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How to Scale Your Design Process and Improve Handoff

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It’s something every design team dreams about – a better design process and handoff procedure. Your design team is not alone if you are looking for a better solution.

Imagine what your workflow would look like if you could forgo the struggles of image-based technology, design and handoff with accurate components that have interactive features. Projects in the design phase will look more like final products and, most importantly, interact like final products. 

Let’s imagine a new design process together.

Challenges of an Image-Based Design Process

Here’s what we all know – image-based design tools provide pictures of components in the visual form but lack the interactivity and conditions that exist in the end-product. There’s not a high level of functional fidelity there, and it can cause confusion among design teams and rework.

These tools require you to redraw the fundamental components and design with boxes and rectangles, which takes too much time and can create a disconnect between the design and development teams. 

Further, you don’t fully maximize the potential of a design system because of inconsistencies between code-powered systems that developers use and these image-based systems for designers. There’s an innate gap between maintaining the environments and creating consistency in components. 

The final and maybe most difficult challenge with an image-based design process is in usability testing. You just can’t test an image the way you can working components. If the prototype is not interactive enough, you lose valuable feedback in the testing process. Functional fidelity is a must-have design and development tool in 2022. 

Iress, market-leading financial software, had many of these same problems in its design system process. You can probably relate to its story, which includes a designer and engineer who aren’t entirely on the same page, hit the deadline and have to deliver, and then get customer feedback. The result was a lot of extra headaches and work. 

But there is a better way: Import all user interface components into a code-powered design system in sync with a design tool so that your team can work in harmony to build, scale, and handoff projects with ease. 

Scale Design With Accurate Components

Here’s what most design and development teams want en route to building products: Accurate components with built-in interactivity, states, and conditions. No redrawing boxes and rectangles; no trying to figure out what states and interaction should be.

And if you can do it with ten times the speed and agility? Now you’re really in business. 

“It used to take us two to three months just to do the design. Now, with UXPin Merge, teams can design, test, and deliver products in the same timeframe,” said Erica Rider, Senior Manager for UX at PayPal. “Faster time to market is one of the most significant changes we’ve experienced using Merge.”

The time and workflow savings come from the ability to maintain only one environment as a product team. Rather than image-based tools, a code-powered design system that will push updates to components as the design evolves is the modern way to work. This workflow can also eliminate duplicate documentation so that your team has a single source of truth for whole product teams. 

Now you can be more agile in the design process and scale. And as Rider hinted at, there is a solution already available in UXPin Merge. 

Scalability with accurate design components has other benefits as well. 

Teams can onboard people faster because the design system is in the design tool. There’s less searching for answers with drag and drop-ready building blocks. New team members will find more success and be more valuable to the team quicker due to fewer inconsistencies and errors. 

Testing also gets a boost as you scale with a single source of truth. You can actually create better usability tests with a high-fidelity, functional version of the prototype, allowing users to leave more valuable and detailed feedback that can improve your product in the early stages. 

Better Handoffs Start Here

As you imagine a better design process, take it one step further. Better handoffs are a goal for most teams. 

An interactive component-based design tool can eliminate the need for multiple iterations of the same meeting to explain how a prototype works. Everyone can see and interact with it for themselves with accurate, true components that ensure the prototype works the same as the product. 

Designers will feel more like their vision is making it into the final product, and developers have a better idea of how to work. Everyone has the exact same components written in code. Thanks to the single source of truth, devs can speed up as they build the product because they start with components that include production-ready code.

A typical design to developer handoff might have multiple steps: Create vector design elements, create a model for interactions, and then send the prototype with documentation. Not to mention the meetings that are required to make sure everyone is on the same page.

In a model with interactive component elements, the developer handoff is fast and easy; they create a prototype with true components and all the built-in properties. The developer copies the JSX code and pastes it into his tool to build the final product. All the component properties and their coded interactions already exist in the source code. This is possible because the source of truth is the code itself, the source code.

Quick Tool Solution and Technical Use

This solution to this common challenge is not somewhere in the future; it’s already here.

UXPin, a code-based design tool, has Merge technology, which allows you to bring all interactive components into UXPin. Then you can use your own, or the open-source library with the ready-made building blocks to get products ready faster.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with Merge by UXPin:

  • Integrate your developer’s storybook to use it as a single source of truth (works for all frameworks)
  • Import design system components from a dev’s Git repository, such as GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, or others (works with React)
  • Work with the built-in MUI library
  • Add the npm component package to UXPin on your own (no developer required)
  • Design with the confidence that your work can be ideally reflected by developers
  • Create and share a library of interactive components

Summary 

Say bye-bye to redrawing rectangles – build more accurate prototypes easier and end-products faster with Merge by UXPin.

Now is the time to solve one of your biggest design challenges while upgrading and scaling the design process and improving handoffs. 

Merge by UXPin is user-friendly and made for scalable projects of almost any size. The line between design and development blurs with quicker product release and a fully-interactive solution. Request access today.

 

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of UXPin –]

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15 Instantly Helpful Tools and Resources for Designers and Agencies (Updated for 2022 )

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Experienced web designers are always on the lookout for tools or resources that will (1) introduce them to the latest design trends, (2) enable them to incorporate features and functionalities that will make their products more competitive, (3) allow them to improve their workflows or all the above.

Apply one or more of these new design tools and resources. Then you could realize anything from incremental to game-changing improvements. The better the tool or resource, the more you are apt to realize your investment.

The 15 tools and website design resources selected for this article are the best in their respective categories. The degree of improvement you can realize when using one or more of them may depend on your own business needs. Or on the actual needs and wants of your clients as opposed to what you are currently able to deliver.

Browse the list, and you should be able to put your finger on one or more of these products or services. They could lead to improvement in one or more areas of your work. Look closer, and you might come across a genuine game-changer.

Happy shopping!

1. Be – The Biggest WordPress and Portfolio WordPress Theme

If your website design activities are proving to be exercises in tediousness, or you’re tired of working around a design tool’s limitations, you need BeTheme.

BeTheme can be a game-changer in that it gives you the flexibility to design what you want. Be makes building a complex high-performance website quick, smooth, and easy.

  • BeTheme’s 650+ customizable pre-built websites are designed to get your website-building project off to a rapid start. They are responsive, UX-ready, importable with a single click, and incorporate the latest design trends.
  • You’ll love working with the recently launched BeBuilder, the fastest and most flexible page builder for WordPress with which you can import from Be’s pre-built website’s 1000+ pages.
  • There’s an absolute gem of a BeBuilder Woo you can work with to create your shop or single product layouts.
  • BeTheme features a wealth of design aids, options, and settings to work with.

BeTheme is Elementor ready and is regularly updated. Click on the banner to find out more about Be’s 40+ powerful core features.

2. Total WordPress Theme

Put Total to work, and 2022 could be a very good year for your website design undertakings.

Total has it all insofar as design aids and options, website-building tools, and design flexibility are concerned regardless of the type or style of website you plan to build:

  • Pick any of Total’s 45+ customizable quick import theme demos, and you are off to a quick start.
  • 90+ section templates, 75+ pre-styled post entry cards, and more than 500 live customer settings give you more design flexibility than you are ever likely to need. 
  • The page builder of choice is an extended version of WPBakery. With it at your fingertips, you can easily drag and drop your way to building precisely the website you have in mind.

Click on the banner to discover everything Total can do for you.

3. LayerSlider

What could LayerSlider do for you to help make 2022 a banner year? Look over any of your past website designs to see if any of them could profit from adding a little spice or pizzazz because that’s what LayerSlider does best. 

LayerSlider is an animation and website-building tool that can be used on any website to transform its look & feel with modern graphics, eye-catching animations, and interactive features. LayerSlider is one of the most established and popular products with millions of active monthly users.

  • LayerSlider has 150+ website, slider, and popup templates. Templates are a great way to learn as well as an ideal starting point for new projects.
  • LayerSlider comes with a very easy-to-use and modern editor interface similar to professional desktop applications. Anyone can use it without prior experience.
  • LayerSlider is not just for sliders. It can also create image galleries, popups, landing pages, animated page blocks, or even full websites.

Click on the banner to see what LayerSlider could do for you.

4. wpDataTables

Most table or chart building table plugins on the market either limit the amount of data that can easily be processed or the types of tables or charts that can be produced. wpDataTables has neither of these limitations.

With the wpDataTables premium WordPress plugin, you can –

  • create responsive, interactive, and frontend editable tables and charts
  • process huge amounts of data from various sources and in various formats
  • highlight or color code key data.

5. Uncode – Creative & WooCommerce WordPress Theme

Uncode is a top-selling pixel-perfect creative and WooCommerce theme. More than 80,000 sales have been made to date to freelancers, bloggers, agencies, and small businesses.

Uncode’s key features include –

  • a suped-up Frontend Page Builder.
  • an advanced WooCommerce builder with supporting capabilities that include a Single Product builder and a host of customer-centric design elements and options.
  • a Wireframes Plugin and 550+ section templates.
  • a gallery of inspirational user-created websites.

6. Trafft

With Trafft, you can schedule meetings, events, on-site and virtual appointments, manage staff schedules, send reminders, and accept payments — all from a single platform.

  • Special features include custom domains, coupons, and custom fields.
  • Trafft also manages group bookings and can serve multiple locations.

This game-changer integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar, Google Meet, Outlook Calendar, Apple Calendar, Zoom, and Mailchimp.

7. WHATFONTIS 

WHATFONTIS is a hidden gem in the world of font identifiers that allows you to find a font from your uploaded image in a matter of seconds.

  • Powerful AI algorithms and a database of 850K+ fonts provide the basis for this app’s impressive search capabilities.
  • Positive identification is achieved 90% of the time. Premium support is on hand should AI yield an awkward result.
  • Cursive fonts can be identified once the letters are separated.

8. Mobirise Website Builder Software

Mobirise is fast, easy to use, and the best offline website builder on the market.

  • Mobirise does not tie you to a specific platform; you can edit your site locally and host it wherever you want.
  • Full access to HTML allows you to code.
  • 4,000+ website blocks and 300+ elegant home page templates are guaranteed to make your website-building adventures short and sweet.

The Mobirise website builder is free for both personal and commercial use.

9. GetIllustrations’ Stock Illustrations Bundle

Downloads from this library of premium illustrations can change the way you go about designing your websites, apps, and presentations.

  • GetIllustrations, with its 10,000+ illustrations library, is the biggest of its kind.
  • Featured formats include Vector AI, PNG, Sketch, SVG, Figma, and Adobe XD.

Illustrations you download come with a commercial license and are yours to keep without limitations.

10. Slider Revolution

If you have trouble bridging the gap between what your clients want and what you can provide, Slider Revolution could be exactly what you need to fix the problem.

Slider Revolution is THE cutting-edge WordPress plugin for addressing today’s over-the-top web designs. It features –

  • 200+ awesome website and slider templates.
  • eye-catching WebGL slide animations.
  • 25+ powerful addons.
  • the ability to import dynamic content from social media outlets.

11. Amelia

Amelia offers an automated, highly customizable solution to any business that relies on a manual or semi-automated operation for booking client appointments.

  • Amelia is an excellent choice for beauty, healthcare and fitness, and educational and training enterprises.
  • Clients can make or change appointments online 24/7.
  • Amelia can manage individual and group bookings, events, and employee schedules at multiple locations.
  • Amelia integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar, WooCommerce, and Zoom.

12. 8bio – Link in Bio Tool 

Many social media platforms allow you to include a link that allows followers to visit your website or an important landing page. With 8bio, you can create a link that a visitor can’t resist clicking on.

Your link can – 

  • Present a brief biographical profile of your business or yourself.
  • Feature an image or catchy animated background.
  • Showcase your product or service at no cost.
  • Use your existing domain or a “yourname” .8b.io domain.

13. Essential Grid

The premium Essential Grid WordPress gallery plugin developers assembled a collection of aesthetic, easy-to-customize plug-and-play templates that make creating a breathtaking portfolio gallery a fun and easy task.

  • Your galleries will load lightning fast.
  • They will display perfectly on all devices.
  • You can choose from a variety of layouts and mix and match adjustable grids to get precisely what you want.

14. Pixpa – Portfolio Websites for Designers

Pixpa provides an all-in-one platform from which creatives can manage their online portfolios, blogs, galleries, and eCommerce sites.

  • Choose among Pixpa’s beautiful and mobile-friendly customizable templates and customize them to achieve exactly what you want. 
  • Put Pixpa’s drag and drop website builder into play to tie everything together, exactly as you want.
  • Add content, connect with your custom domain, and into your social profiles, and you are good to go.

15. XStore – Best WordPress WooCommerce Theme for eCommerce

XStore is a feature-packed Envato WooCommerce theme that is incredibly simple to work with has acquired more than 30,000 enthusiastic customers.

  • XStore’s 110+ customizable shops make creating your own shop as easy as can be.
  • XStore integrates seamlessly with the premium Elementor and WPBakery page builders.
  • $510 worth of carefully handpicked “must-have” premium plugins are included.

There are plenty of tools and resources for designers on the market. You could use them to create websites that are a little better than the ones you have already built or are using.

What you should really be looking for is a special design tool or resource. When using it for a small investment could markedly improve both your productivity and your design efforts to make 2022 by far your best year ever.

That’s the reasoning for publishing this selection of top 15 design tools and resources. Selecting one or more could make your day.

 

[- This is a sponsored post on behalf of Be -]

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Using Micro-Interactions to Drive UX

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Micro-interactions effectively communicate brand identity and ethos while strengthening ties with the customer. These habit-forming tools make for a fun and seamless user experience. Facebook’s ‘likes’ and Tinder’s ‘swipes’ are two classic examples. 

Micro-interactions originated with the need to guide customers who had hit a snag while using a service or a product. The goal was to ease customers into being more product-savvy via subtle reassurance and feedback. Micro-interactions are now employed by everything from washing machines, to coffee makers.

Along with feedback, prompts, and recommendations, they can also present customers with an appealing visual reward upon finishing a task. When used optimally, micro-interactions drastically enhance the navigation and simplify how users interact with sites and apps.

How Micro-Interactions Work

Here are the four structural elements to a simple micro-interaction: triggers, rules, feedback, and loops. Every micro-interaction has a significant component to organize the operational cycle. It lets you control feedback and runs, so the users understand the consequences of their performance and feel motivated to follow through.

Triggers

This feature begins micro-interactions of both the user-initiated (prompted by user) and system-initiated (driven by the system) kind. For example, a click, scroll, swipe, tap, and pull are common triggers that users carry out. So making a payment, booking a cab, and clicking or tapping on the hamburger menu all fall under this category. On the flip side, the user’s alert prompt upon entering a wrong password is a classic system-generated trigger. 

Rules

This element determines what happens after the user sets a prompt into motion via tapping, clicking, scrolling, or swiping. Rules refer to the fact that apps decide the triggers that users employ — Tinder’s ‘swipe’ feature illustrates this point. These rules gradually become a habit-forming action that users get accustomed to while regularly engaging with an app.

Feedback

During this process stage, the system informs the user via auditory, visual, or haptic cues. It engages the users and encourages them to proceed further in their process. For example, the progress bar of a download, the visual representation of steps cleared in a circle, or the visual, aural, and tactile indication upon the success or failure of payment are all a part of the feedback mechanism.

Loop/Modes

This final stage entails tiny meta-rules of the process and determines the frequency and duration. A classic example from an ecommerce app is the ‘Buy Now’ transformed to ‘Buy Another’ Before the user loses interest in the app, the app typically uses such a loop to get them to re-engage with the app. 

How to Use Micro-Interactions

We’ve established that micro-interactions are fabulous, but not every UX interaction on your app or site needs one throughout the wireframe. Overusing this tool could saturate the overall creative experience your design may want to offer. Worse, it might even end up confusing the information hierarchy. It undermines the design and unbalances the user experience of discomfort and irritability. So it’s crucial to know when exactly to use them.

Let’s find out how few quick tips on micro-interactions can elevate and humanize your mobile user experience:

  • Swipe right or left: A signature move made entirely on swiping micro-interaction featured in the famous Tinder app. Swiping is an easier action than clicking or tapping.
  • Call-to-action:  As part of the last step during payment or order, place a ‘Confirm Order’ or ‘Book Now’ prompt, which gives the task a sense of urgency. As a result, having acted on it feels like a minor achievement. 
  • System status: Your app user wants to know what’s happening. System status lets them know they are moving in the right direction and helps avoid confusion. Sometimes, users even run out of patience while uploading a picture, downloading a file, or filling up the registration form.
  • Classic notifications: Users need a quick reminder of products selected/wishlist in their abandoned cart with a reduced attention span. A simple notification can nudge them toward finalizing the purchase. 
  • Button animation: Animated buttons are not only cute, but they also help users navigate the mobile app swiftly. Try out attractive colors, fonts, sizes, shapes, and clipart elements corresponding to the animation and create that cool button to pop up when tapped or hovered on. 
  • Animated text inputs:  A simple process of a likable element like zooming in while entering data into a form or filling up card details for payment can enhance the user experience.
  • Reward an achievement:  Especially true for educational and health apps, micro-interactions celebrating big and small milestones with a badge or a compliment of encouragement can strengthen a user’s engagement with the app. 

Benefits of Micro-Interactions

  • Brand communication: A successful brand ensures that the transmission to the buyer is engaging, positive, and hassle-free. When micro-interactions show a process status clearly, it creates and reinforces a positive image for your brand.
  • Higher user engagement: Experts say micro-interactions engage users better. These tiny elements subconsciously create the urge to keep interacting with your app. For example, each push or nudge notification acts toward redirecting your customers back to your app.
  • Enhanced user experience: From shopping to banking to traveling to learning to staying healthy, there’s an app for everything. A wide range of activities elevates the overall user experience and stays ahead in the game. Micro-interactions can work that magic for your brand. 
  • Prompt feedback: It’s frustrating not to know what’s happening behind the blank screen, especially during a purchase. Instant feedback via visual, sound, or vibrating notifications makes for a pleasant user experience. 
  • Visual harmony: Micro-interactions initiated even with a tap, swipe, typing, or scrolling are all a part of the UX design’s overall appeal. The trick is to keep all the interface elements in perfect sync with the app’s visual features.

Micro-Interaction Best Practices

Here are a few basic principles you should follow when you introduce a micro-interaction to the user experience.

1. Keep it simple, stupid (KISS)

KISS is a famous design principle that becomes even more important in the case of micro-interactions. The goal is to make the user journey delightful and not be a distraction.

2. Keep it Short

It has ‘micro’ in the name itself. But, again, micro-interactions aren’t supposed to be show stars, and a lengthy micro-interaction only distracts the user. 

3. Pick the Right Place

You should always consider the options carefully before choosing the spot for any micro-interaction. The widely used user-interaction designs are popular for a reason. Many people have already approved them, so you can safely continue with them. The use of micro-interaction should also sit well with your brand image. 

See also if the placement of a micro-interaction is reaching your ideal customer or not. And even consider whether you need a micro-interaction to begin with. 

And That’s a Wrap!

As UX designers, we can profoundly impact the overall design of sites and apps, the user’s journey, their interactions with our product/service, their connection with the brand, and the ease of doing a transaction.

We want customers to connect to our brand, love our products, and experience our exceptional customer service. But most of all, we want to earn their trust and loyalty.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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Using CockroachDB Workloads With Kerberos

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GSSAPI authentication is becoming increasingly popular as CockroachDB starting to make inroads in Fortune 2000 customer bases and financial services segment. That said, ecosystem coverage for GSS needs to improve for parity with other authN methods. Today, we are providing a workaround and a look at the future. By the way, do you realize this is my 15th article on Kerberos and CockroachDB?

Articles Covering CockroachDB and Kerberos

I find the topic of Kerberos very interesting and my colleagues commonly refer to me for help with this complex topic. I am by no means an expert at Kerberos, I am however familiar enough with it to be dangerous. That said, I’ve written multiple articles on the topic which you may find below:

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What is the “Minimum” in Minimum Viable Product?

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“Minimum Viable Product,” or “MVP,” is a concept of agile development and business growth. With a minimum viable product, you focus on creating the simplest, most basic version of your product, web application, or code possible.

Minimum viable products include just enough features to attract early adopters and validate your idea in the early stages of the development lifecycle. Choosing an MVP workflow can be particularly valuable in the software environment because it helps teams receive, learn from, and respond to feedback as quickly as possible.

The question is, how exactly do you define the “minimum” in MVP? How do you know if your MVP creation is basic enough while still being “viable”?

Defining the Minimum Viable Product: An Introduction

The concept of “Minimum Viable Product” comes from the Lean Start-up Methodology, introduced by Eric Ries. The purpose of MVP is to help companies quickly create versions of a product while collecting validated insights from customers for each iteration. Companies may choose to develop and release minimum viable products because they want to:

  • Introduce new products into the market as quickly as possible;
  • Test an idea with real users before committing a large budget to product development;
  • Create a competitive product with the use of frequent upgrades;
  • Learn what resonates with the target market of the company;
  • Explore different versions of the same product.

Aside from allowing your company to validate an idea for a product without building the entire concept from scratch, an MVP can also reduce the demand on a company’s time and resources. This is why so many smaller start-ups with limited budgets use the MVP and lean production strategy to keep costs as low as possible.

Defining an MVP: What your Minimum Viable Product Isn’t

When you’re building a Minimum Viable Product, you’re concentrating on developing only the most “essential” features that need to be in that product. For instance, you might be building a shopping app for a website. For the app to be “viable,” it would need to allow customers to search through products and add them to a basket or shopping cart. The app would also need a checkout feature and security components.

However, additional functionality, like the ability to send questions about an item to a customer service team or features that allow clients to add products to a “wish list,” may not be necessary straight away. Part of defining a minimum viable product is understanding what it isn’t. For instance, an MVP is not:

  • A prototype: Prototypes are often mentioned alongside MVPs because they can help with early-stage product validation. However, prototypes are generally not intended for customers to use. The “minimum” version of a viable product still needs to be developed enough for clients and users to put it to the test and provide feedback.
  • A minimum marketable product: An MVP is a learning vehicle that allows companies to create various iterations of an item over time. However, a minimum marketable product is a complete item, ready to sell, with features or “selling points” the company can highlight to differentiate the item from the competition.
  • Proof of concept: This is another similar but distinct idea from MVP. Proof of concept items test an idea you have to determine whether it’s attainable. There usually aren’t any customers involved in this process. Instead, companies create small projects to assess business solutions’ technical capabilities and feasibility. You can sometimes use a proof of concept before moving on to an MVP.

Finding the Minimum in your MVP

When finding the “minimum” in a minimum viable product, the primary challenge is ensuring the right balance. Ideally, you need your MVP to be as essential, cost-effective, and straightforward as possible so that you can create several iterations in a short space of time. The simpler the product, the easier it is to adapt it, roll it out to your customers, and learn from their feedback.

However, developers and business leaders shouldn’t get so caught up focusing on the “Minimum” part of Minimum Viable Product that they forget the central segment: “Viable”; your product still needs to achieve a specific purpose.

So, how do you find the minimum in your MVP?

1. Decide on Your Goal or Purpose

First, you’ll need to determine what your product needs to do to be deemed viable. What goal or target do you hope to achieve with your new product? For instance, in the example we mentioned above, where you’re creating an ecommerce shopping app, the most basic thing the app needs to do is allow customers to shop for and purchase items on a smartphone.

Consider the overall selling point of your product or service and decide what the “nice to haves” are, compared to the essential features. For instance, your AR app needs to allow people to interact with augmented digital content on a smartphone, but it may not need to work with all versions of the latest AR smart glasses.

2. Make a List of Features

Once you know the goal or purpose of your product, the next step is to make a list of features or capabilities you can rank according to importance. You can base your knowledge of what’s “most important” for your customers by looking at things like:

  • Competitor analysis: What do your competitors already offer in this category, and where are the gaps in their service or product?
  • User research: Which features or functionalities are most important to your target audience? How can you make your solution stand out from the crowd?
  • Industry knowledge: As an expert in your industry, you should have some basic understanding of what it will take to make your product “usable.”

3. Create Your Iterations

Once you’ve defined your most important features, the next stage is simply building the simplest version of your product. Build the item according to what you consider to be its most essential features and ask yourself whether it’s serving its purpose.

If your solution seems to be “viable,” you can roll it out to your target audience or a small group of beta testers to get their feedback and validate the offering. Use focus groups and market interviews to collect as much information as possible about what people like or dislike.

Using your feedback, you can begin to implement changes to your “minimum” viable product to add more essential features or functionality.

Understanding the “Minimum Viable Product”

Minimum viable products are evident throughout multiple industries and markets today – particularly in the digitally transforming world. For instance, Amazon might be one of the world’s most popular online marketplaces today, but it didn’t start that way. Instead, Jeff Bezos began purchasing books from distributors and shipping them to customers every time his online store received an order to determine whether the book-selling landscape would work.

When Foursquare first began, it had only one feature. People could check-in at different locations and win badges. The gamification factor was what made people so excited about using the service. Other examples include:

  • Groupon: Groupon is a pretty huge discount and voucher platform today, operating in companies all around the world. However, it started life as a simple minimum viable product promoting the services of local businesses and offering exclusive deals for a short time. Now Groupon is constantly evolving and updating its offerings.
  • Airbnb: Beginning with the use of the founders’ own apartment, Airbnb became a unicorn company giving people the opportunity to list places for short-term rental worldwide. The founders rented out their own apartment to determine whether people would consider staying in someone else’s home before eventually expanding.
  • Facebook: Upon release, Facebook was a simple social media tool used for connecting with friends. Profiles were basic, and all members were students of Harvard University. The idea quickly grew and evolved into a global social network. Facebook continues to learn from the feedback of its users and implement new features today.

Creating Your Minimum Viable Product

Your definition of a “minimum viable product” may not be the same as the definition chosen by another developer or business leader. The key to success is finding the right balance between viability – and the purpose of your product, and simplicity – or minimizing your features.

Start by figuring out what your product simply can’t be without, and gradually add more features as you learn and gain feedback from your audience. While it can be challenging to produce something so “minimalistic” at first, you need to be willing to release those small and consistent iterations if you want to leverage all the benefits of an MVP.

Suppose you can successfully define the meaning of the words “Minimum” and “Viable” simultaneously with your new product creations. In that case, the result should be an agile business, lean workflows, and better development processes for your entire team.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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Designing Cloud-Based Multimedia Solutions

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Private, public, or hybrid, cloud solutions for any business domain are designed to provide the freedom to grow and security for the organization and customer data. For cloud-based multimedia solutions, there is cloud-based custom transcoder IP that supports automated Video-On-Demand (VOD) pipelines. Cloud services offer solutions that ingest source videos, processes video for playback on a wide range of devices using cloud media converter, and store transcoded media files for on-demand delivery to end-users.  

Custom IP integration along with other cloud services showcases better feasibility of using Open-Source codec, to use one’s transcoder instead of cloud media-converter for multimedia solutions. In this blog, we will see how an Open-Source codec like AV1 is selected as a custom IP for encoding to integrate over the cloud as a service.  

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How to Install OroCRM on Ubuntu 20.04

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OroCRM is a customer relationship management software. It is a simple and low-cost CRM system ideal for small and medium-sized enterprises.

OroCRM is an integrated CRM, marketing automation, and live chat platform that helps marketers build genuine relationships with their prospects and customers. It has all the features to create, manage, measure, and optimize customer journeys. OroCRM streamlines the management of large amounts of data to provide accurate insights for better decision-making.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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How to Use Hand-Drawn Elements in Web Design

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What stands out as an incredible web design project for you? Do you count your creation as a success if it’s modern, minimal, and accessible? Maybe you’re the kind of designer that’s constantly experimenting with the latest dynamic design tools or state-of-the-art technology. Perhaps your websites are vivid, animated, and brimming with unique components?

Sometimes, creating the ideal design means thinking carefully about what you want to accomplish for your client. The purpose of your web creation has a significant impact on the components that you need to consider. For instance, if you’re hoping for a highly emotive and human design, it may be worth combining some of your sleek lines and graphics with hand-drawn elements. 

The Value of Hand-Drawn Graphics in Web Design

Hand-drawn elements are just like the other components of web design; that way may use to express individuality in a cluttered digital environment. In a world where everyone focuses on futuristic and virtual creations, hand-drawn elements can pull attention back to the importance of humanity in your content. 

As web designers, we know that visual components often impact people more than text-based content. Illustrations are highly engaging functional elements that capture audience attention and convey relevant information. 

The main difference between hand-drawn elements and graphics built with vectors and other digital components is that one appears to be more influenced by the human hand than the other. Even if your illustrations are created on a screen, just like any other web design component, it pushes an audience to see something more straightforward, more natural, and authentic. 

For a brand trying to convey innocence and humanity in its personality, hand-drawn design can speak to the part of the human psyche that’s often unappreciated by web design. Perhaps more than any other visual, the content reminds your audience that there’s a human behind the web page. 

The Value of Hand-Drawn Features in Web Design

Any image can have a massive impact on the quality of your web design. Visuals deliver complex information in an easy-to-absorb format. In today’s world of fast-paced browsing, where distractions are everywhere, visuals are a method of capturing attention and delivering value fast. 

However, with hand-drawn elements, you go beyond the basic functionality of images to embrace the emotional side of the content. Benefits include:

  • A memorable experience: Web illustrations are becoming more popular among leading brands like Innocent Smoothies and Dropbox. However, the time that goes into these components means that they’re still scarce. If you want to stand out online, illustrations can help you do that. 
  • Brand personality: One of the most significant benefits of hand-drawn web design is showcasing your brand personality. The blocky lines of imperfect content that go into illustrated images highlight the human nature of your company. So many businesses are keen to look “perfect” today to make the human touch much more inviting. 
  • Differentiation: As mentioned above, hand illustrations are still rare in the digital design landscape. If you’re struggling to find a way to make your brand stand out, this could be it. Although there needs to be meaning behind your design, the result could be a more unique brand if you can convey that meaning properly. 

Tips for Using Hand Drawn Elements in Web Design 

Hand-drawn components, just like any other element of visual web design, demand careful strategy. You don’t want to overwhelm your websites with these sketches, or you could end up damaging the user experience in the process. 

As you work on your web designs, pulling hand-drawn elements into the mix, think about how you can use every illustration to accomplish a crucial goal. For instance:

Create Separation

Hand-drawn design components can mix and match with other visual elements on your website. They work perfectly alongside videos and photos and help to highlight critical points. 

On the Lunchbox website, the company uses hand-drawn elements. This helps make the site stand out, and it provides additional context for customers scanning the website for crucial details.

Engage Your Audience

Sometimes, hand-drawn elements are all about connecting with end-users on a deeper, more emotional level. One of the best ways to do this is to make your hand-drawn elements fun and interactive pieces in the design landscape. 

One excellent example of this is in the Stained Glass music video here. This interactive game combines an exciting web design trend with creative interactive components so that users can transform the web experience into something unique to them.

Highlight Headers with Typography

Sometimes, the best hand-drawn elements aren’t full illustrations or images. Hand-drawn or doodle-like typography can also give depth to a brand image and website design. 

Typography styles that mimic natural, genuine handwriting are excellent for capturing the audience’s attention. These captivating components remind the customer of the human being behind the brand while not detracting from the elegance of the website. 

This example of hand-drawn typography from the Tradewinds hotel shows how designers can use script fonts to immediately capture customer attention. Notice that the font is still easy to read from a distance, so it’s not reducing clarity. 

Set the Mood

Depending on the company that you’re designing for, your website creation choices can have a massive impact on the emotional resonance that the brand has with its audience. Hand-drawn elements allow websites to often take on a more playful tone. They can give any project a touch of innocence and friendliness that’s hard to accomplish elsewhere. 

A child-like aesthetic with bright colors and bulky fonts combines with hand-drawn elements on the Le Puzz website. This is an excellent example of how web designers can use hand-drawn elements to convey a mood of creativity and fun.

Animated Elements

Finally, if you want to combine the unique nuances of hand-drawn design with the modern components of what’s possible in the digital world today, why not add some animation. Animated elements combined with illustrations can help to bring a website to life. 

In the Kinetic.com website, the animated illustrated components help to highlight the punk-rock nature of the fanzine. It’s essential to ensure that you don’t go too over-the-top with your animations here. Remember that too many animations can quickly slow down a website and harm user-friendliness.

Finishing Thoughts on Hand-Drawn Elements

Hand-drawn elements have a lot to offer to the web-design world. 

Even if you’re not the best artist yourself, you can still simulate hand-drawn components in your web design by using the right tools and capabilities online. 

Although these features won’t fit well into every environment, they can be perfect for businesses that want to show their human side in today’s highly digitized world. Hand-drawn components, perhaps more than any other web design feature, showcase the innocence and creativity of the artists that often exist behind portfolio pages and startup brands. 

Could you experiment with hand-drawn design in your next project?

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What’s the Difference Between Good UI and Good UX?

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User Experience (UX) design and User Interface (UI) design are two terms people sometimes mistakenly use interchangeably. While aspects of each are interconnected, there are distinct differences between UI/UX design.

According to Internet Live Stats, there are over 1.9 billion websites, but not all are active at the same time. No matter how you slice it, there’s a lot of competition to grab and keep user attention. Good UX is just part of the equation. For a genuinely stellar site, you must also offer an excellent interface.

Learning the ins and outs of good UI and UX requires a bit of knowledge of how the two differ and what works. Although they weave in and out of the same design, they are different.

What Is the Biggest Difference Between Good UX and UI?

UI is the functionality of the design and what users see. How do they interact with various elements? UX is more the way things come together — both visual and interactive features — to create a feel for the user. You can certainly see why people confuse the two as they both apply to interacting with a website or app.

Top design firms often have team members specializing in each discipline. However, UX designers are also aware of UI, and UI designers are also mindful of UX. How can you ensure you’re offering excellent UI/UX design while covering the full spectrum of requirements for each?

Ensuring Effective UX Design

Good UX design increases conversion rates by 400% or more. The site visitor walks away feeling understood and not frustrated. What are some of the most important aspects of good UX design?

1. Create a Good Structure

What is the hierarchy of your site? What is the first thing the user sees when they pull it up? How do they navigate from one page to the next? A well-designed website classifies different aspects of the page, and new content naturally falls into the appropriate category as it grows.

When creating a structure for your site, think about how it might expand in the next five years. You want the hierarchy to work from day one, but you also want to think through significant shifts in the content you might see down the road.

Even your navigational hierarchy should accommodate new areas easily. Plan for the unexpected, so you know how to work it into the overall design when you must.

2. Choose Beautiful Aesthetics

You have a few seconds to make an excellent impression on your site visitors. Take the time to make sure your design functions and is visually appealing. Your color palette should work, images should be crisp and relevant, and typography should be readable and engaging.

Step back from your computer and look at your design from a distance. Does anything stand out that isn’t pleasing to the eye? Get feedback from visitors about what they like and dislike. Since the focus is on user experience, your best source of constructive criticism is from your target audience. Listen to their concerns and ideas.

3. Communicate With Site Visitors

Most experts agree that users want an element of interactivity on sites and apps. People want to know you hear them and get a response. Some ideas include adding a live chat option to your site or engaging in SMS customer support.

Put yourself in their shoes. A customer may visit your site for the first time, having never heard of your brand. They have no reason to trust you or that you’ll follow through on your promises. Potential leads may have a few questions before parting with their hard-earned dollars.

Adding various ways to communicate shows them you’ll be there should they have a problem. It’s much easier to trust a company when you know you can phone, engage in live chat or shoot off an email and get an almost immediate response.

4. Add Clear Direction

Excellent UX is intuitive. You should add calls to action (CTAs) and images pointing the user where they should go next. You can use graphics of arrows, people looking or pointing toward the next step, words, or CTA buttons.

Get feedback on how clear the directions are and tweak them as needed. The user should never have to stop and ponder what to do next. Everything on the page should guide them toward the ultimate goal.

5. Break Down Complex Data

Every industry has complicated data that is difficult for non-experts to understand. Part of good UX is breaking down complex information and sharing it in a simplified way.

One example might be the registration process. Instead of just showing text, a good UX designer would number the steps. Visualizations help add to understanding.

Embracing Effective UI Design

User Interface impacts UX and involves how the design works. The UI designer thinks through visitor expectations and then creates an interface that isn’t frustrating. UI works within the framework of a website to develop functional features. User experience isn’t the complete focus of UI, but it does tie into the planning phases. What are some elements of good UI design?

1. Set Standards

For a design to have good UI, it must perform as expected. Have you ever clicked on a button, and nothing happened? Determine how you want things to work and the minimum acceptable standards for your site.

For example, what happens when someone clicks on a link or button? How does the user know their action created the expected result? Consistency is crucial to how a site performs.

2. Choose the Right Colors

While UX designers look at the emotional impact of various colors, UI designers look at whether the shades match branding and how well the different ones contrast for readability and usability. UI/UX design often bridges a single designer’s work, so the employee ensures everything works as intended, both emotionally and functionally.

You may work with another designer to make the site aesthetically pleasing while also tapping into the emotions driving users. For example, some people love blue, so a blue button can have positive results.

UX and UI designers utilize split testing to see which users respond best to. Then, make adjustments as indicated by how site visitors respond.

3. Focus on Cognitive Matters

According to the Interaction Design Foundation, people can only retain around five things in their short-term memory. Designers should work with recognition instead, as users tend to rely on cues to find what they need.

UI designers may develop an intuitive navigation system and then use the same cues on every page, such as placement, color, and language. Users can then recognize the system without having to memorize it.

4. Prevent Errors

Your job is to ensure errors are kept to a minimum when designing a website or app. One of the most significant parts of a designer’s job is testing and retesting.

Think about all the potential problems a user might run into, such as broken links, images not showing, or incomplete actions. How can you keep those problems from occurring in the first place?

Error prevention is particularly vital when designing software as a service (SaaS) or apps. Users grow frustrated quickly and will find another solution rather than troubleshooting an issue. You’re much better off avoiding the error in the first place.

How Do UX and UI Work Together?

You’ve likely already figured out how closely UX and UI entwine to create a usable experience. The UX designer pays attention to function and interactivity, and the UI designer thinks through how the interface looks.

UX pays attention to the flow of the website and where users start, go next and end up. On the other end, UI figures out how the elements look to the viewer and where everything is placed.

The UX team may decide to add an extra button to the page. The UI team must determine where to place it, if any sizing needs must occur, and how it impacts usability on desktop and mobile devices.

Although each has a different function, user experience and user interface must work together to create a usable site the target audience responds to. You can’t have excellent UX without excellent UI, and vice versa. The best designers consider both and implement them to their fullest potential.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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5 Creative Management Trends to Watch in 2022

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Yesterday’s creativity won’t keep pace with tomorrow’s requirements; businesses need speed and agility without sacrificing creative quality.

“The creativity that was needed in the past is not the creativity that is needed today,” according to Matthew Rayback, a creative director at Adobe. He’s not talking about the function of creativity but rather about the process of creative management in a marketing context. 

What is needed today? Speed and agility without sacrificing quality. 

Why? Because the pace of change has accelerated. As Rex Salisbury, a deal partner for the venture firm a16z noted early in the pandemic, “Businesses of all kinds are experiencing two years’ worth of digitization compressed into months.”

This accelerated digital transformation has put pressure on marketing teams to turn campaigns around faster. In turn, that places pressure on creative teams to generate the requisite creative for those campaigns. Leaders need to sharpen their awareness of the unfolding creative management trends to keep pace. To that end, below are five such trends to watch in 2022. 

1. In-House Creative Teams Continue to Grow

Companies have been building in-house creative teams for the better part of a decade. A 2018 study by Forrester Research and the In-House Agency Forum (IHAF) found the number of in-house teams has grown 22% in the last ten years or so. As The Wall Street Journal reported, more than half of advertisers (64%) have shifted their creative organizations to an in-house team.  

According to a more recent version of that same study, the in-housing movement didn’t stop throughout the pandemic. It revealed, “80% of respondents said they have brought more marketing assignments in-house since the onset of the pandemic, with 50% saying the increase was directly triggered by the events of the past two years.”

Businesses seem well-satisfied with the results because the urge to in-house is poised to grow beyond creative teams. For example, a recent survey by the customer intelligence company Axciom found about 50% of respondents believe the “in-housing is currently a top marketing objective, and 40% expect it will remain a top priority in the coming years.”

2. Outside Agencies Hired for Specialized Skills

Despite the in-housing trend, there is still opportunity for agencies, consultants, and freelancers, particularly those with specialized skills. Even the consumer-packaged goods giant Proctor & Gamble, a leading example of brands bringing marketing and creative teams in-house, still needs outside service providers.

Indeed, while in-house creative teams produce the lion’s share of creative work, the vast majority (86%) also continue to partner with agencies and freelancers; according to our own research, published in our 2021 Creative Management Report, which was facilitated by Lytho (formerly inMotionNow) and based on a survey of 400 creatives and marketers. 

When the survey asked creatives why they hire outside resources, the top reason was access to specialized skills (60%). That was followed in a distant second by a need for increased capacity (44%), help with developing strategy (24%), and, lastly, to get work done faster (20%). 

“It is very unusual for an in-house team to have no outside resources that they lean on,” wrote Alex Blum of Blum Consulting Partners, Inc. in a written assessment of the survey results.

He says there are two primary ways to partner with agencies. “First, for overflow capacity. There is always a need for more creative resources, and agencies can offer that flexibility without the cost of maintaining larger teams,” he wrote. “Second, in-house teams can divide areas of ownership with an agency based on the skill sets they have in-house.”

3. The Creative Process Evolves

Marketing today is dominated by an insatiable thirst for fresh content, produced and polished by creative teams. The demand for that content continues to explode. 

What does this portend for creative teams? Despite adding headcount, creative requests exceed the creative team’s capacity to produce it – even as lead times shrink. Matthew Rayback, the creative director at Adobe, suggested the creative process must evolve. 

He likens creatives to an auto factory, where “creatives used to be the assembly line to make a single car.” However, today, creatives are tasked with creating more cars, each with unique adjustments such as personalization. 

“The assembly line we built can’t accommodate that speed or volume,” he says. So the whole factory – the entire creative process – must be overhauled to adapt. 

4. Quantitative Measurement Drives Creative Priorities

Current methods for measuring the value of creative teams center on outputs. That is to say, the metrics tracked tend to quantify the number of creative projects in progress, the rounds of review, and the number of projects completed over time. 

These metrics are important, but alone they are insufficient. A complementary way to prioritize large volumes of creative requests is focusing on those tasks most likely to move the business needle. The barrier to achieving this is that most creatives aren’t kept informed as to the outcomes of marketing campaigns fueled by their creative efforts. This must change.

With the growing demand for content, the margin of error for applying creative resources to projects that don’t correlate to business results shrinks. Marketing organizations must build a feedback loop that brings quantitative results back to the creative team. In turn, creative teams must learn to use the data to drive their work priorities in collaboration with marketing. 

5. Creative Resource Management Becomes Essential

Resource management is both a leadership concept and technology (or a combination of technologies). It’s a means to plan, track, collaborate and measure creative operations, including people, processes, and budgets.  

Traditionally, planning and tracking of all things creative and marketing occurred in a spreadsheet. It works well when the future is generally predictable – yet cliché as it may be to say it – we are living in a state of uncertainty. 

Like many trends over the last 18-24 months, the global pandemic “forced virtual experiences, disrupted marketing channels and campaigns, and accelerated companies’ transition to digital marketing,” according to Forrester. The research firm calls resource management “essential” because it helps move “planning from static spreadsheets to a dynamic and real-time environment.” 

Final Thoughts

Yogi Berra paraphrased an old Danish proverb when he said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Even so, the pandemic has accelerated trends that were already underway, and these five trends are good examples. More than just watching them, creative and marketing leaders should take steps now to get ahead of them.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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