UXpin's Blog, page 80

Your Prototype Videos Could Come With Big Benefits

The amount of online video has grown tremendously in recent years. In 2020, 239 million people viewed digital videos. Google Sites, which includes YouTube, had 205 million unique views in January 2021. 

Obviously, people enjoy video content. Many companies, however, do not add videos to their products until right before their release dates. It makes more sense to add videos to your prototypes, especially when you use a prototyping tool that works just like the final product.

When you know that your videos work well within your prototype, you can expect to reap several benefits when you release your product.

Video can increase your conversion rates

Practically any type of movement can increase conversions of landing pages. Recent landing page trends that increase conversions include adding background videos, intro videos, autoplay videos, and animated videos. Even animated page elements could give your conversation rate a boost.

Marketer extraordinaire Neil Patel says that viewers are 64 to 85 percent more likely to purchase products after they watch videos. Higher conversion rates make sense when you consider that video can:

Demonstrate a product’s use.Show consumers how to use a product.Grab a viewer’s attention to keep them interested for longer than text or static images.Include compelling messages that pique the viewer’s interest.Add to a brand’s personality.

A video can only increase conversions when it works well, though. By including video in your prototype, you can test every feature before releasing it to the world. 

Can viewers interact with the video? Do embedded buttons work? Can people enlarge and shrink the video? You can only answer these questions through testing. That either happens in the prototyping phase or right before you release your product. Testing the prototype will give you more opportunities to optimize performance and avoid unexpected delays.

Video improves user engagement

Video does more than convert website and app users. Videos can also double user engagement.

Improving user engagement, of course, often leads to more sales. Not all digital products make money through sales, though. By adding video to your app or website, you can keep people looking at the screen longer. That often means increased advertising revenue, better brand authority, and future willingness to interact with content.

Videos can boost your search engine ranking

Adding video content to a web page can improve your search engine ranking over time. When you increase engagement, keep people on your pages longer, and attract more visitors, search engines notice and reward you with higher rankings. 

Video content can also appear directly on a search engine results page. When your video appears on the list of results, internet users are likely to watch it because it involves fewer steps than navigating to a website and reading text. People want to access the information they need as easily as possible. When you give them a simple way to watch a video, you will get their attention and earn their clicks.

Adding video to your prototypes

UXPin makes it easy for you to add videos to your designs. You can add video files saved on your computer or network. You can also add videos from YouTube and Vimeo. Accepted video files include:

MP4OggWebM

It’s great to preview your design with the added video before the product launch – just to show your team, stakeholders and developers how the final product should look and feel. Especially when you want to make the most of your design system, you can add approved videos there and add it to your design. 

Start making realistic prototypes with UXPin 

Videos in your products can improve conversations, engagement, and search engine positioning whereas adding them to prototypes can help you check that your product will work as planned thanks to testing that in a prototype. Don’t wait to implement your videos just before the launch, make sure you get them ready in your prototyping phase!

Get started with UXPin today to learn more about the benefits of creating prototypes that look so real!

The post Your Prototype Videos Could Come With Big Benefits appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Best Ways to Evaluate Your Design for Color Contrast

Using a color contrast checker can make your designs more attractive and accessible to people with vision problems. Worldwide, about 300 million people have colorblindness. About 2.2 billion people have vision issues that could make it difficult for them to use your digital products.

Understanding the positive and negative effects of some color combinations will put you on the path to reaching more people with your web and app designs.

Why color contrast makes your digital products better

A color contrast checker can make your digital products better in at least two important ways.

Follow WCAG 2 guidelines to make products more accessible

WCAG 2.1 (web content accessibility guidelines) and Success Criterion set rules you can follow to make your products more accessible to people with a broad range of vision impairments.

Accessibility checker in UXPin editor

Using a background color that blends in with text color can make it impossible for some people to use your products. Colorblind people might also have difficulty seeing text and images when you select a color that they do not perceive as the larger population does.

Something as simple as picking a different color can help people recognize:

User interface componentsWeb page contentNavigational menusLogos

A color picker that considers accessibility makes it much easier for you to create designs that more people can use. You can check your designs in our built-in color blindness simulator and contrast checker that comply with all the WCAG 2 guidelines. 

You can learn more about the topic by reading Things every designer needs to know about accessibility. It explains some of the ways you can help users by using large text and other features.

Reach a broader audience with color contrast

When you make your designs more accessible, more people can use your products. Ethically, you want to include as many people as possible because everyone deserves to enjoy using the same products. Financially, you want to include more people because it helps grow your business’s revenue.

Using color contrast attracts more users, which can lead to higher advertising revenues and more sales. It makes sense from ethical and business perspectives.

Recommended reading: New e-book: Web UI Design for the Human Eye (Colors, Space, Contrast)

Know the three WCAG levels

WCAG has three levels. Aim to reach the highest level so you can make your designs as accessible as possible.

The following explanations only cover vision-based accessibility. You will need to think about other features before you can reach people with other accessibility restrictions.

Level A (Beginner)

The presentation doesn’t rely exclusively on color.

Level AA (Intermediate)

The color contrast ratio between the text and background color is at least 4.5 to 1.

The color contrast ratio between user interface components, graphics, and nearby colors is at least 3 to 1.

Text can double in size without losing function or context.

Level AAA (Advanced)

The color contrast ratio between your text and background is at least 7 to 1.

Color contrast checker tools to explore

If you don’t have any visual impairments that prevent you from distinguishing colors, you probably can’t identify whether you reach the minimum contrast unless you use a color contrast checker. The following tools can help you choose colors that improve accessibility for more people.

Colour Contrast Analyser (CCA)

Colour Contrast Analyser is a free tool that you can download to your computer. Enter the hex code, CSS color format, or use the color picker tool to get your contrast ratio and determine whether you pass AA or AAA standards.

Built-In Contrast Checker 

See if your design tool has a built-in contrast checker to make it easier for you to evaluate the colors you used. At UXPin, you don’t need to search for plugins that will help you with that as it’s already there, in the editor. 

Colour Contrast Check

Colour Contrast Check makes it easy for you to know whether your design is WCAG 2 AA or WCAG AAA compliant. Enter the hex value of your background and foreground colors. The results will give your contrast ratio and a simple “yes” or “no” regarding compliance.

Accessible Color Generator

Accessible Color Generator lets you enter a color by hex code or a color palette. It will analyze your color and give you a contrasting color that meets AA or AAA guidelines for small, large, or normal text sizes.

Color Laboratory

The Color Laboratory tool lets you choose colors to see how they look next to each other. It will also augment the colors you select so you can see them the way someone with colorblindness would. It can give you quite a bit of insight into how colorblind people experience your products.

Color Safe

Color Safe generates color palettes based on WCAG guidelines. Choose a color, your text size, and font family to get a color palette that complies with WCAG standards.

APCA Contrast Calculator

The APCA Contrast Calculator is a tool designed to meet guidelines established by the American College Personnel Association. The APCA Contrast Calculator stands out for giving you a simple and full font matrix version of its tool. If you just want to know whether your text size and color contrasts meet APCA standards, you can use the simple version. If you want to include more variables, try the full font matrix version.

Ensure proper color contrast with UXPin 

UXPin lets you make prototypes that look and perform just like your final product. That way, you don’t have to worry about your color contrast changing between the prototyping and product release stages.

Try our 14-day trial to use the editor with a built-in contract checker and so much more! Sign up here. No credit card required! 

The post Best Ways to Evaluate Your Design for Color Contrast appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Make your remote UX workshop more effective with these key steps

It takes a lot of preparation and effort to create a remote UX workshop that keeps people engaged and teaches designers new skills. Considering that working remotely isn’t going away anytime soon, it makes sense that you learn how to make your remote workshop more effective.

Use the following steps to create a successful workshop that improves your industry authority.

Recommended article: Tips for Running Design Thinking Workshop

Steps to take before creating your remote UX design workshop

In some ways, planning a remote work design workshop is similar to putting together an in-person workshop. You will, however, need to think about how you can use technology to bring together attendees, facilitators and stakeholders.

Obviously, you need a fast, reliable internet connection that lets workshop participants communicate in real-time. Any internet disruption will create a frustrating environment that makes it nearly impossible to share your UX research, get feedback from your design team and use breakout rooms to brainstorm ideas for digital products.

Choose video conferencing and visual collaboration tools for your presentation

During a typical in-person workshop, you would have most of your participants gather in a conference room. But since people may join your UX workshop from all over the world, you need to choose video conferencing, visual collaboration and possibly other tools to make communication easier.

Some of the top video conferencing tools include:

SlackZoomGoogle HangoutsMicrosoft Teams

Your workshop participants will also need whiteboard apps that let them share their visual ideation. Popular remote whiteboard tools for brainstorming include:

MiroConceptboardInVision FreehandStormboard

UXPin also offers a real-time collaborative environment where team members can explore ideas and visualize them quickly through building wireframes. Also, you can easily manage access to designs and share previews without hassle! 

Set goals and realistic expectations for your workshop

Determine what subject you plan to cover during your workshop. For example, you could use your remote workshop to teach participants about topics like:

How to make digital product designs accessible to more peopleHow UX designers can visualize the user experienceUsing design thinking to create new productsTracking the user journey to improve engagementUsing code-based design platforms that make it easier for designers and developers to work together

You will have a limited amount of time for your workshop, so set realistic expectations. Unrealistic expectations will only make participants feel stressed. For instance, there might not be enough time to cover all WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards, so focus on the ones you find most important. Remember that you can always host more workshops in the future.

Work with your facilitator to create a program that reaches your goals

Your remote workshop needs an outline that keeps everyone on track and helps you stay within your time limits. Talk to your facilitator and colleagues to create a program in line with your objectives.

Distribute your workshop outline and assets

Once you have a workshop outline and any assets that participants will need, distribute them digitally at least one week ahead of time. For example, you might want to show your design system or distribute some examples and send it to everyone signed up for the workshop. That way, they can review materials ahead of time and prepare for the event.

During your UX remote workshop

On the day of your remote UX design workshop, prepare to adjust your approach as technical issues arise. Perhaps you will get lucky. A flexible mindset, however, will help you adjust to any changes without feeling overwhelmed.

Break the workshop into teams

After a brief icebreaker and a presentation that explains what people can expect to learn from your workshop, break participants into teams so they can practice what you have taught them. Ideally, you should keep your lecture short. Most people learn best by trying new things rather than listening to someone talk about them.

Have teams brainstorm with a whiteboard

You can treat brainstorming and whiteboarding as design sprints. You’re not looking for perfection. You just want to make sure your workshop participants learn how to incorporate your lesson into their designs.

A long workshop might involve prototyping. Often, though, you will only have time to cover basic skills that introduce people to concepts they can learn more about on their own. Alternatively, you could offer a series of remote UX workshops that culminate in a fully realized product.

Compare prototypes to discuss successes

After your breakout teams have completed their designs, take time for them to discuss their approach and what they learned. Keep people motivated, and encourage them to focus on their successes. Failures create learning opportunities too, so let teams talk about any challenges they encountered while working.

End with a Q&A session

Participants will likely have questions, so leave room for a short Q&A session at the end of your workshop.

After your design workshop

Every workshop can use some adjusting for improvement. Follow these steps to make your future remote UX workshops even better:

Ask attendees for feedback on their experience

Ask your workshop attendees to send you anonymous feedback about their experiences. Google Forms is a good tool for this, as it lets you ask both multiple-choice and open-ended questions.

Evaluate your remote UX workshop approach

Review your feedback, and watch a recording of your workshop. Keep your eyes open for ways to improve, and think about those options as you prepare for your next design workshop.

Recommended article: When Remote Design Fails: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

Use UXPin to improve your remote UX workshop

UXPin is one of the most effective online tools for collaborating and exploring the latest design trends. You get a real-time collaborative environment that lets people share their ideas and visualize them in no-time. You can use Material Design patterns and built-in forms that make you prototype faster.  

Sign up for a 14-day trial to see how much you can achieve in the short time that you have for UX workshops. 

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UX Writing and UX Design: How to Bring Them Together

More often than not, product development starts with a UX designer making a wireframe or a UX writer working on the text.

The first step determines what happens after that. If your writers have wireframes full of lorem ipsum, they can try to create influential text for landing pages, blog posts, and other products. If your UX designers have text intended for the target audience, they need to find ways to incorporate those words into the overall product experience.

No matter which approach you take, product managers lose the opportunity for UX copy and UX design experts to collaborate to discover options that could dramatically improve functionality, usability, and accessibility.

The following strategies should help you break down the barriers between your writers and design team so they can develop better digital experiences that attract more users.

Recommended reading: 13 Ways to Make Your UI Writing Better

Make the product manager responsible for breaking down silos

Ultimately, the product manager needs to take responsibility for breaking down the silos that prevent UX copywriters and designers from collaborating. Management must take control of the process because creating a positive user experience depends on so many factors, including:

Microcopy that makes the user interface more intuitive.User research that shows what types of messages and designs the target audience responds to.Research from content strategists and marketers.Designs and copy that lead users through the sales funnel.

Too many product managers seem to think that copy and design can exist independently of each other. In reality, you get better results when your text and designs work together to create a unique brand identity. For example, you don’t want edgy writing on a website with a boring design. The opposite is also true. A bold design deserves more than plain ux writing.

How to integrate UX writing into your design process

Of course, it isn’t fair to say make product managers in charge of bringing teams together without giving them tools for collaboration. You can’t count on expectations alone to break down silos. You need real tools and strategies that get results.

Bring all of your teams to brainstorming sessions

Brainstorming sessions shouldn’t happen behind closed doors that prevent team members from contributing ideas. While you don’t want the chaos of 25 people throwing out ideas at the same time, you do want the diverse ideas you get from inviting representatives from every department. If you hire freelancers, make sure you invite some of them, too. They can give you insight into how other companies handle the challenges you encounter.

Inviting members from every team means that you need input from:

CopywritersDesignersDevelopers

Encourage people to collaborate with each other during the brainstorming sessions. These days, you might have some people working remotely, so make sure you choose video conferencing and collaboration apps that make it easier for them to contribute.

You can improve the effectiveness of your brainstorming session by:

Defining and communicating your goals a few days early so people can come prepared.Keeping the time limit fairly short (between 20 and 30 minutes).Encouraging everyone to explore their ideas without fear—while also interrupting bad ideas quickly so they don’t take up too much time.Giving participants a way to submit ideas anonymously to help ensure that shy people contribute.Recognizing that some brainstorming sessions don’t yield great results, so you may need to regroup later.Encourage team members to learn about other jobs in product development

Do the members of your design team understand that excellent UX writing requires a keen understanding of behavioral and cognitive psychology? It’s not all about following grammatical rules and using fancy words. Often, good writers have to break the rules they know so they can reach their target audiences better. It’s a craft that requires a lot of practice and consideration.

Do your writers know that designers play an essential role in improving conversion rates? Their images, fonts, white spaces, and other design components have a significant influence over how people respond to everything from calls to action (CTAs) to informative blog posts. Designers even need to think about meeting the needs of people with disabilities. It’s a complex job that demands thoughtful experimentation.

Try pairing a writer and designer to work on a project. Even an hour or two working together could show the professionals how much they rely on each other to reach common goals.

Improve your digital products with UXPin and make UX writing easier! 

Since a software update in 2018, UXPin has been able to import real data instead of forcing designers to rely on lorem ipsum. The term “data” doesn’t have to refer to numbers, though. UXPin can import fields from JSON, CSV, and Google Sheets. That includes chunks of text created by your UX copywriters.

Using data sheets that can store human-readable content gives you several advantages. Some of the benefits include:

Keeping all of your product’s copy in one location.Building a content strategy that converts readers without straying from the brand voice.Scheduling when you plan to release social media posts.Letting designers easily move content into their work without the negative influence of human error.

UXPin even has a spell check tool that adds a level of quality assurance to your product creation. The more opportunities you take to review text for minor spelling and grammatical issues, the more opportunities you create to make your product look professional and reliable.

Go with UXPin to improve your collaboration

UXPin is a design tool that makes it easy for your writers and designers to collaborate in real-time and to get rid of going back and forth with inefficient email communication. See how it works with a 14-days UXPin trial – all for free! 

The post UX Writing and UX Design: How to Bring Them Together appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Making It Easier for a Designer and Developer to Collaborate on Projects

The gap between designers and developers often slows workflows and makes it harder to bring products to market. Without strong collaboration between your design and development product teams, you will likely find that your company has to correct a lot of mistakes before you can finalize a product and release it to consumers.

You don’t have to tolerate the designer-developer gap. The following tips will bring them closer together, improve your process, and lead to better user experiences.

Recommended reading: Coding Designers and Design Collaboration with Developers – 2020 Design Trends with Joe Cahill

 



Create a design system that uses the same components for designers and developers

Creating a design system that uses the same components for designers and developers is the most important thing you can do to bridge the gap between teams. Your design system should provide everything that your people need during the designing and coding phases, including the product’s approved:

Typography
Colors
Icons
Photographs
GIFs
Sounds
Interactive elements

You can improve every step of production by using the same design system for your designers and developers so that they don’t waste time on deciding which font or color to use, and how to code this button and that form. Traditionally, companies struggle with this approach because they take an image-based approach to building products and you need to put a lot of effort to maintain the design system. After the design team finishes its work, developers need to find ways to make components functional. A code-based approach eliminates the gap by giving designers and developers access to a real single source of truth that can be reused anytime. 

See examples of design systems.

Ready with your design system?  Go one step further with UXPin Merge – the technology of coded components. It lets users import and keep in sync coded components from GIT repositories to the UXPin Editor. 

Imported components are 100% identical to the components used by developers during the development process. It means that components are going to look, feel and function (interactions, data) just like the real product experienced by the end-users and they are consistent with your design system and production-ready! It means that not only do you bridge the gap between design and development, but also cut down the time to market as it takes much less time to both design and code a digital product. 

Recommended reading: Why It’s Time for Designers to Switch From Image-Based to Code-Based Design

 



Improve communications between web designers and front-end developers

Your designer and development teams need easy ways to communicate with each other. Not too long ago, you had limited ways to improve communication between teams. You could have them share a workspace or add everyone to a social media group.

Today, you have ample tools to improve communication and collaboration, even when your team members work remotely. Some of your best options include applications like:

Slack 
Trello
Google Workspace

When you need a replacement for face-to-face conversations, you can use video conferencing apps like:

Zoom
GoToMeeting
Microsoft Teams

The easier communication becomes, the more likely your team members are to talk to each other. Give them the tools they need to stay in contact and build professional relationships. 

Invite designers and developers to product design brainstorming sessions

Teammates get left out of critical brainstorm sessions far too often. The project manager might think to invite the development team’s leader for insight into the challenges of adding certain features to a product.

Get more designers and developers involved in brainstorming sessions to build camaraderie, share ideas, and discover innovative concepts that you might have missed without everyone’s participation.

You can make your brainstorming sessions more successful by:

Choosing diverse participants with unique skills.
Establishing rules for your session and communicating those rules before participants gather.
Setting a timer so no one has to keep an eye on the time.
Following an orderly process when asking people to share their ideas (surprising someone will only make them nervous).
Writing down every idea without passing judgment. 
Scheduling a follow-up meeting later in the day or week so your facilitator can provide feedback and your group can discuss their favorite ideas.

As an extra benefit, getting more people involved in the initial steps of product development will show departments that everyone has something useful to offer regardless of the role they play within the company.

 



Encourage UX designers and web developers to learn about each other’s roles

Unless your UX designers and web developers spend a lot of time working together, they might not know much about the roles they play in product creation. Introducing your team to the basic terminology and types of work that other group performs could help bridge the communication gap in your design process.

That doesn’t mean everyone needs to share skill sets. They just need to know enough to communicate and grasp the nature of what other people contribute. 

Knowledge for your designers

Your web design team doesn’t need to learn how to code—although they might want to pick up some basic HTML skills—but they should know the popular tools used by developers. That includes programming languages like:

PHP
JavaScript
Java
CSS

Knowing about essential web development tools like JQuery should help your designers understand the amount of work involved in their requests. If nothing else, they should gain a deeper respect for the jobs developers do.

Knowledge for your front-end and back-end developers

Developers need a lot of technical knowledge and coding skills to turn designs into interactive components. Some of them might mistakenly believe that designers do less work than them. From an outsider’s perspective, it could seem that designers do little more than play with Adobe Photoshop.

Of course, designers also have extraordinary skills that contribute to product usability and popularity. Your coders should know that designers have years of experience:

Creating user interfaces that align with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Selecting typography that appeals to the product’s target market.
Following detailed style guides that make diverse visual elements feel like part of a larger whole.

When everyone understands their colleagues’ levels of expertise, you might see improved respect and teamwork across teams.

Recommended reading: You Can Become a Code-Based Designer Without Learning Code

Adopt UXPin Merge to bridge the gap between designers and developers

UXPin Merge gives you a unique, code-based approach to designing and prototyping your products. Bridge the gap between designers and developers by choosing a tool that already uses live code instead of image-based elements  and tap into the strength of a design system that applies equally to designers and developers.

Request access to UXPin Merge to experience the benefits of code-based design that encourages collaboration between your teams.

Discover Merge

The post Making It Easier for a Designer and Developer to Collaborate on Projects appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Breaking Down Silos to Improve Digital Product Development

Breaking down silos makes it easier for everyone involved in a project to work together towards a common goal. Unfortunately, traditional working environments make cross-team collaboration different. Newer tools with a code approach can give you an easier way to eliminate organizational silos.

Unsplash

Adopting team collaboration tools doesn’t always eliminate silos, though. The following steps should help you break the silo mentality to make your digital product development more effective.

Why you need to break the silo mentality

Silos create inefficiencies that can adversely affect your teams. You might not even know that silos exist within your organization. Once you learn to notice their effects, though, you will likely spot departmental silos everywhere and see how they interfere with your company achieving a common goal.

Some of the common problems created by silos include:

A narrow focus on individual tasks that do not contribute to the bigger picture.Continued functionality issues that no one within the design team knows how to solve.Longer product development, testing, and release timelines.Lack of insight into how the company could improve its product development process.Inefficiencies that add to project expenses and disappoint stakeholders.Practical steps to break down silos and encourage information sharing

With these issues in mind, consider how the following steps could break down silos and build a better company culture.

Form a leadership team that includes a representative from every department

You can build trust and improve communication by creating a leadership team that includes at least one representative from every department. The leadership team can keep the big picture in mind while steering the project toward its final goal.

Establish a unified vision before breaking the common goal into individual tasks

Communication doesn’t always trickle down to every member of a team. You can eliminate this problem by creating a unified vision and breaking the common goal into individual tasks. The tasks can get assigned to teams.

If you start with small tasks and hope that they come together in the end, you will likely find disappointment.

Invite team members from different departments to meetingsUnsplash

The pandemic forced companies to adopt remote working environments. Luckily, videoconferencing apps stepped up to help colleagues and freelancers from all over the world engage with each other in virtual environments.

Since you might need to invite marketers, developers, designers, and other colleagues, you should choose a videoconferencing service that can accommodate several people. You can even get marketing teams engaged to learn from their insights and help them plan for how they will sell the finished product.

Some of the top options include:

Zoom, BlueJeans, Google Meet

If you expect fewer or more participants, you can usually choose plans that match your unique needs. Choosing the right plan helps ensure that you get input from different teams without spending more money than necessary.

Many teleconferencing apps will also let you track metrics and record your meetings so you can focus on interacting with colleagues instead of taking notes. You should notice improved employee engagement when people can talk to each other without writing down their thoughts. You have to put a premium on engagement when working with remote teams.

Choose collaboration tools that appeal to all departments

Until recently, designers and developers often found themselves at odds when creating digital products. Even when they share long-term goals, their specializations encourage them to think about creating products in different ways. That’s why there’s drift when it comes to the handoff process. It’s best to use a tool that will allow both devs and designers to collaborate without getting in each other’s ways. A solution with code-powered technology can help with that. 

When designers use already-coded components that can be easily reused, there’s no room for a disconnect between what is designed and what can be coded. Not to mention the time efficiency that tools like that offer – both with designing and coding the final product based on the prototype. 

Create a design system that contains all approved assets

Every team working on a product should have access to a design system that contains all approved assets and components. A design system ensures that diverse teams work toward a shared aesthetic and function even when they do not spend much time talking to each other.

When you go for a code-approach in design on top of that, you don’t have to worry about syncing the changes in the code with the design components as that can be done automatically. Thanks to that you have all the approved assets up to date. 

Share information between teams as you make progress

Regular updates can incentivize developers, designers, and team members of other departments to stay focused on their projects.

Working in a vacuum often feels like a thankless—or even pointless—task. Someone designing icons might lose inspiration because they do not see what role the icons will play in the product. Similarly, a developer tweaking interactive forms might not see the point of their work until they witness it in action.

When you reach a milestone, celebrate by showing how everyone’s cumulative efforts have taken you closer to your ultimate goal. If possible, you might enjoy lunch or a drink together. If you work remotely, you can still enjoy a fun meeting that focuses more on building excitement and trust than working on the project.

Eliminate organizational silos with UXPin Merge

UXPin has always been a code-based tool for digital design. UXPin Merge takes the technology a step further by letting designers design with production-ready components That means developers get the opportunity to review designs from the perspective of fully functional code and quickly implement it

UXPin Merge also works in conjunction with several systems, including Material UI, CA Technologies Mineral UI, and IBM Carbon. This approach makes it even easier for engineers to participate in prototype development and making sure designers use components that have already been coded.

Discover more effective, collaborative ways to solve DesignOps challenges. UXPin Merge can help break down silos, reduce design inefficiency, and improve customer experience to meet your company’s goals better than ever.

Discover Merge

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Encourage collaborative design to build better products

“Design is a process. An intimate collaboration between engineers, designers, and clients,” — Henry Dreyfuss, design pioneer.

Collaborative design has helped people make some of the greatest products in modern history.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen collaborated to build Microsoft, the world’s largest software company and Windows innovator. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak needed each other’s collective talents to found and grow Apple. Ben and Jerry made some of the world’s best ice cream by sharing ideas and working side-by-side. 

From the MacBook to cookie dough ice cream, collaborative design has proven itself a successful approach to product development.

You can build better products by encouraging collaboration that draws from your team’s collective talents and refines decent concepts into excellent designs.

Some UX/UI designers prefer working alone, so they don’t want to participate in cross-teams collaboration until they have concrete concepts that they love. Despite reluctance from some team members, a culture of collaboration results in better product outcomes. Minds mesh, ideas flow, and designers share a common goal: excellent, intuitive designs that make users feel comfortable.

Here are some tips to help you add a collaborative design process to your team’s workflow.

1. Set shared goals

UX design involves multiple processes, from brainstorming to testing, requiring various team members at all times. But not all these team members agree or share the same common goal. UX designers often work in silos — researchers research, designers design, and testers test. This segmented approach prevents a collaborative design process and blocks communication between people who can build on each other’s ideas. 

Setting shared goals helps solve this issue by making more people aware of the individual tasks and overall purpose of the project.

Setting shared goals — and communicating these goals properly — gives team members a clear focus and direction. Everyone knows who’s doing what, how, and when. Team members know what you want to achieve, and you know what they expect you to achieve.

Shared goals don’t always demolish silos, but they do add windows that let team members see the bigger picture. While communicating these shared goals it’s also best to let members of other parts of the product team have a seat at the table to improve the communication flow. 

2. Invest in collaborative tools

Team members often work in isolation because they use different tools. Design processes become fragmented, resulting in poor design. Imagine if you could centralize your entire UX/UI project with one tool.

UXPin Merge lets everyone collaborate on the same project, designing from one source of truth. Create design systems with pattern libraries, style guides, and libraries that give everyone access to approved assets.

Choosing a collaborative tool like UXPin with Merge technology also helps prevent software bloat that can contribute to inconsistencies in design and functionality. Merge lets your team approach projects from design and code-based perspectives to give you a straightforward, uncluttered way to create responsive prototypes that are almost production-ready! It’s possible thanks to using coded components that cut down the whole product development process including designing and coding. 

The collaborative design process becomes much easier when everyone from designers to developers can use the same tool to reach a common goal.

3. Communicate better

UX/UI teams underestimate the power of communication, especially with larger teams. Not articulating design thoughts, ideas, and processes could render an entire project useless from the start. 

Communication failures in UX/UI manifest themselves in various ways:

“A developer who receives the wireframes may assemble detailed feedback on missing functionality, not knowing that the functionality is beyond the scope of the deliverable,” says the User Experience Professionals Association. “The result is frustration about a seemingly incompetent usability professional who doesn’t understand what the system is about, and additional frustration when the developer learns that the feedback was in vain because it was way too early for scrutinizing wireframes on that level.”

How can you improve communication in a way that encourages collaborative design? Try:

Choosing project management tools like Trello or Asana that let you assign tasks and track their progress.Getting UX/UI team members in the same room to discuss ideas and identify potential barriers to success.Finding an application like Zoom or GoToMeeting that lets any remote workers you have participate from their locations.Selecting a project methodology like Agile, Scrim, or Kanban that works well for your team.Making sure everyone knows that they can come to the project manager to talk about their concerns without worrying about repercussions.

“By encouraging participants to suspend judgment of ideas, participants will feel free to generate unusual ideas, bold ideas, humorous ideas, and even absurd ideas,” says Forbes magazine.

4. Lead with collaboration in mind

Project managers need to lead by example. You cannot create a collaborative environment simply by telling people to work together. You must open yourself to the collaborative design process.

What does leading with collaboration in mind look like? It means you need to do things like:

Accept feedback without feeling personally attacked.Ask team members to review your work and give you criticisms.Sit down with designers — in person or virtually — to brainstorm ideas without judgment.Introduce new team members to make sure they feel welcome.Resist the temptation to dismiss ideas until you get more insight from your team.Accept difficult tasks to show that everyone on the team must make sacrifices. 

Project leaders need teams that respect them and follow their management style. If you don’t demonstrate a commitment to collaboration, no one else will.

UXPin Merge makes collaborative design easier

It takes a village to build better products. Collaboration leads to better design outcomes, allowing researchers, prototypers, and designers to exchange creative ideas and streamline workflows. 

Choosing a collaborative design tool is one of the most important steps you can take to start building better products. Request access to UXPin Merge to discover features that bring every member of your team together so they can work toward a common goal.

Discover Merge

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Webinar: From Style Guide to Interactive Design System in Enterprise

How to manage and build a Design System for an enterprise? As you may already know this single source of truth helps enterprises bridge the gap between designers and developers and speed up the development process. It is thanks to the set-out standards and reusable components that the design and development workflow is cut down and the digital experience is unified. 

Remember that Design Systems are both a great efficient solution for an enterprise but also a challenging process to set out every piece of information in a clear and easy-to-use way. If you’re convinced to build a Design System, or you already have one – new questions may arise. What are the best examples and practices to follow? How to organize and manage your system in the best way possible? 

You may also wonder if your enterprise makes the most of a Design System and cares about the cohesive experience. After all, why should you go through all the work with standards and documentation if most product teams won’t be using them and caring about the Design System consistency? Why not use then simple Style Guides? 

To clear some of the confusion and answer these questions, we decided to host a webinar with Johnson & Johnson: From Style Guide to Interactive Design System in Enterprise. J&J’s Experience Design Team will talk about their Design System examples and show best design practices to reach consistency and ultimate efficiency. 

You’ll learn about :Transforming Style Guides into interactive Design Systems. Atomic Design and Rapid Interactive Prototyping. Promoting the adoption of Design Systems in your organization. 

Also, there will be a Q&A session to ask J&J’s experts some questions. 

Date: April 15, 2021Time: 1:00 PM EDT / 7:00 PM CEST

The post Webinar: From Style Guide to Interactive Design System in Enterprise appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Strategies to Design at Scale and Iterate Products More Efficiently

Over the last few decades, companies have learned that they need to embrace digital transformation and release digital products that meet consumer expectations. As a result, developers have added a lot of UX professionals to their teams. The change has forced designers to rethink how they can design at scale without creating an impossible amount of work.

According to Erica Rider, UX lead for developer tools at PayPal, companies used to hire about 10 UX developers to every one designer. The designer would create what a product looked like. Then, developers would turn the designs into functional components. However, when supporting a great number of developers, the PayPal team needed to find the way to scale the design and support a lot of developers with a small design team. The only way was to enable product teams to do design on their own. That’s how now, three designers can work with about 1,000 developers on approximately 100 products.

As companies demand more from their designers, it becomes increasingly important for design teams to find strategies that let them scale design systems with little effort.

Recommended viewing: Scale design efficiently with DesignOps2.0, featuring Erica Rider

Integrate design and DevOps

The typical product design process doesn’t scale easily because it relies on several steps, including:

Product managers writing descriptions of their ideas and sending the descriptions to design teams,Designers creating several versions of the ideas before they find a good design that matches the product manager’s concept,Product designers sending their work to developers, who have to translate the designs into features that give the digital product exceptional usability, which isn’t always simple and fast.

Not surprisingly, the process involves a lot of back and forth before the project manager receives a completed prototype that works as intended.

Teams can improve the process by integrating design and DevOps. A version of this approach might include:

DefineDesignDevelopEvaluateDeployOperateDiscover

The process repeats to continue improving the product until the company discontinues it.

Create a design system of approved components

Few strategies matter more than creating a design system of approved digital assets for your product ecosystem. A good design system will include:

Pattern librariesDesign patternsTypographyBrand languageCoded componentsIconography

Ideally, anyone with a question about building the product should find the correct answer in the design system. No matter how many people you add to a team, the workflow remains efficient because the design system solves problems at the source.

Adopt strategic UX concepts to Design at Scale

Applying strategic design principles can also help scale design systems as needed. Strategic design can include several concepts. Some critical considerations when you need to scale design systems include:

Making searches global

When UX designers need to find UI components, typography, icons, and other assets in the design system, they shouldn’t have to wade through multiple search results.

Product teams that search for an asset shouldn’t get a dozen results related to a dozen products. They should get the correct result for the query. Multiple results will only create confusion among team members and stakeholders. At the very least, it will slow the DesignOps and DevOps processes. At worst, it will lead to inconsistent UX design that confuses users.

Implementing guardrails

A small team of designers cannot let developers overstep boundaries. Implement guardrails that prevent developers from making mistakes. Ideally, you will adopt design tools that make it easy for you to make rules and boundaries clear.

Reducing variables

Reduce variables to simplify the roadmap from design to iteration. The fewer options people need to consider, the easier it becomes for them to work efficiently. Now, you can design at scale without adding more members to your group.

Make design system changes global and automatic

Designers should revisit their design systems at least once every few years. Otherwise, they will spend time supporting products that look outdated.

Changing something in your design system, however, shouldn’t mean that developers need to update every product’s code. It should happen globally and automatically. When you change icons in your design system, the icons should automatically update in your product.

If your design tools don’t let you coordinate at this level, you will waste hundreds of hours. No one, including large corporations and small startup operations, can afford that much-wasted effort. It’s best to have a single source of truth tool that lets the developer change the code of a component to update all the designs with it. Automatically. 

Narrow the differences between prototypes and productshttps://uxpincommunity.cdn.prismic.io/uxpincommunity%2F469f590d-d37e-4741-ba52-5d81a4693ced_merge_3.mp4

In an ideal world, you can’t tell the difference between a prototype and a finished product. How often does that happen, though?

When you use UXPin Merge, you can have trouble noticing any differences between your prototypes and products. That’s because you get fully interactive prototypes that use real data and you build your prototypes with already-interactive components that are in fact, live code. You can interact with the prototype just like your users will interact with your finalized product.

Scaling your design system happens much more rapidly when you can test prototypes instead of products. Explore, experiment, and make mistakes during the prototyping phase. Your efforts will lead to a better product that impresses users. Considering that the Google Play Store offers more than 2.5 million apps and the App Store has more than 1.8 million apps, you need to make a good first impression for your product to succeed.

Adopt UXPin Merge so designers and developers can collaborate easily

Adopting UXPin Merge is one of the most important ways to scale your design system strategically. UXPin Merge adapts to the way that your teams work. Your developers can import React.js component codes, add Material UI Design System to libraries, and create prototypes within a drag-and-drop environment.

UXPin Merge will also turn your designers’ work into HTML and CSS without any coding knowledge or support from DevOps as the components that they use are already coded. Designers can also reuse existing interactive components, stop recreating lines that have already been turned into code, and use real data to test their interaction designs.

Discover how much easier designing, developing, and prototyping become when you rely on a code-powered tool with new technology. You don’t need to worry about scaling your design system. Anyone on your team can access it to design at scale as your company’s needs evolve.

Discover Merge

The post Strategies to Design at Scale and Iterate Products More Efficiently appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

How Collaboration Makes You a Better Designer

You probably think that you participate in design collaboration every day. You complete one stage of a design, then you hand it to someone else who works on the next step. That isn’t true collaboration, though. That’s more like working at an assembly line where everyone has assigned roles.

Real collaboration involves getting together with other people and contributing to every step of the design. This process could make you a better designer.

Use ideation to develop great design concepts

Ideation gives you a chance to consider the problem you want to solve and start looking for solutions.

You can think of ideas sitting in a room by yourself. Unless you have an extremely creative mind, though, you will probably find your thoughts returning to similar processes over and over. When an approach solves one problem, your brain uses it to answer the next question. It doesn’t take long before your brain falls into a pattern. The pattern might lead to solutions, but they get tired and boring after a while.

Making ideation a part of design collaboration opens your mind to new possibilities. Instead of having a conversation with yourself, you open your mind to ideas from other people. Suddenly, you have more approaches that could lead to a solution. Just as suddenly, your go-to ideas might not seem so great anymore.

Ideation techniques that you can use during design collaboration sessions include:

Brainstorming—when everyone shares ideas verbally.Mind mapping—when people create visual ideas and use free association to add more thoughts connected to the original idea.Storyboarding—when the group makes visual storylines that show how your product might work.Worst possible idea—a rather fun approach that opens creative pathways by encouraging people to come up with their worst possible concepts.

Design collaboration doesn’t have to start when you begin drawing lines. It can start when people share ideas with each other.

Design collaboration gives you insights into your product

Design collaboration projects can include people who work outside of your skillset. No matter how much talent and experience you have with UX design, you need to get other people involved to make your products successful and gather their feedback.

Perhaps you don’t include them in every step of the collaboration, but you can get a lot of insight into your designs by requesting feedback from developers, sales reps, and customer service reps. Cross-team collaboration lets you see your product from multiple perspectives. If you can think about designing projects from a sales perspective, you might discover ways to make products more appealing to consumers. If you can see your design from the perspective of people who work in customer services, you could find that it makes sense for you to include features that answer questions for puzzled users.

How to make it seamless without going back-and-forth with email feedback? Make the most of your tool’s collaboration possibilities like leaving comments in the design, sharing access to the prototype with the people you want, and applying changes in real time – even while different teams are working on the same design. And went the project is ready, send its link with all the needed specifications to the developers.

Learn to accept constructive criticism

When you work in a creative field, you can become protective of your ideas. When someone criticizes your design choices, you can feel like you’ve been attacked personally. In most cases, the other person doesn’t intend to hurt your feelings. They just want to provide feedback on design that adds to the product’s success.

The more you open yourself to criticism and outside perspectives, the easier it becomes to accept constructive feedback without feeling defensive and improve the collaboration process

How does letting your guard down make you a better designer?

Imagine that you take your latest design concept to a meeting with four other people. Someone points out that they don’t think your navigation menu will go over well with the target audience. Perhaps you’ve made a design for highly sophisticated users when you should have created one for average users.

If you don’t know how to accept criticism, you feel hurt, and you return to your desk angry. You’re not in the right mood to do good work. You could waste precious hours nurturing your ego instead of looking for smart ways to solve the problem.

This level of defensive reaction rarely happens when you participate in a lot of design collaborations. You get so used to feedback that you don’t take it personally. It’s not about you, after all. It’s about making a product that users will love.

Unlearn your creative approach during design sprints

Building habits makes it easier for creative people to accomplish their goals. A process called “habit stacking” can even help you add useful habits to your day. The more habits you stack, the more you can move from one task to the next without putting much thought into the process.

At some point, habits can become limitations, though. When you use habit stacking to make sure you doodle design ideas while having your morning coffee, you get positive results. If you develop habits that force you to approach each project from the same perspective, though, you can hurt your creativity. It’s important to notice the difference between a positive and negative habit.

Participating in a design sprint with other people can knock you out of your humdrum process. Formal design sprints often take place over the workweek. During each day, you take steps toward your goal. Setting a time limit encourages you to think with your gut, which can lead to new creative ideas that never occurred to you before. 

If a week-long design sprint doesn’t fit your schedule, you can take a faster approach. The rapid sprints help people break the habit of worrying about the quality. When you only have a 25-minute design collaboration session, you work as quickly as possible. You make a lot of mistakes, but you make a lot of discoveries, too.

Add diversity to your design team’s skills

When you work alone, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut. Your designs get the job done, so you never think about developing new skills that could improve your work.

Design collaboration forces people to acknowledge their limitations and learn from other people. 

For the best results, seek out other professionals who have different backgrounds from you. Adding diversity to a workplace helps everyone perform better. You don’t have to rely on your team members to grow, though. Use social media to find potential collaborators who live in other parts of the world. You can learn a lot from each other.

Collaborating can improve your performance

Getting more work done doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to spend extra time fine-tuning your designs. Surveys find that collaborative work results in five times better performance.

Setting up a time to collaborate takes a little effort, but the result is worth it. 

Discover new design tools

Design collaboration gives you opportunities to see how other people work. You might find that some people use design tools you’ve never heard of. That’s like a painter discovering that someone uses a completely different type of canvas!

You can share UXPin easily with collaborators because it lets people experience your prototypes and leave feedback without creating accounts. As long as they have a link to your work, they can access it.

UXPin also has a real-time collaborative environment that lets you and others work on the same project simultaneously. Sign up for a free trial with UXPin now so you can start collaborating with other designers all over the world. You don’t even need to meet, you can collaborate virtually.

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