use GWD to create engaging HTML5 content and assets for their website projects.

GWD is a fantastic tool for creating custom ad banners or eye-catching CTAs with motion or video. You can even set an exit URL if someone clicks the content, taking them to a product or promotion.

If you’re using a code-based tool like UXPin, these HTML videos will have full functionality for prototyping and testing.

Web Design Software for Teams & Experts

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These advanced web design tools are perfect for cross-functional product development teams to optimize processes and workflows. 

1. UXPin Merge for Design & Web Development Collaboration

Merge is a powerful UXPin add-on that allows you to sync a component library hosted in a repository to UXPin’s design editor for designers to build fully functioning high-fidelity prototypes.

These code components have the same fidelity and functionality as those hosted in the repository, so your prototypes look and work exactly like the final product or website.

Design handoffs are much smoother because engineers already have copies of the components in the repository. UXPin renders any component changes in JSX, so engineers simply copy/paste to start the development process. 

uxpin merge component responsive 1

If developers update components in the repository, the changes automatically sync to UXPin, notifying design teams of the new release. This single source of truth enables you to ship consistently with a quicker time-to-market, even for enterprise products–discover how PayPal scaled its design process with Merge.

2. Storybook for UI Components

Storybook is an open-source tool for front-end developers to host, review, edit, and share individual UI components. Storybook also works with Merge, allowing you to sync React, Vue, Angular, Ember, and other front-end components to UXPin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXgUfZLCPfE

Engineers can share Storybook components with leads and stakeholders for review and feedback before publishing. You can also embed Storybook components in your design system documentation to provide context and examples for team members.

3. GitLab for DevOps

GitLab is a DevOps platform encompassing multiple tools for an end-to-end development process. With GitLab, your team has a simplified development workflow to ship products faster with enhanced consistency and cohesion.

GitLab allows leads and stakeholders to visualize and monitor the development process to track projects and identify bottlenecks. Whether you’re a startup looking to scale or build enterprise products, GitLab has a solution to meet your development workflow.

4. LambdaTest for Product Testing

One of the challenges with building websites, web, and mobile applications is testing across multiple browsers and devices. LambdaTest is a cloud-based tool that automates your product testing across 3000+ browsers and operating systems.

You also get geolocation testing to ensure your customers enjoy a consistent user experience, no matter where they are in the world.

LambdaTest’s integrated debugging tool flags issues for developers to fix. You can integrate LambdaTest with many tools and platforms to optimize workflows and collaboration, including GitLab, Asana, GitHub, Bitbucket, and others.

Design for the Web with UXPin

Web design can become much faster if you use the right tools. One of the best tools is UXPin. It’s great for high-fidelity prototyping with advanced interactions at scale. Try it for free for 14 days.

Try UXPin for free

How to Create an Effective App Design Process

How to create an effective app design process

Without the right app design steps in place, it’s like rolling a dice and wishing for a six. Sure, the app you unleash into the marketplace may be a hit. More likely, it risks sinking without a trace because it didn’t appeal to the target audience and didn’t work the way it should. 

Effective mobile app design processes are laser-focused on testing, from that exciting initial concept, and continuously post- launch. Testing functionality and usability. Testing user demands. Testing the boundaries of what your design and dev team can achieve.

Design your first app with UXPin. An end-to-end design tool for building interactive prototypes that behave like a fully developed app. Sign up for a free trial and see how fast you can design your app and share it with your stakeholders.

3 Major Benefits of Creating an Effective App Design Process

If you’re creating a new mobile application, an effective app design process brings three major benefits. You’ll get your product to market faster. You’ll build a successful app that really hits your users’ spot. And you’ll stop wasting unnecessary time and money on an app that doesn’t work (or, at least, doesn’t work for your users). 

The app design steps aren’t set in stone – every business is different, after all – but we’ve mapped out the general process every successful design and development team follows to reach a successful launch, and well beyond. Along the way, you’ll learn more about your users, your market, and your business.

Explore how to get from that first spark of inspiration to a fully-fledged and fleshed-out app. 

3 Steps that You Should Follow in the Mobile App Design Process

To build a successful product, your process needs three core app design steps:

  • Plan & research
  • Design & app development
  • Launch & continuous testing

Let’s look at what you’ll need to apply at each stage of the mobile app design process. 

1. Plan & Research

What are your business goals?

Your app design process starts with a solid foundation: what do you (and your end-users) want? 

Start broad. Write down every goal. Every problem and every solution. Then step back and assess. Now you’ll be able to see a path towards your true goal – tangled and overgrown and only just visible, but it’s there. 

lo fi pencil

It’s really important, here, to have a single vision. One that can be easily communicated to all stakeholders including the C-suite. 

‘Create a mobile app’ doesn’t tell anyone anything. 

‘Create a mobile app for stockbrokers’ offers the team direction. 

‘Create a mobile app that lets stockbrokers share professional advice’ gives everyone a clear objective, and how their work will make that vision a digitally tangible product. 

With your business goals and specification in place, you can then work up a design team’s to-do list and define the delivery time frame.

Who will the user be?

Next, it’s time to dig deeper into who your user is and the broader market. That “sharing app for stockbrokers” only tells half the story. It doesn’t contain any detail about the target audience, demographics or how their use computers or mobile devices. These are the sort of factors that now need to be built up.

Don’t let assumptions run the mobile app design process. Run user research. Assess your initial ideas through:

  • Focus groups
  • Surveys
  • Phone and face-to-face interviews

This feedback will tell you what your users really want, what are their pain points, and what they like. So, you don’t spend months building an app that doesn’t meet their expectations.

When you run the user research, turn it into personas that will guide you throughout the full application design process and refine your app idea.

Who are your competitors?

You know the user and their needs. But how much does the team know about the market you want to operate in? The most successful app design processes include a heavy dose of competitor analysis. It’s like a CEO of a retail company ordering products from a competing store online or browsing around their brick-and-mortar store, aiming to understand the way they operate (and, ultimately, defeat them). What’s working, what isn’t? What do they do well, what don’t they do at all? What makes top competitors popular, what misses the mark completely?  

Ideally, you should analyze only a few companies – especially when developing an MVP. It will keep your research hyper-focused (and won’t overwhelm you as you refine your vision). 

Try out existing android, iOs, and web apps on the market. You might spot an opportunity straight away by reviewing the existing use cases and checking what the real users think about one app or the other.

To see what users make of the same product, head to review sites like G2Crowd, Capterra, and Serchen. The findings can be revealing. Don’t neglect social media, either. Undertake a deep dive of competitor profiles using social listening tools to make the research phase more efficient. 

2. Come up With a Design & App Development Process

mobile screens

Engage in wireframing

Wireframing is a 2D mock-up of a product. It’s typically simple, lacking color and styling, and it won’t feature any functionality. Wireframes help visualize your app information architecture without wasting tons of precious resources on a product that isn’t viable, doesn’t meet business goals, or just doesn’t work at all. During the wireframing stage, remember to make sure that your app design layout is in line with the Apple and Google app store guidelines. Otherwise, your app could be rejected. 

Hopefully your wireframes are bang-on target. All that user and competitor research has paid off. Which means you can begin scraping feedback from real users, or even colleagues, and key stakeholders across different departments. By implementing the best scraper API, you can centralize feedback, identify trends, and refine your designs based on real-world data.

It’s really easy to collect and collate this feedback using UXPin for wireframing. Just to make it easier, those serving up their views don’t even need a UXPin account to leave feedback. They can just add comments in the Editor and on Preview screens. The tool lets you add two kinds of comments in UXPin: 

  • Team comments.Team comments are internal – only those added as team members via Team Management can leave and see them. 
  • Public comments. Public comments are visible to everyone – even if they don’t have a UXPin account. You can explore more about how to ask the right questions in our guide Tips on Asking for Feedback. Use that feedback to refine the vision, direction, and scope of your app design layout.
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Start thinking about the design system

After you’ve started working on your wireframes and collected feedback, it’s a good time to also start considering your design system. It entails a style guide with visual elements such as:

  • Color & typography
  • Sizing and spacing
  • Imagery and animations
  • UI components

Having a design system in place will help you speed up your work as you engage in the next steps and ensure that your design is consistent as you bring your app to the market. A step-by-step guide on design systems is here: Creating a Design System: The 100-Point Process Checklist.

In UXPin, you can create and maintain your own Design System or use one of the available design system library that are already in the app. Sign up for UXPin’s trial and see how easy prototyping is when you have a design system in place.

Proceed with high-fidelity prototypes

Low-fidelity prototypes like wireframes give you a good idea of how the app will look. But it doesn’t tell you how it works. For that, you’ll need to work up a high-fidelity prototype. 

There’s more to this than just an app design layout. Hi-fi prototyping blends user interface (UI) considerations like how the app looks with user experience (UX) factors like how the app behaves and how users interact with it. 

screens process lo fi to hi fi mobile 1

UXPin is tailor-made for this prototyping phase of the app design process. Your team can build clickable prototypes that are fully interactive. That’s because UXPin’s powerful advanced features, such as variables, expressions, and states. Elevate your prototyping to be more life-like than vector-based prototypes. Sign up for a trial.

The aim is to create a functional product fit for usability testing. It’s a way to let potential users (and your testers) try out the app to see how well it meets their needs – and pick up on any possible problems to be addressed before you start product development. 

Develop the app

It’s time to see how well the groundwork was laid. Or, to put it in Star Wars terms, ‘this is where the fun begins…’ by handing off the app UI design to front-end and backend developers who will code it into reality. There’s that flurry of emotions welling inside. Excitement. Tension. Joy. Frustration as designs go back and forth between the teams until they finally do what you need them to do. 

Efficiency is critical. It’s not an effective app design process without it, and the endless back and forths can really put the brakes on your momentum, or worse, stall a project seemingly indefinitely. To harmonize the workflow, UXPin lets designers build clickable prototypes with the same code used by front-end developers. So, design team knows what’s possible and devs know precisely how to recreate the UI design in fully functional code. 

3. Launch & Continuous Testing

Test the app with real users (and launch a beta version)

You now have an app. Or something that looks and works a lot like the finished product should. So, it’s time to test it among your target market to see what they make of it. Just as you did when you were determining the end-user all that time ago, organize focus groups to assess the product. Throw in remote usability tests, as you did during the prototyping stage, to assess navigation and interactions. 

Don’t just seek praise. Seek feedback to make your app even better (and iron out any annoying bugs).

Here’s the step way too many mobile app developers miss: the beta phase. 

A beta version of your app is a great way to observe user behavior. It opens up your user base. More users means more feedback that can translate into meaningful design tips – and who doesn’t love exclusive access to an app, anyway?

Then there’s the financial factor. If you jump straight to launch, and find you need to make changes, it costs a lot more to make those tweaks to the ‘finished’ product. UXPin simplifies testing, since you can observe the user truly interacting with the app and design elements, such as signup forms, data tables, etc.

Test your app with a robust prototype before you expend time, money, and all those other far-too-precious resources on developing the final iteration of your mobile app.

Launch the app

Of all the app design steps, this is arguably the most thrilling. The launch. The moment when the hard work of your whole team is delivered into the world for all to see (and download and love and use on a daily basis). 

Ok, let’s not get carried away. Before you launch, give your app one final check: does your app still meet the Google and Apple app store guidelines? A lot may have changed from the last time you checked. You’ve come too far to have your app rejected at the final hurdle. You need to make sure your product is 100% ready. 

All right, after that check, it’s time to launch. 

Collect user feedback & refine the mobile app experience

But the launch doesn’t mean the story’s over. In user experience and visual design as well as app development, the product launch is really the beginning of the journey. Everything that came before was just a prologue. UI/UX design is all about refining and reiterating on the initial idea. It’s the reason why Facebook initiated so many UI and UX changes, particularly in the years when usage exploded. The core idea remained – how users accessed the platform’s options evolved. 

user bad good review satisfaction opinion

Your users know what they want. 

Their feedback tells you how you can give it to them. 

You should still continue running focus groups and usability tests. Alongside these, monitor social media platforms, app store reviews, and customer satisfaction and UX design surveys. Make use of all the feedback collection methods you can. Just like during the app testing stage, the more data you can collect, the more on-point your innovations will be.

If you have access to a tool that helps you filter feedback by user sentiment, then that’s going to be invaluable. Congratulations – someone left a positive review. That’s ripe for the marketing team to help build social proof. Oh no – several users said they found menu navigation slow and clunky. Now, you’ve identified an area where you can make your app even better. 

Continuous product refinement ensures you’re always meeting market and user needs. 

Build High-Fidelity Prototypes in UXPin

App design process is pretty easy to follow once you understand its distinctive phases. Yet, you can be almost certain that you will hit a lot of bumps, especially when doing the testing part.

Spending a lot of time on testing with real users, letting them interact with a prototype and experience it can help you save loads of money and ensure your success. Use the prototyping tool that helps you design real interactions, not simulate them. Try UXPin and check how much you can gain.

New Ways of Revolutionizing Design Process – Insights from Design Value Conference 2022

New Ways of Revolutionizing Design Process DVC 2022

During the Design Value Conference, our CEO, Yuga Koda, spoke on UXPin’s latest way of improving the design process for teams that would like to bring the single source of truth to design workflow, without developers’ help – Merge Component Manager with NPM integration.

Yuga explained the “why” behind Component Manager and showcased how it works.

Design Value Springs From Solid Foundations

“Empowering designers, developers, product managers, and really anyone and everyone involved in the product development cycle,” said Yuga “is key to any team or organization because people are the secret sauce.” 

People, “the secret sauce”, need strong foundations to produce great work. As Yuga says, “over the years, we’ve seen many improvements in the design process. These improvements (…) now have built on top of each other to form the foundations of design best practices.”

Build a Pyramid, not a Jenga Tower

When you ignore building the strong base of the foundations, “the more you try to build on top of it, the shakier the structure gets” which may “lead to inconsistencies in the UI that would bleed into the hand off process, and ultimately to the end users’ experience.” Yuga made an analogy that “it becomes a little like playing Jenga.” It will fall apart sooner or later.

“The benefits of having the solid foundations in place are twofold – first, you are able to immediately impact the inefficiencies with structure and standardization. Second, with less firefighting, you’re enabling teammates to focus on more value-add work, which will make a significant impact in the future.”

DesignOps is Key

DesignOps forms such foundations. It takes care of every piece of the puzzle, from creating a consistent design process to smoothing handoffs and eliminating the so-called tribal knowledge.

UXPin aims to support building foundations for a great design culture, which is clear when you look at the product roadmap, starting with UXPin Merge, a tool for smoother handoffs and better design-developer collaboration.

UXPin Merge Contributes to Creating Strong Foundations

We released UXPin Merge technology that helps designers and developers build products together and finally reach an understanding between what gets designed and what gets coded.

“The drift between what’s being designed and what gets coded remains to be an issue that is still being addressed today. Some aim to solve it by trying to translate the design into code. Our approach is to have code and the coded components be the single source of truth.”

logo uxpin merge

With UXPin Merge, product teams can bring their coded components into the UXPin editor. The component libraries serve as a single source of truth that the whole team can understand and use to create their chunk of work. As Yuga said, designers and developers have a “common language of interactive coded components for building the product together.”

It means that organizational silos can finally be broken down and designers can finally scale their work without sacrificing design and product quality.

“With this approach everyone, even non-designers, are able to build advanced prototypes without the need of understanding how to add intricate interactions in the design tool. Since they are all baked into the component anyone can build high fidelity prototypes.”

UXPin Merge contributes greatly to building strong design foundations. It helps DesignOps teams create efficiencies, strengthen design culture, and bring the team closer together.

Introducing Merge Component Manager & NPM integration

UXPin Merge integrates with Git repo and Storybook – you can bring coded components to the design editor to maintain the component consistency in both design and development. With both of those solutions, you may want to include your developers in the integration process.

We are introducing the third way of importing UI components to UXPin, an npm integration. It’s an easy, code-free way of bringing components from a design library to the UXPin editor. Check it out: Merge NPM integration.

Increase the Value of Design with Component Manager

With the upcoming release of Merge Component Manager, we aim to make the code-base design paradigm more accessible by making it as code-free as possible.

  • Create fully-interactive prototypes fast –  import UI components and see how designing with them simplifies interactivity and increases design velocity.
  • Simplify handoff with functional prototypes –  since you have a quick and easy way of designing with UI components, you can be sure that your product gets developed the way you designed it.
  • Test UI components before bringing them to your component library – import components to UXPin and test them before committing to using them. It’s a great way to find out whether you should expand the UI component library or not.

During the Design Value Conference, we presented how Component Manager works. It’s very easy. You just need to follow a few steps until you can use code components in UXPin. 

How Does It Work?

Component Manager allows you to bring components via NPM package (Yuga demoed bringing Ant Design library), configure its properties, and build prototypes with the code-based UI elements you’ve just set up.

Bring Components via NPM integration

Merge Component Manager enables you to manage coded UI components in your design process and obtain a single source of truth, but before you can use it you need to import the said components. You can use our newest NPM integration for that.

Discover Merge

A Guide to Responsive Design – 8 Easy Steps

responsive design

In a world filled with an extensive range of devices and different screen sizes, it’s safe to say that responsive design is design. Organizations cannot afford to build any website or application for a single device or screen size because they’ll lose out to a competing product that’s more accommodating to more users.

This step-by-step responsive website design guide walks designers through the process of designing for multiple viewport widths. Incorporating these processes into your UX workflow will ensure that design teams consider various screen widths when designing user interfaces.

Design responsive prototypes without adjusting multiple layouts for different screen sizes Try the power of UXPin’s Merge technology and bring React components to a design tool. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

What is Responsive Design?

Responsive design is the process of designing user interfaces to accommodate multiple viewports. The aim is to provide a consistent user experience no matter what device someone uses.

Traditionally, responsive web design considered three primary screens, mobile phones, tablets, and desktops. Nowadays, designers have more screens and devices, including smartwatches, TVs, vehicle dashboards, and fridges, to name a few. Some products also include voice, meaning design teams must also incorporate VUI (voice user interface).

Understand Responsive Design

Before designers start designing responsive UIs, they must understand responsive design and the techniques developers use for their products. 

For example, engineers can use CSS to serve users different-sized images based on their screen size or use an optimization tool that does this automatically. If engineers use the former, designers must supply assets for multiple screen sizes, whereas the latter only requires one.

responsive screens

So, before designers start a project, they must consult with engineers to understand the technical requirements and constraints. Some questions designers need to ask include:

  • Does the product use a responsive grid or a fluid grid?
  • What are the product’s breakpoints?
  • Does the operating system (Apple iOS, Android, Windows) impact the product’s layout?
  • How do engineers scale and serve images?
  • What formats do engineers use for videos, images, icons, and other media?
  • What grid system does the product use?
  • Does the product use Flexbox or regular CSS?

Responsive Grid vs. Fluid Grid

A responsive grid uses a standard 12-column grid system with pixels for sizing. Using pixels means engineers set the size of a component or container that only changes with CSS media queries. A fluid grid uses percentages, allowing UI elements to resize according to the available space.

Define Your Breakpoints

Listing the breakpoints allows designers to plan information architecture, layouts, and features for each device. For example, some complex features limit what you can do on mobile vs. desktop application versions.

The most common breakpoints include:

  • Desktops – max-width: 1200px
  • Laptops – max-width: 991px
  • Tablets – min-width: 768px and max-width: 990px
  • Smartphones – max-width: 500px

Designers must also consider screen orientation and how designs adjust to a landscape layout. For example, the iPhone 13 is 390 pixels × 844 pixels, more than double the width in landscape vs. portrait. 

Content Strategy Approach

Designing layouts around content enables designers to build intuitive, easy-to-navigate UIs. Defining your content hierarchy allows designers to organize layouts according to breakpoints.

Designers must consider hierarchy relating to the action they want users to take. For example, a blog feed’s purpose is to show users a list of articles and get them to click on something of interest. The blog feed’s most essential elements are the featured image and headline that entice users to click on an article.

On a desktop feed, designers have space to include more information, like the article’s excerpt, published date, author, and category tags. User research and interviews can guide responsive design according to what matters most to users. 

Mobile-First Design

Mobile-first design is a process of starting with the smallest screen size and scaling up. This design strategy offers two primary benefits:

mobile screens pencils prototyping
  1. The constraints of small screens force designers to include only the most critical features and UI components. Reducing unnecessary features reduces costs and time to market.
  2. It’s easier and faster to convert a mobile layout to larger screens than the other way around. Designing desktop-first often leads to compromises and redesigns to scale down to a mobile version.

A mobile-first approach also makes business sense for web design. Google prioritizes mobile-friendly content, which means a responsive design could benefit SEO to rank higher and generate more clicks.

Prioritize Content

Part of a mobile-first and content-first approach is prioritizing content that is always visible on smaller devices and what to hide behind navigational drawers, dropdown menus, or accordions.

For example, on a desktop layout, designers often show the questions and answers to users for an FAQ section. This layout would mean users would have to scroll over every Q&A to find what they want on mobile devices. Instead, designers can show users the question on smaller screens with the answer hidden behind an accordion, reducing scrolling for mobile users.

Responsive Images & Videos

Deciding on media formats at the start of the project could save designers rework later. For example, designers might use PNG for icons, but engineers use SVG because they adapt better to responsive layouts and deliver better performance.

Engineers might require several sizes and formats to serve different media depending on the device or viewport for complex responsive designs. Agreeing on these formats from the beginning ensures designers test prototypes correctly while preparing assets for a smoother design handoff.

Responsive Typography

Typography is a crucial design component impacting brand/identity, readability, voice, and readability. Selecting a typeface that translates across multiple devices is something designers spend hours, days, or even weeks deliberating.

text typing input 1

In A guide to responsive typography, UX designer Augustine Thomas talks about what designers must consider for responsive typography, including:

  • Choosing the right typeface
  • Selecting a typography scale
  • Alignment and spacing

Your project’s content, like images, video, graphics, etc., has a significant impact on all three of these elements. So, always test your typeface pairings with real content and avoid dummy text to get accurate results.

Responsive Design Performance Optimization

While performance is often a developer’s job, there are some things designers can do to make their job easier:

Use System Fonts

Every operating system has a font stack. iOS uses San Francisco, Android Roboto, and Windows Segoe UI, to name a few. Using these default fonts means the responsive website or application doesn’t have to make additional requests, improving performance.

If your product prioritizes performance over aesthetics, consider using system fonts instead of a custom one. Make sure you test your product with each font to get consistent results across all operating systems.

Animations

CSS and Javascript animations impact performance and could adversely affect the user experience. Conversely, designers can use animations when engineers need a few seconds to load a feature. Finding the right balance between these two takes collaboration and testing with designers and engineers.

Responsive Design with UXPin Merge

uxpin merge component responsive 1

One of the challenges with responsive design is that the static nature of image-based design tools doesn’t allow designers to test UIs and components across multiple viewports accurately. 

The only way to test a web page accurately is by using HTML, CSS, and Javascript–languages most designers don’t speak.

UXPin Merge is a code-based design tool allowing designers to prototype and test using the same components engineers use. Engineers can also program responsive properties, so UI elements function in prototypes as they do in the final product.

What is UXPin Merge?

UXPin Merge allows you to sync your product’s component library to UXPin’s design editor so designers can prototype using fully functioning code components.

You can connect a React component library direct to Merge using Git or our Storybook integration for Angular, Ember, Vue, and other front-end frameworks.

Creating Responsive Components Using Merge

Using a React component library, engineers can program an IFrame component to respond to responsive properties, media queries, and styling, providing the same responsive functionality as components in the final product.

Check out this step-by-step tutorial for building responsive components with UXPin Merge.

Enhance Testing

Instead of using multiple frames, designers can achieve the same responsive functionality as code using a single frame and component. These UI elements also have the same fidelity and functionality as the final product providing designers with meaningful feedback from usability testing and stakeholders.

With Merge, designers can prototype and test using fully functioning, responsive UI elements from a component library without writing code or relying on engineers to build it.

Streamlining the Design Handoff

These responsive Merge prototypes also streamline design handoffs, reducing time to market. Engineers no longer have to inspect multiple mockups and documentation to convert designs into responsive code; they simply copy/paste components from the repository plus any JSX changes from UXPin to start the web development process.

Top Frameworks of DesignOps – Lessons from Salome Mortazavi

At UXPin’s Design Value Conference in March 2022, we hosted five design industry leaders to understand Design and DesignOps at some of the world’s biggest organizations.

We were honored to have Salomé Mortazavi share her insights and experience from working with multiple Fortune 500 organizations helping to “break down silos to align teams around customer outcomes rather than outputs.” 

Salomé currently works as Director of DesignOps at SiriusXM. Her Design Value Conference talk covered proving DesignOps and business impact–a crucial factor for getting buy-in for maintaining and scaling design operations within an organization.

Advice for DesignOps Beginners

Salomé begins her talk with advice for DesignOps beginners–which could also apply to experienced practitioners who find themselves playing “whack-a-mole” instead of focusing on tactical and strategic initiatives.

The first piece of advice is to refrain from being a “yes person.” In their quest to make an impact, many DesignOps practitioners make the mistake of saying yes to everything early on. This approach pulls DesignOps in several directions, adversely affecting the team’s focus and value.

Finding Value

“At the core of everything we do, regardless of your background, everything comes down to being value-driven–delivering value and business impact.” Salomé Mortazavi, Director of DesignOps at SiriusXM

According to Salomé, everything in business value manifests itself in two ways:

  • Reducing costs
  • Increasing revenue

DesignOps practitioners must use the right metric to measure DesignOps’ impact. Patrizia Bertini simplifies this DesignOps framework by defining the metric in terms of efficacy vs. efficiency.

Efficiency vs. Efficacy

  • Efficacy: Qualitative metrics based on behavior and doing work the “right” way
  • Efficiency: Measurable and quantifiable using numbers, percentages, and ratios

We recommend reading ROI of DesignOps: All You Need to Know About Quantifying DesignOps’ Impact to go deeper into Patrizia Bertini’s framework.

Even with Patrizia’s simplified framework, there is much work DesignOps practitioners must do to measure efficacy and efficiency and find focus. As Salomé points out, 70% of DesignOps departments are a team of one–making it challenging to find direction and decide where to start.

Listen and Take Notes

Instead of jumping in and taking action, Salomé recommends that DesignOps practitioners take a step back and listen to design teams, including one-on-one interviews to understand the organization’s problems and identify patterns.

Take a few weeks or months to understand the bigger picture, the space, the org’s baseline practices, and people, as this will expose the company’s organizational and systemic problems.

Understanding and articulating these issues will help DesignOps practitioners build immediate trust with leaders, team members, and stakeholders–creating a positive foundation for DesignOps to grow.

Salomé says this approach works for DesignOps beginners and experts looking for a fresh start or new direction.

DesignOps Framework: Design Maturity Index

One of Salomé’s favorite DesignOps frameworks is the Design Maturity Index, specifically the New Design Frontier model, which looks at the nine dimensions of maturity:

  1. Design Team
  2. Key Partners
  3. Executives & Employees
  4. Design Operations
  5. Design Systems
  6. Design Strategy
  7. User Research
  8. Testing & Learning
  9. UI Design

The report looks at the most important impact design can have on an organization, including:

  • Product usability
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Revenue
  • Project-specific metrics
  • Cost savings
  • Time to market
  • Conversions/funnel metrics
  • Employee productivity
  • Brand equity
  • Entry into new markets
  • Design patents/IP
  • Valuation/share price

A Design Maturity Index produces a lot of themes and problems. Some of these the DesignOps must solve, while others will fall on design leadership.

Salomé says it’s crucial to assign these problems correctly into two or more buckets depending on your organization’s structure:

  1. DesignOps (Design Org Ops)
  2. Design Leadership/Design Team/Product (Design Practice Ops)

Operational Menu Tool

One way to organize your buckets is by using an operational menu tool to assign activities into several categories and subcategories. Salomé likes to create two menus:

  • Design Org Ops: DesignOps activities
  • Design Practice Ops: Design team, leadership, and product activities

We recommend watching Salome’s Design Value Conference talk around 12:48 for an explanation of this operational menu tool and a graphic with the various buckets.

Once you have filled your buckets, it’s time to find focus by planning your DesignOps roadmap.

Creating a DesignOps Roadmap

designops efficiency person

Salomé uses an outcomes-based tool to build her DesignOps roadmap into three generalized time horizons:

  • Now
  • Next
  • Later

These time horizons allow DesignOps practitioners to avoid arbitrary deadlines. This flexibility enables DesignOps to experiment with solutions you’re piloting with different teams.

The roadmap must include five categories:

  • Goals/OKRs
  • Time horizons
  • Themes/problems to solve
  • Measure of success/KRS
  • Parking lot

The parking lot is for keeping track of the tasks and activities that aren’t on your roadmap but require action at a future date.

Build, Measure, Learn

To implement her DesignOps roadmap, Salomé uses the popular Build, Measure, Learn (BML) design thinking methodology applied to operational practices.

Salomé likes to emphasize the importance of learning in BML for DesignOps practitioners to make educated decisions as they evolve a process or solution.

You can watch Salomé’s presentation at 18:00 for an example of her DesignOps framework in action.

Salomé’s DesignOps Resources

designops increasing collaboration talk

Bonus resources

DesignOps With UXPin Merge

Finding tools to streamline design processes and workflows is crucial for implementing a successful DesignOps strategy. Design drift, collaboration, consistency, and cohesion are problems practitioners often have to overcome.

uxpin merge react sync library git

UXPin Merge enables DesignOps to solve these core problems with a single code-based design solution. Merge allows you to sync a component library from a repository to UXPin’s editor so designers can build fully functioning high-fidelity prototypes using the same UI elements as engineers.

This single source of truth means every design team works with the same component library, maximizing consistency and cohesion while eliminating design drift and reducing rework.

Design handoffs run smoother with UXPin Merge because designers and engineers speak the same language, thus reducing time-to-market and creating a positive ROI for DesignOps.

Discover Merge

What is the Difference Between UX Engineer and UX Designer?

As technology and product design workflows evolve, new tech roles open. UX engineers are one of those emerging niche positions, helping to facilitate collaboration between design and development.

We’ll explore the difference between a UX designer vs. UX engineer, their responsibilities, and how these team members work together.

UXPin is a code-based design tool bridging the gap between design and development. Sign up for a free trial to discover how UXPin can enhance your product’s user experience and improve collaboration between UX designers and UX engineers.

Who is a UX Designer?

A UX designer (user experience designer) works throughout the design process to develop solutions to user problems. In startups and small businesses, a UX designer will work on every aspect of the design process. In contrast, UX experts specialize in a specific role in large organizations and big projects.

Some examples of UX expert roles include:

  • UX Researcher: Responsible for research and user testing
  • UI Designer: Designs user interfaces and components
  • Interaction Designer: Designs microinteractions for user interfaces and components
  • DesignOps Manager/Leader: Oversees an organization’s design operations

All of these people are UX designers. They just specialize in a specific UX field.

Who is a UX Engineer?

UX engineers (user experience engineers) are front-end developers who take care of feasibility of prototypes. People in the tech industry often refer to UX engineers as “unicorns” due to their skill set in both UX and engineering.

A UX engineer’s role is to bridge the gap between designers and developers by collaborating with both teams.

UX engineers work closely with UX designers throughout the design process, collaborating on solutions and providing technical guidance for design ideas.

Do UX Engineers Code?

UX engineers are front-end engineers first, so they’re highly competent in core front-end programming languages like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. 

Depending on the company or project, a UX engineer must know at least one front-end framework, like React or Angular, as they are responsible for developing layouts and UI components.

Are UX Engineers also UX designers?

In most cases, UX engineers have a software engineer or product background. They generally study computer science or human computer interaction (HCI). They’re not necessarily UX designers, but they understand the end-to-end design process and apply design thinking and UX principles to their work.

UX engineers don’t actively participate in most UX design activities. Their primary focus is to turn a designer’s prototypes into functional code.

Why are UX Engineers in Demand?

Design handoffs are notoriously challenging in many organizations. Designers and engineers speak different languages, creating a bottleneck from design to development.

Streamlining this bottleneck can reduce time to market, saving companies money while increasing their competitiveness. That’s where UX engineers come in and why they’re in demand.

UX engineers also play an essential role in managing and scaling design systems. The last decade has seen a rise in companies developing their design systems, increasing the demand for UX engineers.

Do you need a UX Engineer and a UX Designer?

Most startups and small companies don’t need a UX engineer. In these smaller teams, designers and developers work closely, reducing the need for a dedicated UX engineer.

UX engineers are most impactful in large organizations where collaboration between designers and engineers is challenging. These engineer/designer hybrids help bridge the gap by working with designers to convert designs into code and then collaborate with engineering teams to deliver the final product while maintaining the designer’s vision.

UX engineers are also an essential part of a design system team, helping designers convert static prototypes into fully functional code components.

How do UX Engineers and UX Designers Work Together?

idea collaboration design dev 1

UX Design-Intensive Tasks

UX designers are responsible for user research, design, and usability tasks. Their work primarily focuses on:

  • UX research
  • Low-fidelity prototyping and wireframing
  • Visual design and static mockups
  • Design-based prototypes
  • Designing assets
  • Usability testing
  • Accessibility

While UX engineers don’t actively participate in these tasks, they provide technical input when required.

UX Designer/Engineer Collaboration

UX engineers and designers work closest during ideation. The UX engineer’s role is to help develop ideas through a technical lens so that designers don’t go off track during wireframing and low-fidelity prototyping.

UX engineers also work with UX designers during testing. Rather than actively participating in testing, UX engineers help designers develop solutions based on the results. 

UX Engineering-Intensive Tasks

UX engineers lead the high-fidelity prototyping phase of the design process. They build prototypes using code (HTML, CSS, Javascript) or a front-end framework like React. These code-based prototypes take a lot of time to develop, so UX designers usually reserve these for testing complex problems.

UX designers use these code-based prototypes for usability testing and presenting ideas to stakeholders. The benefit of code-based prototypes is that usability participants and stakeholders can interact with them like they would the final product, giving designers meaningful, actionable feedback.

A Typical UX Designer and UX Engineer Workflow

Here is a typical UX designer and UX engineer workflow relating to the design thinking process.

  • Empathize
  • Define
  • Ideate
  • Prototype
  • Test

Empathize Phase

UX designers (or dedicated UX researchers) complete most work during the empathize phase. They are primarily responsible for gathering and analyzing UX research (user, market, competitor, etc.).

UX engineers don’t take part in this early research, but they may reference it at a later stage to understand users better.

Define Phase

The define phase is also a UX designer’s responsibility. They must use research to identify user problems the product must solve.

Ideate Phase

Ideation is the first phase of the design thinking process where UX engineers take an active role. UX engineers collaborate with UX designers to develop solutions to the problems.

UX engineers also participate in design sprints, workshops, and other ideation activities.

Prototype Phase

UX engineers and UX designers build prototypes. UX designers use design tools for prototyping while UX engineers write code.

Testing Phase

UX designers are responsible for usability testing of all prototypes. They share results with UX engineers to collaborate on redesigns and changes.

How UX Engineers & UX Designers Collaborate at Design Handoff

design and development collaboration process product communication 1

A UX engineer’s most important function is converting designs into code. Traditionally, developers would collaborate very little during the design process, only meeting at the handoff.

Designers would have to create a lot of documentation for engineers, and there would be much back and forth communication to convert designs into the final product. Engineers often misinterpret designs, leading to friction between teams.

Embedding UX engineers into the design process allows them to start development long before the handoff. They can also help designers produce documentation and instructions in a language that developers understand–essentially working as translators.

When UX engineers convert designs into code, they work closely with designers, iterating until the component or layout is right. Next, UX engineers present their code to their fellow developers for review.

With a UX engineer completing most of the front-end UI development, the development team only needs to connect everything to the backend and optimize front-end performance. The development team no longer has to interpret designs and prototypes because the UX engineer is working in the middle to translate everything.

How UX Engineers and UX Designers Collaborate using UXPin Merge

uxpin merge git react storybook library

UXPin Merge allows you to sync a component library from a Git repository or Storybook to UXPin’s design editor. Merge works with multiple front-end technologies, including React, Angular, Vue, Ember, Web Components, and more.

Designers can use these code components exactly like any other design asset (meaning they don’t have to learn to code), except they have much higher fidelity and functionality. Designers can drag and drop these components to build fully functioning prototypes–identical to those a UX engineer would develop.

UX designers no longer have to rely on UX engineers to build code-based prototypes, allowing them to test with higher fidelity and design’s functionality more often.

Merge is the perfect collaborative tool for UX designers and UX engineers because they can both build code-based prototypes using the same platform significantly faster than writing code.

When prototyping is complete, UX engineers can use components from the repository and copy changes from UXPin to start development. Because the engineering team has already approved the repository’s components, the review process is quicker, allowing products to ship much faster.

Collaborating With Engineering Teams Through Storybook

logo storybook

Storybook is a fantastic tool for UX engineers to collaborate with development teams. Storybook integrates with UXPin Merge, thus creating an end-to-end software development component ecosystem.

When UX engineers develop a new component, development teams can review, approve, and request edits through Storybook. Once approved, Merge automatically syncs the new component to UXPin’s design editor, notifying design teams of the latest release–creating a single source of truth across projects and the organization.

Enhancing User Testing and Stakeholder Feedback

Merge prototypes enhance user testing with higher fidelity and functionality and attract better feedback from stakeholders. UX designers and stakeholders can use UXPin’s Comments feature to include UX engineers in feedback and changes, making it easier to collaborate on redesigns.

Improve collaboration with UX designers, product teams, engineers, and stakeholders with the world’s most advanced code-based design tool. Sign up for a free trial to and give a UXPin Merge a go via our MUI library integration.

Best Practices for Remote Teams: 12 Principles to Guide Your Everyday Work

Before the pandemic, it wasn’t unusual for startups and small companies to operate with a remote workforce. Now, it’s the new normal for everyone, and many companies offer full-time employees the option to work from home or the office.

The lack of face-to-face communication and collaboration makes remote collaboration design a challenge. Team members must work hard to replicate the collaborative office environment online with Zoom, Slack, Miro, UXPin, and other tools optimized for remote design teamwork.

12 Principles for Remote Collaboration Design

UXPin is the world’s most advanced collaborative design tool for remote work. Sign up for a free trial to try UXPin with your team today!

1. Remote Collaboration With UXPin

UXPin’s Comments feature allows design teams and stakeholders to collaborate in real-time on remote projects. You can choose to make comments visible only to team members or public for anyone to see. 

You can also assign comments to a specific team member to action, which they can mark as resolved once complete. Any team member added to a project will receive notifications for any new comments, so everyone is always in the loop–perfect for remote design work environments.

Sign up for a free trial and discover how UXPin can enhance your remote design workflows.

2. Hosting Remote Design Sprints

Design sprints are a staple for many companies and projects. The collaborative environment and time constraints help UX designers solve complex issues in less than a week.

While remote design sprints are more challenging than traditional face-to-face editions, teams can still achieve the same results. The structure of a remote sprint is the same but requires more planning to ensure everything runs smoothly.

Check out this step-by-step guide to running remote design sprints with your team.

3. Replacing Office Conversations and In-Person Collaboration

In a remote work environment, teams lose natural exchanges and spontaneous conversations. These discussions often lead to new ideas and help build company culture. 

To replicate this with remote design teams, always allow team members to chat informally before starting a Zoom meeting. We also recommend weekly hour-long collaboration sessions where designers can present issues they’re battling with or discuss new ideas.

While Slack and other messaging apps have their place, nothing can replace the free flow of ideas that face-to-face discussion provides.

4. Daily Video Calls

camera video play

Another way to keep the team connected and synced is to kick off the day with a morning call. If your team is spread over multiple timezones, make sure it’s during everyone’s working hours.

These daily video chats don’t need to be longer than 10-15 minutes. It’s simply an opportunity for everyone to check in, give a brief progress report, and ask any questions.

5. Arrange Meetups

Another way to maintain company culture for remote design teams is to encourage meetups. Team members can meet for coffee, visit a gallery, attend a yoga class together or go on a hike–anything to replace the informal team-building exercises you usually have at the office.

You can also encourage work-time meetups for team members to collaborate outside of the office, like a coworking space, coffee shop, or someone’s living room.

6) Build a Design System

design system 2

One of the challenges with distributed teams is communication and design collaboration–which often leads to inconsistencies. A design system can help eliminate these challenges while increasing productivity and reducing time to market.

Design systems are also highly effective when onboarding in a remote environment where new team members can’t shadow someone in-person.

If you can’t afford to build a design system, consider customizing a component library. Many organizations, including Netflix, Spotify, NASA, and others, have customized MUI’s component library for their products.

7. Establish Clear Channels of Communication

Without clear channels and protocols, inter-department communication and collaboration can be exceptionally challenging in a remote work environment.

Design leads must establish clear procedures for file sharing, communication, documentation, and, most importantly, design handoffs–all operational processes that DesignOps can facilitate. 

8. Implementing DesignOps

designops increasing collaboration group

DesignOps is crucial for optimizing UX design processes, onboarding new designers, and creating efficiencies for remote design work. By integrating managed IT services, teams can streamline their tools, improve system reliability, and reduce technical overhead, allowing designers to focus more on creativity and collaboration. Team members have more tools and administrative procedures to worry about in a remote environment.

DesignOps can fill this gap so that UX designers can focus on design and not get bogged down in time-consuming tasks that slow time to market. It also intersects naturally with broader workforce management strategies, especially when scaling operations across distributed teams.

9. Schedule Routine Feedback

Feedback is essential for teams and stakeholders. Team leads must schedule regular feedback sessions and design reviews for stakeholders.

Try to limit the number of tools required for these feedback sessions. For example, you don’t want a call on Zoom with design files in Dropbox and comments in Slack.

By using a design tool like UXPin, designers can present information architecture, wireframes, mockups, and prototypes with assets and a design system all in one place. Stakeholders can leave comments on design files or prototypes and assign them to specific team members.

10. Remote User Research

user laptop computer

Design Research and testing is another challenge for remote design teams, but luckily there are several fantastic online platforms to find and test users. These are a few of our go-to online user testing apps:

11. Managing Miscommunication

It’s easy for designers to misinterpret briefs and assignments when everything is text-based–which is usually the case for remote design work.

Always set up video calls when assigning new tasks or projects so you can provide visual context and allow design teams to ask questions. The aim is to replicate the whiteboard environment where leads explain projects and team members discuss challenges and solutions.

While we all loathe Zoom meetings, these calls can save a lot of time from misinterpretations and miscommunication.

12. Communicating Work-in-Progress (WIP)

Tracking WIP through UX documentation can feel like an administrative burden, but it’s crucial for remote teams. This working document details a project’s journey from inception to the present.

This single source of truth keeps leads and stakeholders updated while providing historical context for onboarding new team members.

How Do You Organize Remote Design Work?

idea 1

Working remotely has its challenges for employees, management, IT, and HR. But most of these challenges result from thinking, working, and home workspace setups that don’t serve us well in terms of clarity, brainstorming, focus, output, and creativity.

Remote works give smaller companies the advantage of having offices in other countries and regions without the hefty price tag. It allows team members the freedom to live where they choose while doing the work they love. 

Give your remote design teams a tool that improves collaboration, not only for designers but development teams, product teams, project managers, and stakeholders. Sign up for a free UXPin trial and discover how the world’s most advanced code-based tool can enhance your UX workflows and product’s user experience.

What These 5 Experts Tell You About DesignOps

We analyzed the strategies and processes from five industry experts. This article summarizes the knowledge these DesignOps trailblazers share through blog posts, interviews, webinars, and talks.

Table of contents

Revolutionize design at your company with UXPin Merge–a code-based design tool that optimizes UX workflows while solving many DesignOps challenges. Sign up for a free trial to experience Merge through our MUI library integration.

Dave Malouf – Director of Design Operations at Teladoc Health

Dave Malouf is a veteran DesignOps expert who’s been around since the early days of design operations–according to Superside, Dave coined the phrase DesignOps.

In his famous DesignX Community talk, Amplifying Design Value (also published on his Medium account), Dave outlines ways Ops can increase Design’s value within the organization through:

  • Form giving: How form creates value–line, layout, composition, color, type, texture, volume, negative space, juxtaposition, alignment, flow
  • Clarity: From information architecture that enables users to use a digital product
  • Behavioral fit: How design provides an intuitive user experience that streamlines or compliments a real-world activity
  • Exploration: How designers discover possibilities through sketching and trying ideas

In an interview with Superside, Dave lists the key challenges DesignOps must solve:

  • Improving the craft, methods, and process
  • Finding the best tooling
  • Hiring the best team
  • Managing the best team
  • Setting up proper communication channels
  • How to reward team members for doing great work
  • Developing collaborative processes with cross-functional stakeholders
  • Asset management workflow
  • Delivery processes
  • Designing best practices
  • Design governance and policies

Learn more about Dave’s approach to DesignOps through a 1-hour webinar he did with UXPin titled: Holistic Design Operations.

Patrizia Bertini – Associate Director of Design Operations at Babylon Health

Patrizia Bertini is Associate Director of Design Operations at Babylon Health. In December 2021, Patrizia did a webinar with UXPin where she gave a high-level strategy for Measuring DesignOps’ Impact.

Patrizia says DesignOps Leaders must measure their impact because “DesignOps is supposed to relieve design-related inefficiencies to create more productive designers.”

To measure DesignOps, you must define the problem, recognizing the difference between efficacy and efficiency.

  • Efficacy: Produces qualitative results by measuring behavior and the way people do work
  • Efficiency: Produces quantifiable data to measure performance and changes

Patrizia uses a three-step process for identifying areas for improvement:

  1. Identify your users and define the problem. Patrizia segments these users into Business, Design Leader, and Design Team. When you identify a problem, you must assess how it impacts all three user segments.
  2. Define the dimensions that matter measured in quality, cost, and time. What can you do to impact efficiencies and improve performance?
  • Lastly, you “play impact”–a process of evaluating the problem with quantifiable and qualitative data to understand the scale of the issue and determine the best course of action.

Watch Patrizia’s hour-long webinar Measuring DesignOps’ Impact or our summary article, ROI of DesignOps: All You Need to Know About Quantifying DesignOps’ Impact.

Erica Rider – Senior Manager UX – Developer Tools and Platform Experience

Erica is another veteran UX designer with extensive experience and an impressive resume from some of the world’s largest tech companies. She currently works for PayPal in a DesignOps role.

Erica is responsible for PayPal’s DesignOps 2.0, which used UXPin Merge as the foundation to scale and optimize the company’s internal product design. With five UX designers, over a thousand developers, and more than 60 products, PayPal could ship new products 8X faster using Merge without employing more team members.

With UXPin Merge, PayPal’s product teams took over designing, prototyping, testing, and delivering new products–freeing the small team of UX designers to focus on high-level user experience initiatives.

Watch Erica’s one-hour webinar, Scale design efficiently with DesignOps2.0, or read How PayPal Scaled Their Design Process with UXPin Merge for more.

Rachel Posman – Senior Director, Design Operations at Salesforce

Rachel has worked in design for almost a decade at several enterprise organizations, including Capital One, Uber, and Salesforce–in DesignOps and ResearchOps positions.

Rachel wrote chapter 2 of DesignOps 101: Guide to Design Operations, where she talks about the importance of DesignOps. 

“Design operations exists to help mitigate challenges that design teams face:

  • Increasing volume of work and demand on the time of design teams
  • Working in isolation or having siloed workflows or procedures
  • Missing design tools that could help design teams work smarter
  • Misunderstanding from not being part of the initial strategy that goes into a project
  • Push for speed and efficiency to create quickly”

In Postcards from the Future (of DesignOps), Rachel reveals her strategy for envisioning “future contexts and scenarios for current products and services.”

Rachel divides the future into four segments based on a cone from Future Today Institute:

  • Tactical: 12-24 months
  • Strategic planning: 2-5 years
  • Vision: 5-10 years
  • Systems-level disruption and evolution: 10+ years

By talking about and envisioning the future, Rachel and her team found they could develop strategies to create their future worlds.

Check out Postcards from the Future (of DesignOps) for a step-by-step guide to implementing Rachel’s planning strategy.

You can also get valuable insights from Rachel and six other DesignOps experts in our free ebook, DesignOps 101: Guide to Design Operations.

Salomé Mortazavi – Director of DesignOps at SiriusXM 

Salomé has spent many years consulting for several Fortune 500 companies helping to transform their software development practices. She currently works as Director of DesignOps at SiriusXM.

Salomé uses a practices-first DesignOps approach–the methods and frameworks used to achieve outcomes. Salomé notes that processes follow practices, so optimizing the former often creates more inefficiencies.

Salomé defines four key skills of a practices-first DesignOps leader:

  • Be comfortable with ambiguity: Don’t try to control everything; embrace problem-solving and the process of finding the best solutions.
  • Research & Service Design skills: Leverage research and Service Design tools to visualize the entire ecosystem’s challenges. 
  • Strong Design and Product practices background: A DesignOps leader must have hands-on product experience to communicate effectively with team members. This experience also helps identify and diagnose problems easier.
  • Program management skills: Knowing how to evolve and scale solutions is vital for long-term success. Building feedback loops help Ops learn and iterate to improve and optimize solutions.

Read more about Salomé’s practices-first approach in this Medium post. You could also watch Salomé at UXPin’s Design Value Conference.

Learn from Other DesignOps Experts at Upcoming Webinars!

Join our free webinar next week. Another great Design Operations leader, Amber Jabeen, will tell you how you can build the case and collaborate with other teams on building a design system for enterprise-level organizations. Check it out: Enterprise Design System – How to Build and Scale.

Design Value Conference Recap – How Top Leaders Tackle DesignOps Challenges

DVC Scaling

At UXPin’s first annual Design Value Conference in March 2022, we hosted five design industry leaders to understand Design and DesignOps at some of the world’s biggest organizations.

This article summarizes everything we covered at the Design Value Conference 2022, with links to a synopsis of each talk and the 30-minute video.

Design Value Conference 2022 was sponsored by UXPin Merge–the world’s most advanced collaborative prototyping tool. Sign up for a free trial.

UXPin CEO Yuga Koda on Merge Component Manager

To kick off Design Value Conference 2022, UXPin CEO Yuga Koda announced UXPin’s latest offering, Merge Component Manager–a new way to sync your component library with less reliance on engineers.

Merge in its current form requires some help from engineers to prepare a component library and repo to sync with UXPin. Merge Component Manager is a code-free way to import your components.

Merge Component Manager allows you to configure your components without dev’s help. The codeless process allows designers to set up and manage component properties within UXPin, giving them the power of coded interactions when building prototypes.

Design Value Conference 2022 Talk: Maggie Dieringer, Uber Eats

Maggie Dieringer, Senior Design Program Manager (DPM) at Uber, shared some valuable insights about DesignOps at Uber. 

Having worked with various Uber products, Maggie provided examples of how she tackled DesignOps with multiple team sizes and all stages of maturity.

Here are the key takeaways from Maggie’s talk. 

Framing and Scaling

Maggie’s framing and scaling process to determine where DPMs should spend their time to have the most impact. Maggie uses three framing factors to get an accurate picture of the org and make informed decisions:

  • Size & State of the Design Org
  • Design Team Resourcing
  • Level of Partnership

Increase DPM Impact

With a clear understanding of the org and its problems, Maggie chooses a suitable “level of engagement.” DPMs are more hands-on when zoomed in, working with teams on day-to-day tasks. When zoomed out, DPMs focus more on advocating, strategy, and planning.

Support DPM Trajectory

Lastly, Maggie creates a DesignOps roadmap with long-term goals. Using the framing exercise, Maggie wants to answer three crucial trajectory questions:

  • Where are you today?
  • Where do you want to be?
  • Where does your team want to be?

Design Value Conference 2022 Talk: Salome Mortazavi, Sirius XM

Salomé Mortazavi, Director of DesignOps at SiriusXM, talks about using frameworks to create a DesignOps roadmap.

Salomé’s work with SiriusXM and many Fortune 500 organizations has given her valuable knowledge and experience, which she shares in her talk.

Here are the key takeaways from Salomé’s talk.

Advice for Beginners

One of the common mistakes beginner DesignOps practitioners make is being “yes” people. They take on too many day-to-day operations instead of focusing on the bigger picture.

When starting, Salomé has three recommendations to overcome this:

  • Find value: Look for areas where you can add the most value
  • Efficiency vs. Efficacy: Start by framing problems using the right metrics to identify a baseline
  • Listen and Take Notes: Rather than jumping in and making the changes you think the org needs, interview team members to understand their challenges

DesignOps Framework: Design Maturity Index

Salomé uses the Design Maturity Index to identify themes and problems, separating them into two “buckets:”

  1. DesignOps (Design Org Ops)
  2. Design Leadership/Design Team/Product (Design Practice Ops)

Salomé uses a menu tool to assign and categorize these themes and problems accordingly.

Creating a DesignOps Roadmap

With her problems defined and assigned, Salomé outlines a DesignOps roadmap with three time horizons and several categories. Salomé uses the Build, Measure, Learn methodology to implement and evolve her roadmap.

Read the full recap of Salomé’s talk on our blog.

Design Value Conference 2022 Talk: Erica Rider, PayPal

Erica Rider, UX Lead EPX @ PayPal, talks about how she revised the traditional DesignOps model to scale design and transferred UX responsibilities across the organization.

Traditional DesignOps vs. DesignOps 2.0

Erica’s DesignOps strategy had to scale design practices, not the Design Department. To do this, Erica created a hybrid DesignOps/DevOps framework. Instead of creating DesignOps, Erica and her team operationalized design within DevOps.

Evolution of Responsibilities

For this hybrid system to work, Erica had to empower product teams to design, prototype, and test while educating product managers and engineers about the importance of user experience.

Evolving PayPal’s DesignOps 2.0 Process

Having worked with DesignOps 2.0 since 2019, Erica and her team are working on evolving the process for product teams to deliver better products.

Erica is working on a system to operationalize user research. They’re also creating a balance of control/accountability so that Product, Design, and Engineering share UX responsibilities in PayPal’s hybrid operational model.

PayPal’s UX team uses a user experience wizard tool to measure and evolve this next iteration of DesignOps 2.0.

Erica Rider used UXPin Merge as the foundation for PayPal’s DesignOps 2.0. Sign up for a free trial to discover how Merge can help scale your design operations.

Design Value Conference 2022 Talk: Omkar Chandgadkar, Amazon

Omkar Chandgadkar, a Senior UX Designer at Amazon Alexa Smart Home, discusses overcoming common design challenges using his two frameworks. 

Omkar developed these frameworks from experience at tech giants IBM and Amazon to move from a tactical (or what Omkar calls “designing a plane while flying it”) to a strategic approach by being proactive.

Common Design Team Challenges

Omkar outlines three common challenges design teams experience at large organizations. In short, design teams often find themselves playing catch-up rather than working on long-term strategies.

Omkar uses two frameworks to overcome this catch-up conundrum.

Framework One: Omkar’s Connecting the Dots Map

Connecting the dots is about aligning Product, Design, and Engineering activities and frameworks to improve communication and collaboration throughout the software development process. 

The aim of connecting the dots map will help you identify how your orgs make decisions and how these decisions are interdependent. DesignOps can then implement strategies to align Design with the rest of the organization for more streamlined product delivery.

Framework Two: Omkar’s Design Offerings

Omkar’s proactive Design Offerings strategy is a process of creating products that DesignOps markets Product Managers for their projects.

These products streamline project intake and provide design teams with actionable first steps. DesignOps practitioners can use the Design Offerings framework for new projects or work through a product backlog.

How to Use Omkar’s Frameworks?

Connecting the Dots Map:

  • As a reference to navigate projects and create project plans
  • As a mechanism to identify gaps in previously made decisions

Design Offerings:

  • As a vehicle to educate partners about how they can benefit from design
  • As an intake mechanism to balance tactical and strategic projects

Build Fully Interactive Components in UXPin

Use UXPin to create prototypes that are interactive by utilizing features, such as States, Variables, or Conditions. See how easy it is to use and how fast you can prototype with it.

Try UXPin for free

DesignOps Leader vs. Design Leader – What’s the Difference?

DesignOps vs Design Leader

Key Takeaways

  • DesignOps isn’t a substitute for design leadership; it’s a separate role with different skills and responsibilities.
  • Although this separation exists, DesignOps must understand the end-to-end design process. Without this understanding, DesignOps cannot identify problems or implement effective strategies.
  • Organizations must understand the importance and difference between DesignOps and design leadership to effectively scale design and its supporting infrastructure.
  • Design leaders need the support of DesignOps to focus on the product and user experience without being weighed down or distracted by operational issues. DesignOps supports design leaders by providing the stepping stones to success.

DesignOps requires a different skillset to UX design and design leaders, so understanding its role and function are essential for hiring the right people and management.

A design leader is responsible for “what” the organization is creating (the product), while DesignOps must focus on “how” the company delivers the product.

This article summarizes part of a webinar UXPin hosted with Patrizia Bertini, Associate Design Operations Director at Babylon-Measuring DesignOps Impact. Patrizia explains the difference between DesignOps and a typical design leadership position and how DesignOps functions within the organization.

DesignOps’ Role in the Organization

We published an article answering the question, “What is DesignOps?” Summarized in one sentence:

“DesignOps (short for Design Operations) refers to the optimization of design processes, people, and technologies to improve the product’s design and business value.”

DesignOps is an inward-facing operations process that reduces the administrative burdens from designers so they can focus on design and getting products to market quicker.

10 Key DesignOps Roles

  1. Operations management: Creating and managing a design roadmap that aligns with design teams’ goals while identifying skills gaps to achieve those objectives.
  2. Process design: Creating design systems and mapping the tools teams need.
  3. Project management: Design workflows, assign projects, set timelines, and remove any bottlenecks.
  4. Creating a communication strategy: Liaising between the design teams and the organization, including communication channels and file and resource storage.
  5. Onboarding new hires: Hiring, orienting, and training new staff so that they seamlessly integrate with design teams.
  6. Building design team culture: Instilling the company culture with workshops, training, and other team-building events.
  7. Budget allocation and control: Managing the costs associated with running the design team rather than direct product costs.
  8. Legal: Working with legal teams to create NDAs, participant release forms, and other legal documents.
  9. Managing the procurement process: Streamlining and managing purchasing decisions to meet budget constraints which involves connecting with financial departments.
  10. IT and security: Liaising with IT to ensure all tools and processes meet security standards.
designops increasing collaboration talk

None of these ten roles deal directly with the product or customers, but rather the necessary administrative bureaucracy to get products to market and provide the best customer experience.

DesignOps Areas of Intervention

In Measuring DesignOps Impact, Patrizia separates DesignOps into three areas of intervention; business operation, workflow, and design operation, and people operation.

designops efficiency speed optimal

Business operation is managing budgets, resources, and other business-related design functions. Examples include:

  • Budget management/spending optimization
  • Spending policy overview
  • End-to-end procurement and 3PRM (practice in performance & reward management)
  • Contract negotiations
  • Onboarding vendors and 3P (process, product, people) risk assessment
  • Spending ROI calculation
  • Tools ROI/impact assessment
  • Resource asks assessment (tools + people)
  • CW/FTE sequencing
designops efficiency person

Workflow and design operation is a holistic view of the end-to-end design process. How do designers get from concept to final product? Examples include:

  • End-to-end design process optimization
  • Tools ecosystem management
  • Tools onboarding/off-boarding
  • Cross-functional collaboration optimization
  • Design system management
  • Data governance
  • Participant sourcing process management
  • Research and design asset management
  • Design standards
designops increasing collaboration group

People operation considers the human aspect of design teams, like skills development, communication, and culture. Examples include:

  • Career path direction
  • Skills matrix/team composition assessment
  • Development programs and team training
  • Teams culture
  • Knowledge & experience training
  • Streamline ubiquitous cross-functional collaboration
  • Onboarding/off-boarding
  • Internal communication
  • Change management
  • Engagement models
  • Hiring/job specification/tasks review

DesignOps Leader Skillset

If you have ambitions to become a DesignOps leader, change management is the most important skill set. As Patrizia says during the webinar, “DesignOps changes the existing reality to bring more value. It’s a very transformative discipline.”

Further to change management, a DesignOps leader must have a project management background. A DesignOps leader must also have strong business acumen to manage budgets and strategize to meet long-term goals.

Since DesignOps requires cross-functional collaboration, communication and problem solving are vital skills for a DesignOps leader. They must know how to network and become spokespeople for design, drawing attention to significant wins and getting buy-in for important projects.

You can learn more about a DesignOps leader’s qualities and how to get started with DesOps in your company in our free eBook, DesignOps 101:Guide to Design Operations.

What do Design Leaders do?

A design leader is someone who focuses on product design and strategy. Design leaders look outward to understand design’s influence on the customer experience and how to create business value. They also coach and mentor designers to improve their skills to facilitate creative thinking and innovation.

Ultimately, design leaders must ensure that design teams meet KPIs and objectives towards the organization’s business goals and user experience strategy.

DesignOps Leader vs. Design Leader

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As Patrizia puts it in Measuring DesignOps Impact, the DesignOps leader/design leader relationship works similar to that of the CEO/COO. The CEO (design leader) has a vision for the organization (design/product), and the COO (DesignOps leader) creates the systems and processes to achieve that vision.

Patrizia uses five bullet points to compare the two roles.

DesignOps Leader:

Inward looking and process-oriented

  • Mission: the How / the performance
  • Focus: End-to-end design process & teams
  • KPIs: Team health, spending, & performance metrics
  • Deliverables: Ops roadmap & strategy
  • Skills: Change management

Design Leader:

Outward looking and product-oriented

  • Mission: the What / the product
  • Focus: Product/service vision & individuals
  • KPIs: Product & experience metrics
  • Deliverables: Product & design strategy
  • Skills: Influence & negotiate

One quality a DesignOps leader and design leader have in common is a strategic mindset. They must design and implement strategies that take the organization towards its long-term goals. The most significant difference is the DesignOps leader looks inwards when creating a strategy while the design leader looks outwards.

Design Program Manager vs. Design Manager

Below each leader position, you have people who execute their directives. These tactical roles support the leads to ensure vision’s executed effectively and seamlessly. The design program manager (DPM) reports to the DesignOps leader and the design manager to the design lead.

We can compare these roles using the same five bullet points:

Design Program Manager:

  • Mission: Execute Ops roadmap
  • Focus: Align processes to execute
  • KPIs: Program metrics
  • Deliverables: Blueprints, project status
  • Skills: Process & project management

Design Manager:

  • Mission: Implement design strategy
  • Focus: Coordinate and execute design
  • KPIs: Project tracking metrics
  • Deliverables: Project status
  • Skills: Team & project management

A design manager must have a solid design background and have started as a UX designer or researcher. They must have hands-on experience with design to understand UX and its challenges.

A DPM is more project-based and therefore doesn’t require the same extensive design experience, but must still understand end-to-end design thinking and processes.

Further Reading

DesignOps 101

If you’re looking for more DesignOps knowledge and insights, you can also check out our free eBook, DesignOps 101: Guide to Design Operations. This free guide features six chapters, each written by DesignOps industry leaders. Topics include:

  1. What is DesignOps?
  2. The Importance of DesignOps
  3. The Impact of DesignOps
  4. How DesignOps Works
  5. How to Get Started With DesignOps in Your Company
  6. DesignOps Tools

DesignOps Pillar: How We Work Together

Would you like to create a stellar design team? Read our free eBook about the first strategic area of DesignOps, that is managing a design team. Learn about rituals, practices, and processes that will help you grow an amazing design team that’s happy at their jobs. Follow: DesignOps Pillar: How We Work Together.

Use UXPin Merge Tech to Scale Design Operations

UXPin is proud to provide this free content to help develop and evolve DesignOps practices. We welcome you to learn more about our revolutionary code-based technology Merge–a tool that solves many DesignOps challenges by bridging the gap between design and development.

Discover Merge

How DesignOps Can Increase Collaboration in Enterprise?

In February 2022, UXPin hosted a free webinar with DesignOps expert Dave Malouf titled Holistic Design Operations. Dave discusses how he and his team solved the “human operational problem” to break down silos–a common issue with large and enterprise organizations.

Join us for the May 2022 webinar about building centralized design system for enterprises. Sign up for free at “Enterprise Design System–How to Build and Scale.”

Increase UX value at your company with the world’s most advanced code-based design tool. Design, prototype, and test faster with improved cohesion and consistency. Sign up for a free trial and discover how code-based design can enhance your UX workflows.

Enterprises are Prone to Create Silos

designops increasing collaboration group collab

Silos are a significant issue for many enterprises. These vertical silos create a horizontal divider between teams, projects, and operations–getting in the way of design teams’ ability to do great work.

Companies have to manage work in individual workstreams at three levels:

  • Project level
  • Program level (a group of projects)
  • Portfolio level (a group of programs)

As organizations scale, these silos expand, creating and intensifying problems. The foundations that built these silos start to disintegrate–consistency, cohesion, optimization, efficiency, and speed begin to degrade.

Organizations lose the ability to maintain the supporting structure of a holistic design practice because they’re distracted by these vertical silos. Focusing on just one of these silos at a time isn’t a scalable solution and only compounds the problems.

For example, if you try to scale delivery, you create bottlenecks in other operational processes like practice and business. Bridging the gap between these silos requires a holistic DesignOps approach.

Introducing Holistic DesignOps

DesignOps (short for Design Operations) refers to the optimization of design processes, people, and technologies to improve the product’s design and business value as well as building a better, more nourishing and efficient, work environment for the employees.

Dave Malouf describes DesignOps in three pillars:

  • Delivery operations: processes and programs–usually the first place DesignOps starts. Delivery operations focus on optimizing efficiency, velocity, cost reduction–how to get things delivered.
  • Practice operations: The people, spaces, methods, and tools that make it possible for designers to design. Practice operations focus on quality, community, engagement.
  • Business operations: As Dave Malouf puts it, “the operations no one wants to talk about.” The bureaucracy that teams have to deal with. Business operations focus on finance, IT, procurement, compliance, legal, etc. 

As we mentioned above, these three pillars of DesignOps are intertwined–impacting one another. If you’re optimizing design operations, you must use a holistic approach, and prioritize all of those areas. When you leave something out, you may add to the issue instead of fixing it.

How Does DesignOps Help with Operational Issues?

designops increasing collaboration group

There’s a misconception that you can solve these operational issues with architectural solutions, like design systems, platform layers, reusable core components, and common branding, for example. 

While these are reasonable solutions, the problem isn’t about technical mapping; it’s about people.

Discovering the Problem with Operations

Dave and his DesignOps team found that adding more platforms and tools often amplified the issue they were trying to fix because they focused on optimizing processes without accounting for the human element.

The problem wasn’t with design; it was a service management issue.

Dave and his DesignOps team started a discovery process for this human problem. Finding the solution required a collaborative effort with team members from multiple departments.

Dave’s DesignOps team used journey mapping service blueprints to study four key areas:

  • Scale
  • Silos
  • Bridges
  • People

While they had the platform and components, the real issue was a lack of operations. They had to find a way to intertwine the human narrative with the practice and programs. Dave and his team’s solution had to move the narrative from design intent to design execution.

After completing their research, Dave’s DesignOps team arrived back at the vertical silo conundrum.

The code of this operational problem was the people who inhabited these silos also maintained them–making it difficult for tools alone to solve the problem. While they had some bridges in the technical sense, few were at the operational or narrative level.

They discovered that people were wearing blinders–there was a tunnel vision mentality. Team members measured things from the silo’s point of view, which didn’t align with other silos or the company.

There wasn’t anything fundamentally wrong with these individual silos. Teams used data to make decisions and optimize systems and processes. But with each silo operating independently, the delivery lacked cohesion and consistency.

Dave’s team had to change the operational model to create connection points from the user’s perspective at the narrative level.

Dave Malouf’s Strategy for Optimizing Operations

designops efficiency speed optimal

Dave and his DesignOps team created parent journeys for operational processes. Each parent had a 2D journey map with channels and a decision tree.

At each stage, Dave’s team created metadata so that team members could drill down into the meaning behind operational decisions. This metadata spoke to business and delivery teams to help with prioritization and making better decisions.

The metadata included links to work, insights, metrics teams must monitor as the project develops, and opportunities. Dave’s team also had a commenting system to collaborate and communicate, making the parent journeys dynamic to meet the project’s requirements.

This dynamic journey map allowed teams to visualize the project’s current state and multiple proposed future states for team members to prioritize and make decisions.

The operations team assigned a Design Program Manager (DPM) to the journey work and another DPM for delivery. These DPMs, combined with the team’s journey map system, were able to bridge the gaps between silos, thus improving cohesion and collaboration across projects, programs, and portfolios.

We highly recommend checking out the webinar UXPin hosted with Dave Malouf on Holistic Design Operations for more details about Dave’s approach.

Increase Collaboration With UXPin

Optimize your UX workflows to improve collaboration, cohesion, and consistency with UXPin. With UXPin’s code-based design tool, you improve collaboration between designers while streamlining design handoffs with engineers.

Try UXPin with your team. Sign up for a free trial today!

How to Hire a DesignOps Expert?

The webinar with Dave Malouf about Holistic DesignOps made us wonder what else we could write about to expand on the design operations topic. One of such things is hiring. What should you look for in a DesignOps expert? If you want to watch the webinar, we have a recording of it on our YouTube channel.

Let’s go back to the main topic of this discussion–how to hire a DesignOps expert?

Table of contents

As a discipline still in its infancy, there is no clear path to becoming a DesignOps expert. It’s not like UX, where you study to become a designer. Most DesignOps experts transition from product, design, change management, or project management because they want to solve their company’s inefficiencies.

Setting up systems and processes to keep design teams focused on building great products has proven to increase productivity and deliver a good return on investment. Building a DesignOps team is essential to compete in today’s ultra-competitive market.

Reduce time-to-market with UXPin Merge, the world’s most advanced code-based design tool–built to solve DesignOps challenges. Sync your company’s design system to UXPin’s editor to create a single source of truth between designers and engineers. Request access to Merge.

Who is a DesignOps Expert?

A DesignOps expert focuses on identifying operational inefficiencies and finding solutions to optimize them. DesignOps experts have little to do with design itself; instead, they focus on the tools, processes, systems, and protocols that enable designers to do work.

designops efficiency person

There are ten key DesignOps roles:

  1. Operations management: Creating and managing a design roadmap that aligns with design teams’ goals while identifying skills gaps to achieve those objectives.
  2. Process design: Creating design systems and mapping the tools teams need.
  3. Project management: Design workflows, assign projects, set timelines, and remove any bottlenecks.
  4. Creating a communication strategy: Liaising between the design teams and the organization, including communication channels and file and resource storage.
  5. Onboarding new hires: Hiring, orienting, and training new staff so that they seamlessly integrate with design teams.
  6. Building design team culture: Instilling the company culture with workshops, training, and other team-building events.
  7. Budget allocation and control: Managing the costs associated with running the design team rather than direct product costs.
  8. Legal: Working with legal teams to create NDAs, participant release forms, and other legal documents.
  9. Managing the procurement process: Streamlining and managing purchasing decisions to meet budget constraints which involves connecting with financial departments.
  10. IT and security: Liaising with IT to ensure all tools and processes meet security standards.

There are three primary DesignOps positions:

  • DesignOps Leader or Head of DesignOps
  • Design Program Manager (DPM)
  • Design Producer

DesignOps Leader

A DesignOps leader works closely with the Design Leader to create an operational vision and roadmap. This high-level role focuses on how design teams complete tasks and projects.

A DesignOps leader usually has a background in change management and project management. They have to understand how to facilitate change while recognizing the end-to-end project process.

As Patrizia Bertini says in UXPin’s webinar, Measuring DesignOps Impact, “DesignOps changes the existing reality to bring more value. It’s a very transformative discipline.”

A DesignOps leader has to find tools and processes to optimize operational workflows and then develop the strategies to encourage their adoption.

Design Program Manager (DPM)

A DPM is responsible for executing the DesignOps Leader’s strategy and roadmap. They work with UX and product teams providing the necessary support to focus on design.

To do this effectively, a DPM usually comes from a design background, so they understand the end-to-end design process and identify roadblocks.

The DPM also acts as a bridge between teams and projects to improve communication and collaboration.

Design Producer

A Design Producer works directly on a project managing the administrative and operational tasks so that designers can focus on designing. They manage the end-to-end design process, ensuring everything runs smoothly while facilitating communication and collaboration.

DesignOps Leader’s Skill Set

While it’s helpful for a DesignOps leader to understand design, it’s more important to have a change management background. They must understand how to implement change and encourage adoption.

designops efficiency speed optimal

DesignOps Leaders must have excellent business management skills for budgeting, strategy, and execution. They need to manage people and lead them towards their Ops vision.

Communication and networking are crucial DesignOps skills. Leaders spend a lot of time engaging with stakeholders and executives to advocate for design and get budget buy-in. They’re also the voice of design to the rest of the organization, meeting with peers to find opportunities for collaboration.

DesignOps Leader’s Responsibilities

In Measuring DesignOps Impact, Patrizia Bertini talks about three DesignOps areas of intervention:

  • Business
  • Workflow and design
  • People

1. Business Operations

Managing budgets, resources, and other business-related design functions. Examples include:

  • Budget management/spending optimization
  • Spending policy overview
  • End-to-end procurement and 3PRM (practice in performance & reward management)
  • Contract negotiations
  • Onboarding vendors and 3P (process, product, people) risk assessment
  • Spending ROI calculation
  • Tools ROI/impact assessment
  • Resource asks assessment (tools + people)
  • CW/FTE sequencing

2. Workflow and Design Operations

A holistic view of the end-to-end design process. How do designers get from concept to final product? Examples include:

  • End-to-end design process optimization
  • Tools ecosystem management
  • Tools onboarding/off-boarding
  • Cross-functional collaboration optimization
  • Design system management
  • Data governance
  • Participant sourcing process management
  • Research and design asset management
  • Design standards

3. People Operations

Considers the human aspect of design teams, like skills development, communication, and culture. Examples include:

  • Career path direction
  • Skills matrix/team composition assessment
  • Development programs and team training
  • Teams culture
  • Knowledge & experience training
  • Streamline ubiquitous cross-functional collaboration
  • Onboarding/off-boarding
  • Internal communication
  • Change management
  • Engagement models
  • Hiring/job specification/tasks review

Would you like to improve your skills concerning people operations? Here’s a free eBook that covers the first strategic area of DesignOps: People, called DesignOps Pillar: How We Work Together. Learn about hiring, onboarding, and managing a team of designers.

Is Your Company Ready to Hire a DesignOps Expert?

designops increasing collaboration talk

Here are some signs your company might need a DesignOps expert:

  • You’re having trouble with silos, communication, and collaboration resulting in poor cohesion and consistency for project deliveries.
  • You have too many tools which disrupt workflows or cause errors.
  • Design teams often miss deadlines, or high rework rates adversely impact time-to-market.
  • Designers complain that operational and administrative tasks prevent them from focusing on design.
  • Design leaders spend too much time onboarding, orienting, and training new hires–time better spent on design-related tasks.
  • Designers wear too many hats instead of focusing or specializing on one primary activity–i.e., UI design, research, testing, etc.

Check out these resources to learn more about DesignOps, and its role in your organization:

Optimizing Design With UXPin Merge

Managing design systems is one of the biggest challenges for a DesignOps expert. Ensuring the design system’s UI kit syncs with the component library takes considerable time and effort.

With Merge, you sync your design system from a repository to UXPin’s editor, so designers use the same components as engineers–creating a single source of truth across the organization. Any changes to the repository automatically sync to UXPin, notifying design teams of the new release.

Ready to optimize your UX workflows with a single tool? Request access to Merge.

Discover Merge

Product Design Influencers that You Need to Follow

product design youtube channels

YouTube is often the go-to for product design tutorials, career advice, design tips, design tools, and more. We’ve put together our favorite product design YouTube channels and influencers to inspire your next project.

We’ve selected the best YouTube channels featuring product design and product development content from some of the Internet’s most creative people.

One of our favorite YouTube channels is Jesse Showalter. Jesse has done a couple of UXPin product reviews, including a basic overview and a walkthrough of our advanced features. Sign up for a free trial and follow along as Jesse takes you through UXPin.

Top Product Design Influencers

These product design influencers offer practical advice and helpful design tips to enhance your design skills. Whether you’re just starting as a designer or a seasoned pro looking for advanced techniques, these product design YouTube channels offer excellent content for designers. You can also explore various influencer databases to discover even more creators in the product design and development space.

1. Flux (AKA Ran Segall)

flux

Flux is the personal vlog of a designer Ran Segall who documents his learnings of web design and entrepreneurship. Ran is extremely charismatic and knowledgable which makes him an amazing person to follow. Besides posting YouTube videos, he has a very energetic Instagram account where he publishes a bite-sized content for anyone interested in UX and UI design, as well as growing a digital business.

Here are links to follow Ran Segall:

2. Sharon Oniyine

One of the Best design influencers in 2022

Sharon Onyinye is a UI/UX designer with over five years of experience working in tech. Sharon uses her YouTube channel to share her expertise with aspiring UX designers, including how to get a design job, portfolio/CV tips, and other helpful career advice.

You can also book a one-on-one with Sharon for career improvement, Interview preparation, portfolio, resume reviews, and general design advice.

Here are links to follow Sharon online:

3. Jesse Showalter

One of the best design influencers on YouTube

Jesse is a Product UI/UX Designer from the United States. He shares high-quality digital design and web development content on his YouTube channel. 

What we love most about Jesse is his consistency–posting new videos every week to keep his followers up to date with the latest design tools, products, brand identity, and trends. Jesse also offers live streams with web design challenges, Q&As, design-alongs, and more.

Here are links to follow Jesse online:

4. DesignCourse – Gary Simon

Top product design influencers on YouTube

Gary Simon is a UX/UI Designer, Graphic Designer, and Full Stack Developer from the United States. He’s been posting vlogs to his YouTube channel since 2010 and amassed just shy of a million followers.

Gary has over 100 design and development courses on Envato Network’s TutsPlus.com, DigitalTutors.com, Pluralsight.com, LinkedIn Learning & Lynda.com. He also founded DesignCourse, which offers interactive design courses and a mentoring program.

Gary’s YouTube channel playlists include product reviews, typography & color tips, design/development tutorials, free courses, and much more. He also teaches his followers how to get the most out of design tools and front-end frameworks.

Here are links to follow Gary online:

5. Sarah Doody

Follow one of the best design influencers Sarah

Sarah Doody is a User Experience Designer and Researcher from Salt Lake City, Utah, with over 18 years of experience. She founded the Career Strategy Lab, “a UX career accelerator that helps UX professionals get hired without applying to hundreds of roles.”

Sarah’s YouTube channel offers practical tips and strategies for aspiring UX designers with career advice, portfolio reviews, and user research tips and tricks.

Here are links to follow Sarah online:

6. AJ&Smart

AJ&Smart are design influencers on YouTube

AJ&Smart is a Berlin-based Product Design Studio that also runs a successful YouTube channel with over 200k followers. The studio posts new vlogs regularly, hosted by different members of the AJ&Smart team.

AJ&Smart’s content focuses on UX/UI design, design sprints, design thinking, and research to help designers build better products. Other video topics include career advice, how to land clients, and tips for design teams.

AJ&Smart founded Workshopper, a platform offering free resources for UX/UI designers and product designers.

Here are links to follow AJ&Smart online:

7. Vytautas Alechnavicius

Design influencer who talks about product design

Vytautas (or Vy) Alechnavicius UX Designer, Researcher, and DesignOps Leader, originally from Denmark but living and working in the United Kingdom.

Vy works full time as a Product Design Manager at Tesco while running a successful YouTube channel about user research and design. He creates a lot of content around UX design processes and methods, with loads of valuable design thinking tips.

Vy’s Discord channel, Design Squad: UX Community, has almost 3,000 active members where designers and product strategists share knowledge and offer helpful advice.

Here are links to Vytautas’s website and social media:

8. Kim Tang

Best design influencer kim tang youtube

Kim Tang is a UX/Product Designer from the United Kingdom. Kim isn’t as established as the other design influencers featured in this article but shares interesting insights into her life as a product designer at eCommerce giant ASOS.

Kim now works as a product designer at FARETCH, a group of luxury fashion brands, including Browns, Stadium Goods, and New Guards Group.

Here are links to Kim’s social media:

Product Development Influencers

If you’re looking to develop your skills as a product developer, these four influencers offer excellent coding tutorials, tips, and advice.

1. CleverProgrammer

clever programmer is a top influencer for product design and development

CleverProgrammer, aka Rafeh Qazi, is a Los Angeles-based Full-Stack Developer and Software Programmer with over a million YouTube subscribers.

Rafeh’s YouTube popularity is due to his comprehensive video tutorials, several of which are over seven hours long with more than 2 million views each.

Rafeh is the founder of CleverProgrammer, which offers various coding bootcamps in Javascript, Python, front-end, and full-stack development.

Here are links to follow CleverProgrammer online:

2. Ania Kubów

Design influencer who's a developer

Polish-born, Dubai-raised, and UK-educated Ania Kubów is a software engineer sharing her knowledge and experience with aspiring developers. Her YouTube channel has over 210k subscribers, and Ania creates free content for freeCodeCamp.

Ania shares loads of fun code along projects on her YouTube channel, with playlists including games, APIs, web scrapers, clones of popular websites, React applications, and more. She also shares valuable insights into blockchain technology and how to create NFTs.

Here are links to Ania’s social media:

3. Dev Ed

product design influencer and development influencer

Not only does Dev Ed have the coolest name, but he’s also an incredibly talented web developer and designer from Romania with over 720k YouTube subscribers. His enthusiastic style and ability to simplify complex code concepts are what make Dev Ed so popular.

Dev Ed offers beginner coding tutorials for Javascript, Python, Node.js, React, CSS, and web development. He also has fun projects like building video games and creating exciting Javascript animations.

Here are links to follow Dev Ed online:

4. CoderOne

CoderOne is an educational channel for those of you who want top learn fundamental aspects of programming. It’s run by Islem Maboud who has an amazing gift of explaining the nuances of software development. He also teaches the audience step by step how to build something, such as food delivery app.

Here are links to follow CoderOne online:

5. Net Ninja

development and design influencers that help people understand front-end design

Net Ninja, aka Shaun Pelling, is a UK-based full-stack developer and online instructor. Shaun has four Udemy courses with over 62,000 students, and all his courses have solid 5-star scores (an incredible achievement) with thousands of positive reviews.

Through his YouTube channel, Udemy account, and website, Shaun offers courses in Node.js, Vue, React, Python, Ruby, PHP, HTML, Flutter, TypeScript, CSS, and other programming languages and technologies–“to Black-belt your coding skills.”

Here are links to follow Net Ninja online:

BONUS: Design Influencer We Would Love to Go Back on YouTube

These two design influencers have fantastic content, but they haven’t posted new videos for a while.

1. Mike Locke

One of the best design influencers who have great content on Youtube

Mike Locke is a UI/UX Designer from the United States with more than 25 years of design experience. He’s worked as a UI/UX Designer at many global organizations, including Thomson Reuters, Yahoo!, CBS, ADP, and Fox TV, where he currently works as a Lead UI/UX Designer.

Mike’s YouTube channel offers tons of practical tips on UX/UI topics, career advice, interviewing processes, and more. He’s passionate about sharing his wealth of knowledge from working with Fortune500 organizations–which is what makes his videos so unique and engaging.

Although Mike hasn’t posted for over a year, you should still explore his YouTube channel for helpful design tips and advice.

Here are links to follow Mike online:

Improving Product Design With UXPin

UXPin is a code-based end-to-end design tool used by UX and product designers worldwide. The intuitive design canvas and advanced features allow designers to build prototypes with significantly higher fidelity and functionality than other image-based design tools.

In this video, Jesse Showalter walks you through UXPin’s advanced prototyping features, including Interactions, States, Components, Variables, and Expressions.

You can also check out our free app examples and interactive UI patterns, demonstrating UXPin’s advanced features for you to copy and edit.

Sign up for a free trial and experience the endless possibilities with UXPin’s code-based design tool.

UX Engineer Tools that Make The Job Easier

A UX engineer’s (UXE) toolkit includes design and engineering tools. They are engineers first, so most tools apply to development, but they also use a fair share of design tools.

Table of contents

Working between product design and development means that UX engineer tools must allow for collaboration between both disciplines. They must also work with DesignOps and DevOps, meaning UXEs also have many operational tools.

UXPin is a code-based design tool UX engineers use to bridge the gap between design and development. From advanced UI design and prototyping to design systems and component library syncing, UXPin enables UX engineers to work and collaborate more effectively. Sign up for a free trial to experience the world’s most advanced code-based design tool.

What Does a UX Engineer do?

Before we get into UX engineer tools, it’s important to define what a UX engineer does so we understand their diverse toolkit.

UX engineers work primarily in front-end development, collaborating with the design team throughout the end-to-end design process–effectively making them hybrid designer/engineers. They have limited design skills, predominantly focused on UI design, interaction design, and prototyping.

Working across design and development means UX engineers work with a stack of tools for each–more than the average UX designer or engineer.

UX engineers work with design tools when collaborating with designers, and development tools for their engineering work. 

For this reason, we’ve split UX engineer tools into two categories:

  • Design tools
  • Development tools

UX Engineer’s Design Tools

collaboration team prototyping

UX engineers collaborate with designers from ideation to design handoff. Their role is to look at ideas through an engineer’s lens and give technical advice and support during the product design process.

UI Design Tools

Rather than designing UI elements and assets, UX engineers use design tools to collaborate with designers. 

For example, if they’re using a design tool like UXPin, UX engineers use UXPin’s Comments to share feedback and collaborate on wireframes, mockups, and prototypes (low-fidelity and high-fidelity). Many design tools have a similar feature, allowing designers and UX engineers to collaborate throughout the design process.

Prototyping Tools

UX engineers rarely use traditional image-based prototyping tools. Instead, they use HTML, CSS, and Javascript (or a front-end framework) to build fully functioning prototypes.

The problem with prototyping in code is that it’s time-consuming and isn’t accessible for designers to collaborate–they must rely on the UX engineer to build the prototype and make changes.

With UXPin Merge, designers and UX engineers can drag-and-drop components from a repository to build fully functioning prototypes in UXPin.

Sync React components directly to UXPin using Git or Storybook for other technologies like Vue, Ember, Angular, and more.

With Merge, UX engineers benefit from a fully functioning prototype without the time and effort of writing code. Once prototyping is complete, UX engineers can copy components from the repository, plus changes in UXPin, to start the development process.

Other Design Tools

While UX engineers collaborate with designers throughout the design process, they tend to provide feedback and advice rather than actively researching, designing, and user testing.

A UX engineer will have access to many of these tools, but they’re more interested in the results and analytics than conducting user research and usability testing. 

UX Engineer’s Development Tools

code design developer

UX engineers complete most front-end development, leaving data integration, APIs, performance, analytics, and other technical “non-UI” work to front-end engineers.

Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

UX engineers use an integrated development environment (IDE) to write code and collaborate with the engineering team. Visual Studio Code is a widely used IDE with tons of extensions to help streamline the development process.

Engineers can choose from a wide range of IDEs, including native applications like Xcode for iOS and Android Studio for Android.

Component-Driven Development Tools

design system atomic library components

Storybook allows engineers to build UI components, layouts, templates, and user interfaces in isolation. The open-source tool is popular for engineering teams that use component-driven UI or Brad Front’s Atomic Design approach to building digital products and websites.

UX engineers use a tool like Storybook to share new components with engineering teams for reviewing and editing before release. Developers can also use Storybook to build and test user interfaces before committing to development.

Version Control – Git

Git is the most widely-used version control system. It allows engineers to track code changes while enabling development team members to simultaneously work on the same project.

Git is crucial for UX engineers because they often collaborate on customer-facing UIs with front-end developers.

Package Manager

UX engineers use packages to build and scale digital products. They can use privately-hosted packages or public repositories like NPM for Node.js apps or pub.dev for Flutter.

UX engineers must use the command line to interact with these repositories and, therefore, must be competent with working in the terminal.

Webpack

Front-end developers use multiple APIs, plugins, and dependencies to build websites and web applications, each with separate CSS, Javascript, and other assets. Front-end frameworks like React, Angular, and others also come with assets and dependencies.

These assets have a significant impact on performance. A module bundler like Webpack combines these assets into single .js and .css files, optimized for multiple browsers and devices.

Chrome Developer Tools

Chrome Developer Tools is a crucial web development tool. UX engineers use Google Developer Tools to inspect the user interface, find issues, and edit code in the browser.

Google Developer Tools allows UX engineers to work on a website or web application without editing code or additional testing tools. Engineers can also use Google Developer Tools to inspect other websites to find inspiration or research competitors.

Accessibility Tools

accessibility contrast wcag

As UX experts, UX engineers must test their code for accessibility. Here are several standard accessibility tools front-end developers and UX engineers use:

  • WAVE: WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) is an accessibility tool for front-end engineers. It scans the web page’s code and assets, flagging accessibility issues with suggestions for improvements. WAVE also has a contrast analyzer so UX engineers can double-check designer color palettes.
  • Accessibility Developer Tools: A Chrome extension for Google Developer Tools to test accessibility and performance.
  • Tenon: A powerful front-end tool for automating accessibility testing. Tenon integrates with many IDEs, content management systems, and project management software to optimize accessibility testing and fixing.

GitBook’s Front-end Developer Handbook has excellent accessibility tools and other front-end resources.

Why Code-Based Design Tools are Important for UX Engineers

Designers and engineers speak different languages and use separate tools. This disconnect makes it difficult to understand each other and collaborate effectively.

Code-based design tools like UXPin bridge this gap–making it easier for UX engineers and designers to collaborate.

Why Code-Based Design is Different

Traditional image-based design tools render raster graphics or static images of user interfaces. These tools have little or no functionality, making it difficult for engineers and stakeholders to understand the product’s design.

A code-based design tool like UXPin renders HTML, CSS, and Javascript, allowing designers to create interactive prototypes, accurately replicating the final product.

uxpin merge comparison 1

Advanced Code-Based Prototyping with UXPin

UXPin’s advanced prototyping features allow designers and UX engineers to build fully functioning prototypes–eliminating the need for UXEs to write code during prototyping and testing.

For example, one of the challenges with image-based tools is that you can’t use forms, making it necessary for UX engineers to develop a prototype for testing a simple onboarding sequence.

In UXPin, forms are fully functional. Designers can build a dynamic onboarding flow that captures user inputs while creating a unique user experience for each individual-like a welcome message or thank you page with the user’s name.

Some of the other high-fidelity prototypes you can only create with code-based tools like UXPin include:

  • Form validation: Use Expressions to check users enter the correct email format or if a password meets specific requirements.
  • Computational components: Build functioning shopping carts that respond to user interactions, dynamically calculating items, shipping, etc.
  • States: Create multiple States for a single component and switch between those states based on user interaction.
  • Interactivity: Use advanced Interactions with Javascript-like animations and transitions to create immersive experiences that react to users’ clicks, taps, scrolls, swipes, location, and other actions.
  • Variables: Design forms that capture user inputs and take action based on the information–like a personalized greeting or populating a user’s profile page with information provided during sign-up.

Increase Fidelity & Functionality With UXPin Merge

UXPin Merge is the ultimate UX engineer design tool! Merge allows you to sync components from a repository to UXPin’s editor so designers and UXEs can build fully functioning prototypes.

UX engineers can use a component’s props (or Args for our Storybook integration) to give designers more control or set limitations based on the company’s design system guidelines. Designers can edit props via UXPin’s properties panel or switch to JSX, depending on their preference.

UX engineers simply copy/paste the JSX code at the design handoff to start the development process. Any changes UXEs make to the repository automatically sync to UXPin, notifying designers of the change–creating a single source of truth between designers and developers.

UXPin’s low learning curve makes it easy for non-designers (including UX engineers) to design layouts and prototypes. PayPal proved this point when its product designers could build fully functioning high-fidelity prototypes 8X faster than experienced UI/UX designers.

Discover Merge