UI UX design

In this digital era, to succeed in the business, e-commerce plays a paramount role. And building a website is the first step for any e-business. In this context, UI UX design plays a driving role, which decides whether you can grab customer attention in a short while. Now when we say the website, there are two aspects to it. One is the mobile version and the web version. Since everything now follows mobility, you have to think of an optimized design for your mobile version. 

Here we must consider the difference between UI and UX. Although it sounds the same, they are quite different technically. UI is all about the user and product interaction through a website or app, whereas UX deals with users feeling due to that interaction. So, we can say, UX design is more functional, and UI is related to the presentation.

UI UX design decides how the users’ perceptions and feelings are captured before the interface’s actual interaction. Also, it determines how the communication will go due to this interaction. Both these factors measure a lot to estimate the success of the company’s goal towards the product or service. So, from a human-machine interaction point of view, UI UX design realizes the following characteristics –

– Its meaningfulness for the users

– How practical the design is

– Its effectiveness towards the users

– The experimental features

In this blog, we will discuss those crucial UI UX design steps to meet the criteria mentioned above to build a robust and effective website or mobile app. 

Related post – Common Principles of Website Usability in Web design

Step 1# Research on your audience before your UI UX design

Your project is for your users. So, unless you know who they are, what they need, their problems, and how they are looking for the solution, you cannot do a proper UI UX design for the app or website. Thus, the first step is to research your audience. Now, who all belong to this category?

Users may be stakeholders, general users who are the key market players, and of course, the users of your competitors who may be your future potential customers. The process may start with the interviews with the direct stakeholders to understand what they want to sell out of the product. Besides, at this stage only, it should be clarified which technology will be used to build the application so that you can do a feasibility analysis for UI UX design.

The next analysis point is users, for which you may need to consider the entire demographic details of the users. For example, their interests, their locations, etc. In addition to that, competitive analysis is an essential criterion here. It is necessary to know what extra features your competitors are offering while selling the same product or service and similar users’ pain areas. For this purpose, a direct interview or questionnaire could be used. These points can be highlighted during the UI UX design to excel the market’s product and enhance its market positioning.

Another critical perspective of this research is to create segments of imaginary users and making test cases for each of these segments. Also, this opens up scope for broader user stories during the design.

Step 2# Analyze your UI UX design

Making the user persona once the detailed research is over, now it’s time to analyze the data and forward it to the next steps. As we have mentioned, demographic analysis is performed on the collected data of the users. Based on that data, a user persona is crafted. These are imaginary characters based on which different scenarios will be created and executed.

User journey map

As the user persona is crafted, the next step is to analyze the user journey map, which is a diagrammatic representation of a user’s relationship with a product. A complete timeline shows a whole journey with all touchpoints between a user and a product. A user journey map has many benefits like –

– You can understand customer emotions

– Identifies the gaps in service or communications

– Reduce the costs

– Increase sales

– Leverages higher customer and employee satisfaction

Creating mockup and wireframes

This is the step executed by designers and a part of UI design. It involves sketches, user flow, and wireframes. Wireframing in UX design refers to a diagram of a website or product that defines the space allocation on the page, image, content distribution, content prioritization, and different functional aspects, etc. Wireframes help the UX team understand and establish relationships among a website’s different templates, which must be determined before any aesthetic considerations. This is as simple as a pencil sketch on a piece of paper that is digitized to create prototypes.

Once the design team completes the mockup, they share it with the stakeholders for validation.

Step # 3. Design

Once the layout and user flow are finalized for the design, the next step is to create the design. In this step, you need to apply theme and style to your mockups and wireframes to convert them into the final design. In this step, prototyping is also performed. However, a prototype is only validated only after testing. Actual development takes place only after users and business models confirm it. You also need to prepare and share the design specifications like principles, guidelines, colors, typography, and iconography with the development team. Some of them include Sitemap, Images, User flow, Icons, Mockups, and Colors. Another critical point to consider here is that the design must be responsive as most users today access mobile devices.

Step #4. Testing the implementation

Though unit testing, functional testing is an integral part of UI UX testing, like any other software testing process, the primary testing here is usability testing. Once the prototype is built, customers or stakeholders get product interaction. Once they test the product, they are offered questionnaires or interviews to identify their area of confusion or pain areas.

Step #5. Launch and matrices analysis of the product

Once the product is validated and launched, then it comes to analyze how your users are reacting to it. Market available analytic tools are used to track how users prefer to interact with the product and what they are getting exactly whether their expectation is met with the design or not.

Final words:

UI UX design is a combined process. Another most essential criterion for successful UI UX design is working together with UX/UI design and development teams. Unless the designer team works closely with the developers, who are going to implement the functional specifications of design in the product through coding, the design may not be appropriately implemented. UI UX designers and developers and business teams, stakeholders, and expert users need to contribute to the process of generating a fantastic user experience. 

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