NYX Ditech

Lets Talk!

Tag: UX designer

Categories
UX UX Design Web Design

10 Rules Every UX Designer Must Know

UX Designer

User experience or UX is a vast discipline. Anyone who practices UX design should be equipped with skills in many different fields. UX designer creates designs based on their knowledge, experience, trends, creativity, and gut feeling. While there’s no rule of thumb, or a fixed combination of ingredients when it comes to designing fantastic user experiences, here are ten golden rules which will surely help you in creating an excellent experience for people.

1. UX And UI Are Different

Swapping UX with UI, as if the two are the same, is a common mistake among many UX designer. It’s essential to understand the difference between the two disciplines. User Interface is the space where interactions between humans and a product occur, while User Experience is an emotional outcome after interactions with a product.

2. User Research Is a Natural First Step In The Design Process

It should come as no surprise that one of the most important factors you should consider when designing a product is the audience. If you plan to design a product your users will love, you must have an idea of what your audience actually wants and needs. And this means user research should be an essential part of the UX design process. It’s critical to keep your users top of mind before you start designing! This will allow you to provide value for people who’ll use your product and focus on benefits instead of features.

3. Test With Real Users

Designers often assume that people who will use their interfaces are like them. As a result, UX designer projects their behaviors and reactions to users. But thinking that you are your user is a fallacy. This effect in psychology is called the false-consensus — a tendency to assume that others share our beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context.

Most probable, the people who’ll use your product have different backgrounds, different mindsets, different mental models, and different goals. 

There is a technique that helps UX designer overcome false-consensus bias, called usability testing. If you want to build products that users love, then you have to focus on testing. Testing with real users allows designers to learn how to create products that are right for those who will use them. This may be time-consuming, but it’s the only way to be sure that you’re moving in the right direction.

4. Prototype Before You Build a Real Product

Skipping prototyping and putting a lot of effort into building an actual product is another common mistake among many design teams. When we put a lot of effort into creating something that we believe is great, it can be stressful to realize that our solution doesn’t work as expected when we release it into the wild.

Prototyping is creating a model of a product so that it can be tested. Prototyping allows you to test your hypothesis before spending time with an engineering team building the actual product. UX designer can use different design techniques for prototyping. One useful prototyping technique is called rapid prototyping. It’s a popular way of quickly creating the future state of a product, be it a website or an app, and validating it with a group of users.

5. Avoid Lorem Ipsum And Dummy Placeholders

Almost every product is based around content, whether that’s text, images, or videos. It can be said that design is an enhancement to the content. Yet many designers don’t take content into account during the design phase — they use Lorem Ipsum instead of real copy and placeholders instead of real images. While such a design might look great on a designer’s artboard, the picture might be completely different when the same design is filled with actual data.

6. Aim To Be Consistent And Straightforward

The hallmark of a great user interface is simplicity and consistency

In the context of digital products, simplicity means that’s it’s easy to understand and interact with a product. Your users shouldn’t need to read instructions to understand how to use an app or have a map to navigate through it. It’s part of your job as an interface designer to make things clear and subtly guide them from where they are to where they need to go.

Interfaces must also be kept consistent throughout a design. In an attempt to make designs appear more creative and memorable many UX designer intentionally add inconsistencies in style. For example, different color schemes can be used on different pages on a website. Such design decisions often cause confusion and frustration in users. Thus, it’s always important to keep the design element familiar, reinforcing the most important facets of your design at every turn. Remember to apply the Principle of Least Astonishment to your product design.

7. Design Must Be Usable And Accessible

Design for a diverse set of users that will interact with your products

When it comes to design, designers often obsess over the look and appeal instead of functionality and accessibility. Most of us try to make things look beautiful. Quite often, this leads to a situation where aesthetics become more important for UX designer than usability. Of course, aesthetics are important, and we definitely should try to make our designs appealing, but only after we have usable products. The most important job of digital products and services is to perform a function.

8. Design Is An Iterative Process

It’s important to understand that UX design isn’t a linear process. The phases of the UX process (ideation, prototyping, testing) often have considerable overlap, and usually, there’s a lot of back-and-forths. As you learn more about the problem, the users, and the project details (especially any constraints), it may be necessary to revisit some of the research undertaken or try out new design ideas. Don’t think that it’s possible to make your design perfect right after just one iteration. Instead, refine ideas to the point where you can test them with real users, collect valuable feedback, and iterate based on this feedback.

9. Preventing Errors Is Better Than Fixing Them

Whenever possible, design products to keep potential errors to a minimum. To err is human. Errors often occur when people engage with user interfaces. Sometimes, they happen because users make mistakes, and other times they happen because an app fails. 

Whatever the cause, these errors, and how they are handled have a huge impact on the user experience. Users hate errors and hate the feeling that they triggered such behavior even more. Thus, you should strive to either eliminate error-prone conditions altogether or check for them and notify users before they commit to the action.

10. There’s No ‘one’ Universal UX Process

UX process is a make-it-or-break-it aspect of UX design. Without a solid UX process, a designer could be completely moving in the dark. A clear and concise UX development process, on the other hand, makes it possible to craft amazing experiences for users.

Read more about how to prevent mistakes in UX practices here

Many designers believe that there’s one universal UX process that can be applied to all projects. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all UX design. While it’s possible to define individual steps for each project, a precise UX process should always be selected based on project requirements — each project is unique and has its own needs. This means that to create the best possible user experience a designer should be ready to adapt their design process based on project specifics. 
Talk to our team now – learn more about the rules of UX designing.

Categories
UI Design UX UX Design Web Design

7 Best Practices To Design Dropdown Menus

Dropdown Menus

Dropdown menus are an integral part of website design and user experience. A clean, well-structured dropdown menu helps navigate visitors through a website, narrow their choices and save screen space easily. It is widely used in navigation bars, search bars and tab bars. However, it’s a perplexing task to design simple, effective and attractive dropdown menus. Even the simplest looking components can be tricky some times when designing for usability. Here are some best practices for designing effective and user-friendly dropdown menus.

Avoid Long Dropdown Menus

Using dropdown menus in forms is quite apparent. Forms don’t take much space on the interface, all browsers support them, and users are acquainted with them. It’s all right if you have 10-12 option, but it could be overwhelming for users to navigate when they have to choose from more than 15 options. Users face a hard time reaching to what they’re looking for. Also, there are scrolling issues where the user has to keep the mouse cursor within the dropdown box. They may end up scrolling down the page instead. 

The most classic example for long dropdowns is the country selector which has more than 100 options typically. Generally, it sorts by alphabetical order, but sometimes the most popular countries are placed at the top. That may look like a convenient practice but can confuse the users sometimes. The dropdown menu isn’t the best choice in this instance. A text field option with autocomplete functionality is more user-friendly here. The user already knows his choice and can input it quickly.

Grey Out Disabled Options

This one is a no-brainer, but still gets missed out by many designers. If you have an option that is disabled or unavailable, it should not be removed but greyed out. If disabled items are removed, the interface loses spatial consistency, and it becomes more challenging for the user to learn. When you grey out the disabled or unavailable options, it is more purposeful and adds to the user experience. You may choose to show a tooltip to indicate the reason why that option is disabled and how to activate it.

Use Clear Hover States

Designing an “active” class for hovered menus keeps the attention where it belongs. Most designers use the ‘CSS :hover’ pseudo-class, which works great for actively-hovered links. However, keeping the main link highlighted when the user is hovering submenu links is also a good practice. It acts as a clear path of activity where users can glance at the menu and quickly determine which primary link is active and which sub-menu link hovers. You can design hover states with many techniques like font color changes, text underlines, background color changes, highlights, box shadows, and more. The primary objective is to keep the parent link active even when it’s not hovered directly.

Avoid Dropdown Menus Where Typing Works

There are many situations when typing might actually be convenient and faster than using a dropdown menu. For example, inputting the credit card expiry date or entering birth dates. It is definitely much faster to type the dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy formats, rather than scrolling through two dropdown menus and selecting the month and year. Although a free-form input field does require data validation, in some form at least, it’s still a better alternative from usability and convenience point of view.

Keep The Number Of Actions To A Minimum

A dropdown menu must be customized based on the information required. This ensures that the user takes a minimum number of actions. A classic example is the “date selection” field, where you would need 3 dropdown menus (month, day, and year) if a normal list menu is used. This can annoy and frustrate users. Instead, the menu components must be customized, and users must be able to enter the date using only one dropdown menu.

Make Seamless Dropdown Menus

Dropdown menus should appear seamlessly and without interruption. Dropdowns should load immediately. Many times website developers end up overloading the menu, making it too heavy for instantly loading upon hover. The last thing you want is users waiting for something to happen with their cursors on dropdown menu title. Transition effects like wipe down or fade can be the other options to display the change. They look really cool but ensure that the transition is quick and not disruptive.

Use Clear And Concise Labels

Labels on menu options initiate the action. Users choose the menu option based on their labels, so it’s vital to make them accurate and informative. It’s best to use sentence case in labels. Avoid uppercase letters. Keep your labels short and crisp. Concise labels that clearly indicate the purpose of the selection must be used. As part of best practices, use verbs for action menu items. It should describe the action that will occur. For links, use nouns to identify the page that the user will be directed to. Exclude articles in menu items; use “delete page”, instead of “delete the page”. Lastly, keep menu items to a single line of text. Don’t write a story there.

Using these best practices, you can design dropdown menus that are attractive, user-friendly and purposeful. For more, feel free to get in touch with our design experts.

Read about Mega Navigation menu here

Categories
Technology UX UX Design

Creating Fantastic Frictionless User Experience

Frictionless User Experience

The digital world has become super competitive, and it’s a real challenge for businesses to keep themselves ahead of the soaring competition. One of the key propellers of attaining success in the digital world is to offer exceptional, or if not that, at least a good user experience. Companies need to understand the context that aids in creating a smooth, frictionless user experience. Designers and developers have acknowledged the importance of becoming familiar with methods to develop frictionless user experiences.

What is Friction?

NO! We are not going to discuss the scientific definition of ‘friction’ here. In terms of design and user experience, friction is anything that prevents users from intuitively achieving their goals while they interact with a product. Friction is everything people complain about when they find technology challenging. High friction is one of the major causes of cart abandonment and high bounce rates.

Frictionless User Experience

Users don’t want to stress out themselves while browsing your website. They expect simplicity while interacting with your site. Frictionless designs are synonymous with simplicity as it ensures that everything is simplified for the users. A frictionless experience is the one wherein the user needs not to learn anything. Here, the interactions are very intuitive, and every action or operation is a natural, smooth process.

How to create a frictionless experience? 

The first and the foremost step for designers and developers is to deep dive into the user interaction process. They need to understand how a user interacts with a user interface. Understanding the user journey is the key. Also, friction doesn’t need to be always harmful; it can be useful at times. They must decide when friction can be helpful, where it can be harmful, and design the product accordingly. The team can indulge in user research and testing, by creating user flows, to identify the exact places where friction might occur. 

Avoiding Frictions

1. Don’t overload users with content or features

One of the most difficult tasks of user experience is to keep the users attentive and focused. With a strong focus, users can achieve their goals without taking too much effort. The problem rises when you bombard users with loads of content and features; they lose focus.

Get rid of anything unnecessary. Follow the simple yet powerful principle of minimalism, which states that less is always more. Prioritize your content and features and place them according to user expectations. 

You don’t need to put everything on a single page. Prioritize your content and place it according to user expectations. Divide your content and other elements into chunks. For example – break lengthy and complicated forms into a few simple forms and simplify the form filling process. 

2. Users must not be guessing anywhere, anytime

A lot of UIs lack the ability to provide apt and timely feedback from the system. If users initiate action and don’t receive acknowledgment of the same, they think that their request wasn’t delivered. Therefore, they keep trying again and again, which leads to what is known as ‘rapid clicks’.

Visual or audio feedbacks are the most effective forms of feedback. Also, the loading time of the feedbacks must be pretty quick. When users have to wait for content to load, they experience friction. When the users have to wait for a long time for the content to load, they start worrying whether the app is doing anything or it is stuck. It’s essential to provide information on how much time is required to complete the operation.

3. Keep the design clear and consistent

Clarity has a direct and positive impact on user expectations. When users are aware of what to expect, they happily interact with a product. Clearly label all the interactive elements, like buttons and all, with labels that describe their function. Avoid using jargon in labels and other places.

An inconsistency often creates confusion. When the same elements in UI look different in different parts of the app/website, it confuses your users. Maintaining a consistent design approach allows users to use their previous knowledge when interacting with a product.

Simplification of navigation is another way to impart clarity. Poor navigation adds a lot to user frustration. Users should be able to navigate from one place to another easily. The app’s navigation hierarchy, at all times, must tell the users – where they are.

4. Avoid too many steps

Too many steps might also cause unnecessary friction. Right from sign-up to individual operations, every step requires some amount of effort and thus can create friction. Get rid of all the extra steps in user flow and always keep the KISS design principle in mind when designing user flows.

Use default settings, as most users rarely change them. Also, use the data you have about your users to offer a personalized experience. Amazon and Netflix provide tailored recommendations based on previous purchases and viewing habits, which enhances the user experience.

5. Anticipate errors and handle them appropriately

An ideal app prevents the user from making errors by anticipating the errors upfront and eliminating them. Still, it’s not possible to eliminate all error situations. But, a clear help text, telling them the reason for the error as well as about how to resolve the issue, can be provided to them. When you already prepare yourself for the potential errors, you design better experiences. By validating user input and providing feedback as soon as possible, you help users to detect and fix problems.

Conclusion

If there are traces of friction during user interaction, the user experience will not be smooth and enjoyable. As a designer, you must always strive to identify all possible friction elements and get rid of all of them. Discuss more about your design needs with our team NOW!!

Interested in More About UX? You might like the difference between UX and CX. READ HERE

Categories
Blog Design Technology UX Web Design

Learn and Become a UX Designer By Following These 5 Steps

UX Designer
UX Designer

The importance of UI and UX has accentuated tremendously over the last few decades. UX Designer is quickly becoming one of the most popular career choices in the design industry. The design heads of the industry have realized that creating a positive user experience for a product or service is crucial to achieving their brand and business goals.

There are a lot of perks attached to being a UX designer; you get to do a lot of creative work, flexible working hours, and not to mention the attractive salary. Now we know why people get enticed by the job role of a UX designer. However, most of them are confused about how to get started. If you’re curious about becoming a UX designer, but have no idea where to start, you are not alone. In this article, we will guide you on how to start your journey of becoming a UX designer, and that too a successful one.

Who Can Become A UX Designer?

First things first, anyone can become a UX Designer. One of the biggest myths out there is that you need to be a born artist or some kind of design prodigy, but that’s simply not true. There is no specific professional or educational background necessary. Yes, you need a certain skill set, but that can be learned.

It’s not necessary that you start your career as a UX designer. Many people get into UX designing quite late in their career. However, it is very important to understand that UX is a very diverse field and before you take the first step, it’s important to understand the diversity of the field, to see if the various skills you’ll require complement your current skill-set and interests.

This is how you can start learning UX and become a successful UX designer:

1. Choose Your UX Design Field

The field of UX design is absolutely vast and it is essential to zero-down your focus on certain UX areas or fields. Decide what parts of user experience you want to learn and focus on. Ask yourself, what type of designer you want to be? The answer can be anything from an interaction designer, UI designer, motion designer, or product designer?

There may be a case that you want to focus on both design and research. It’s absolutely critical to understand the difference between various disciplines by exploring them and focus on the ones you enjoy the most or are keen to learn.

2. Get Educated – Read and Watch

Whenever you start learning something, it’s important to learn how to do it properly. There are several popular ways you can learn UX design, like academic learning at a university, applying for a UX training program, self-learning, etc. Breaking a common myth here – You don’t necessarily need a university degree to become a UX Designer.

While you can opt self-learning or go to a university, applying for a training program is a better option. A training program can help you learn the theory behind UX practices in a structured manner which will make the process of learning UX more straightforward.

Other resources to gain knowledge are social media channels, podcasts, Youtube channels, blogs etc. If you follow social media sources, you might end up being overloaded with information, and not all of it is useful. It can create a lot of confusion and may even lead you in a direction that you don’t want to go. Try to stick to 1-3 sources at the max. Follow verified and renowned industry experts. Prepare a list of 10 best UX blogs and subscribe to them to get regular learning material.

3. Get Involved in The Community

Meeting people and getting in touch with the design community will help you in not just learning the art, but also understanding how things are done in this industry. Join slack communities, local communities, participate in conferences, industry meetups, UX seminars, events etc. to get started. You will be able to share your thoughts and understand what other people think, who have been in the industry for some time now. Get into conversations with people across the UX community to understand what you actually want to learn or improve.

⁣Find mentors who can help you with your questions. Finding yourself a mentor is great advice, no matter what industry you want to break into. Especially in UX, where project work is so important, a mentor can really help you to improve your work and educate you about industry standards.

4. Master the Right Tools

In terms of software, it’s absolutely crucial that you get apt prototyping software. In a research, it was concluded that problem-solving skills are the most important skills which hiring managers look for while hiring a UX designer, followed by knowledge of UX tools. That said, it’s not easy to choose the right tools. There’s a plethora of tools available in the market and often the best option is unclear.

The task of choosing a tool can be even harder for someone who has only taken their first step into the field of UX. It’s advisable to select a tool that will help you iterate your design; a design tool should allow you to swiftly move from a rough low-fidelity prototype to a high-fidelity implementation.

5. Get Advanced

Once you have gained the basic knowledge of UX designing, learned whatever you could from various resources, it’s time to deep dive in the vast ocean of UX. Put some of this new-found knowledge into practice and find a way to apply UX in actual project work. This will help you gain vital experience. You can take on small UX projects in your current company, find a local non-profit organization and offer to design for free, or even redesign your favorite online service.

With enough practical experience, you will be ready to take up a full-time UX designer role in a design house or a company. To further enhance your skills and career, you may opt for a Master’s degree specializing in UX designing. Once you get a specialized degree in UX design, there are various avenues to explore. You may choose to specialize in UX research, information architecture, or even voice design.

The time is almost perfect to get into the field of UX designing. The world of designing has long identified the importance of creating a pleasing user experience through design. Therefore, the opportunities for a UX designer have grown multiple folds. Still have questions? Talk to our UX experts.

Categories
Brand & Identity Design UX Web Design

UX and UI: Connected, But Completely Different

UX and UI

User Experience, or more commonly known as UX is not a new term for the world of graphics and designing. It has been around for as long as the modern day revamping of the design techniques, ideas, tools and philosophy has evolved; so is the case with User interface or UI. They both do compliment each other and often go hand-in-hand, however, a lot of us think that they are the same thing, which is not true. User interface is, let’s say, a part of user experience. Not clear yet? Let’s clear the smoke and try to understand what are the basic differences between UX and UI designs. Let’s go!

User Experience

It refers to a person’s interactions with a product, application, website, or operating system. Which means, creating a UX design involves defining the way a product operates and how it meets a user’s needs. Some of the obvious benchmarks are that a UX should be clear, comfortable and user-friendly. Moreover, a great UX is cautious and elaborate; you will most probably won’t even notice it while browsing through a website.

A good UX aims at simplifying the user journey. It makes the website navigation simple; simple enough that even a layman finds it a walk in the park. If a user finds it difficult to perform some of the most basic functions on a website, like to sign up, change their password, or get to their shopping cart, then there’s a clear problem with the UX. An effective UX smoothly guides a user through a website or an application.

A UX designer is responsible for all aspects of a user’s interaction, which means a UX designer is not just responsible for the technology behind a product, but they’re responsible for how a user interacts with a company, both online and offline, including customer service and other aspects.

User Interface

While User Experience is the accumulation of tasks specifically focused on the optimization of a product for enjoyable and effective use, User Interface Design is its complement; the look and feel, the presentation and interactivity of a product. User interface (UI) is anything a user may interact with to use a digital product or service. This includes everything from screens and touchscreens, keyboards, sounds, and even lights.

A UI designer’s responsibilities are more cosmetic than a UX designer’s. A UI designer is mostly responsible for the presentation of a product. That said, it’s not that a UI designer randomly picks some pictures and logos and use them blindly.

A UI Designer takes care of the Interface design, prototyping design, interaction design, user testing and optimal design. Towards the end of development, a UI designer takes control over the app’s appearance, including on-screen forms, images, buttons, links and icons. Without a user interface designer’s intervention, a design would not appear beautiful and appealing.

Key Differences

UX enhances the usability, UI enriches the visual appeal

The core objective of UX design is to make the product more useful for users. UX designers are responsible for ensuring that the company delivers a product or service that meets the needs of the customer and allows them to seamlessly achieve their desired outcome. On the other hand, UI designers are more inclined towards creating a visually appealing and aesthetically pleasing website design for users. Additionally, UI design must help users navigate through the website by designing buttons in different sizes, to show priority. UI designers take care of minute visual details to make the site look attractive.

UX Design is first, followed by UI

Normally, UX design and research is the first thing that designers dive into when deciding whether to build a product or application. They start with a competitive analysis and market research to come up with insights which improve site functionality. UI design comes much later; once the prototype has gone through several iterations and is almost finalized, all the wireframes are in place, then the UI designer steps in. Here is where the creative spirit of designers is put to test. They work on the visual design and micro-interactions.

UX pertains to products, services and interfaces, but UI only pertains to interfaces

 

The scope of UX is much broader than UI. UX design is garnering a lot of attention and is becoming more popular day-by-day. It’s no longer restricted to the companies with a web presence, but many others that develop products or provide services are identifying the importance of researching the market, users and validating them before they build. The scope of UI is however restricted only to user interfaces. That said, it doesn’t mean that UI is limited to graphical user interfaces of computers, tablets and mobile devices. A lot of other products also need a touch of UI designing these days, like watches, washing machines, car dashboards, vending machines etc.

UX has a social component, UI has an artistic component

UX is more about people; it has a social component as it deals with market research, analysis, identifying a customer’s pain points and how the product will solve these problems. User personas, journey maps and product user scenarios are accounted through UX research like contextual interviews, focus groups and prototyping, involving people. UI design has an artistic component as it relates to the design and interfaces with the product. It is about the aesthetic value and visuals. It affects what the end-user sees, hears, and feels.

Concluding notes

It is evident that UX and UI are completely two different things and focus on different aspects. But, they both complement each other and go hand-in-hand. It is almost impossible to bail out UI from UX and UX from UI. In a nutshell, UX design helps users accomplish meaningful tasks across platforms and services, while UI design makes compelling and aesthetically pleasing interfaces that connect with humans.