In recent years, the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and user experience (UX) has propelled a transformative shift in how everyone interacts with technology. The integration of AI tools into UX design has opened up new paths for creating a seamless, personalized, and intuitive user journey. 

From e-commerce platforms to femtech apps, and from startups to corporations, AI’s impact is fundamentally changing how users engage with digital interfaces. Let’s explore how technology can enhance personalization and user engagement along with some practical ways to use it in your work. 

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AI Tools and UX Design 

The use of AI tools for UX design is evident in the growth of AI-powered applications and software across industries. Chatbots and virtual assistants, for example, have revolutionized customer service by offering real-time support and personalized responses. 

Similarly, recommendations fueled by machine learning algorithms have become the backbone of personalized content delivery. You can use machine learning and AI tools for UX design in a variety of ways.

How AI Enhances UX Design 

Unlike traditional design, UX designers must incorporate data into their work. AI tools can be a powerful tool in this step of a design process. Because these tools streamline data analysis, they’re most useful in this aspect of the designer’s work. So, here’s how you can use AI and machine learning to optimize your work and create better UX. 

“Create a user persona for {niche} in {industry}.” 

That’s the simplest prompt you can use to generate a user persona using an AI tool like ChatGPT. From there, you can play around with more specific prompts to create more detailed niches.

Start a conversation with ChatGPT and ask questions like these:

• What is the users’ age range?
• What are their jobs, relationship, and socioeconomic statuses?
• What are their typical motivations, needs, and pain points?

Then, refine what you’ve gathered from the AI, present it to your team, and adjust based on mutually agreed feedback before creating user personas that you can test and use on your brand campaigns.

Modern user experiences thrive on personalization, and machine learning plays a transformative role here. Machine-learning algorithms collect user data on all platforms — social media, website, emails, surveys, etc. — and analyze their past clicks, searches, purchases, and other information. They do this to predict what type of products, content, and offers these users will like. Thus, you can deliver tailored interactions, allowing you to target leads who are more likely to convert to customers.

Here are some examples of personalization you can achieve with machine learning:

• Entertainment platforms like Spotify and Netflix can curate custom playlists or recommendations.
• Ebay can offer product suggestions based on past searches, purchases, and wishlists.
• News media can send more relevant stories to their subscribers.

In short, machine learning enables tailored interactions, allowing you to target leads who are more likely to convert to customers. 

You’ve seen how machine learning’s analytical and predictive capabilities benefit personalization, but these can also extend further, leading to more personalized and efficient user interfaces. You can opt to create a dynamic UI based on what each user group likes. For example, you can provide softer color schemes and cleaner interfaces for your neurodivergent users or dynamic layouts that progress according to where your users are in the marketing funnel. This brings us to the next point.

Machine learning also allows AI to continuously learn from user interactions to constantly improve and adapt the user interface. On top of that, by understanding the data analytics of certain web pages and layouts, AI can help suggest improvements to your interface design to help maximize your page conversions.

Natural language processing (NLP) equips machines with the ability to understand and generate human language. This technology is heavily used in writing tools like Grammarly, which provides autocorrections, suggestions, and grammatical clarity. It is also heavily featured in customer experience applications.

Great customer experience is typically a top priority for UX designers, with projects like chatbots and machine translations meant to create seamless engagement. But the thing is chatbots that are too robotic feel unnatural. They can’t really provide useful help and information. Worst of all, they frustrate users. Here’s where NLP can help.

If you integrate NLP into your customer experience, you can create chatbots, virtual assistants, voice interfaces, and machine translations that more closely resemble humans. Thus, you’re able to provide round-the-clock, human-like interactions and support for your users

Clearly, integrating AI and machine learning into the work of UX design can greatly enhance the entire user journey. It dynamically segments users based on behavior, needs, or other parameters, providing each segment with tailored experiences based on your users’ locations, languages, trends, or web servers.

On top of that, AI can also analyze key drop-off points along the user journeys. That means the algorithm can suggest or automatically make adjustments to the journeys, reducing friction and increasing conversion rates. It can even identify users who are at risk of churning and trigger interventions to retain them, such as special offers or feedback requests.

A good example of this might be closer to home than you thought. My Starbucks app analyzes my purchase and reward history and gives me relevant offers and rewards accordingly. The app shows me the closest or most visited store (when I turn on my location), is never late to send me a birthday reward, and constantly gives me my most-used offers (buy one get one free, to share with my husband). And when I’ve been absent for a while, I often get a special reward that tempts me to come back.

More in Design + UXHere’s How to Build an App People Actually Want

Will AI Replace UX Designers? 

UX design has survived for a long time without AI, so do you really need to use AI tools for UX design?Or worse, will AI replace UX designers?

I would say, no, it won’t replace UX designers. And you don’t have to use AI if you don’t want to. 

AI isn’t the enemy of UX design or other creative work, however. Consider co-creating with AI tools if you aim to optimize your work, enhance personalization, create engaging user experiences, and tailor them to individual preferences. They do help make our work easier, so we can design more innovative and user-centric digital experiences with less time and fewer resources. 

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What are we really talking about when we talk about products? Before the Digital Revolution, and way before the concept of SaaS even existed, a product was something tangible, something you could hold in your hand, a physical solution to a physical, real-world problem. Now though, with the advent of the internet, the concept of product has shifted dramatically. Digital problems, after all, require digital solutions.

1997 saw what many agree to be the birth of the first-ever mobile application, and it wasn’t a groundbreaking lifestyle app or an app to revolutionize productivity, it was Nokia’s built-in version of the classic 8-bit arcade game, Snake. Novel at the time, Snake would go on to contribute to a great shift in what the term product meant to us all in the 21st century.

Snake essentially gave birth to the mobile app, but the concept wouldn’t truly be popularized until the emergence of Apple’s iTunes (later becoming the Apple App Store). By this time though, the proliferation of digital products was already well underway. Digital products, not just apps, have found their way into almost every corner of the global ecosystem.

As more and more of the day-to-day minutia of life move into the digital sphere, so too does the need for new and innovative solutions. Digital products, whether they are app-based, web-based, or exist in the metaverse alone, are designed to create specific value, or solve a unique problem for a specific userbase or customer. What part does digital product design play in this user/problem relationship then? Well, it’s the why, the when, and the how of digital products.

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What is digital product design?

The core elements of digital product design

What is the digital product design process?

How to create a digital product design strategy for your brand

Digital product design collaboration

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What is digital product design?

Digital product design is the process of developing a solution to a specific user problem. The nature of this problem will inform the type of solution a digital product designer will develop, and can range from online courses to software, apps, and eBooks. Digital product design is often an iterative process that relies on user feedback to improve the efficacy of the marketable product.

If digital products are solutions to user problems, then digital product design is the process by which product designers ideate, iterate, and prototype those solutions.

Although digital solutions have been around for decades, the idea of digital products and digital product design has largely been popularized over the last decade or so alongside the rise of mobile applications. More so than ever, developers, brands, and businesses are thinking of their digital products the same way as they would think about their physical, real-world products.

The core elements of digital product design

So, what are the core elements of digital product design? Well, we can largely split traditional product design into three core elements, each of which a good product designer should consider during the product design process if they want to generate favorable outcomes. These three elements are the core problem, the solution to this problem, and how the solution is presented.

Classical product design is still relevant in the digital age however, with the emergence of rapid prototyping tools such as Uizard, we can perhaps look at the elements of digital product design in a simpler, more user-focused way. Putting the emphasis on prospective customers, we can instead think of the main elements of digital product design through the core focus of a product, what form the product takes, and how the product functions.

Focus

The Focus deals with the macro view of digital product design i.e., what is the problem, what is the solution to that problem, and who are we solving that problem for? For example, if you are looking to design a fast-food mobile app, then you would start by considering the core problem you want to solve for your users and how your product idea does it differently (or more successfully) than your competitors.

Form

The Form deals with the considerations around how best to challenge your identified focus. If you are designing a product within the UX design tools niche, then you might want to look at a browser-based product for smart collaboration and rapid iteration. If you want to design a product that connects students via instant messaging, then you will likely want to consider mobile app product design. Perhaps more importantly, you also need to think about how you are framing your design based on the target market (aesthetics, branding etc.).

Functionality

How do you want your digital product design to function? What are the core features? What are the USPs? How is your product design going to stand out from the crowd? This might be as simple as being the first product within an emerging niche, or it could be that you have identified a unique feature that will allow your product to become a real market disrupter.

What is the digital product design process?

The process of digital product design involves the identification of a specific use case, niche, or problem, and the subsequent analysis and exploration of the digital space to form a robust, testable, and adaptable solution. This process has sometimes been referred to as design thinking, which is more simply defined as the finding of practical solutions to user problems.

Classical Design Thinking (image from the Interaction Design Foundations)

More specifically, design thinking allows designers to apply a human-centered, or user-focused, approach to digital product design, one which focuses on outcomes as much as it does the actual design process itself. Great digital product designers tend to think of the development of digital products as an end-to-end process whereby a problem is identified and a solution only meets the need of a user once the digital product has been tested, iterated, and improved upon, or until the burden of product market fit has been adequately and accurately met i.e. if your solution isn’t good enough, your digital product isn’t ready.

From a more contemporary view that taps into the online world, the digital product design process can also be broken down into the following six steps…

1. Finding the problem – what is the purpose of my digital product?
2. Forming goals – what do I want to achieve with my product design?
3. Establishing audience – who am I targeting my digital product at?
4. Idea generation – how am I going to make my product design unique and valuable?
5. Product iteration – how can I refine my design to support product/market fit
6. Testing and validation – does my product work, does it solve my initial problem, and is it of value to my target market?

How to create a digital product design strategy for your brand

Digital product design strategy development should always start with a few reflective questions about the aims of the project. It is vital the strategy is framed around problem-solving, after all, customers rarely care about how or why your product works, they only really care whether it does what it’s supposed to or not. If you are creating a digital product design strategy for your own brand or product, start by asking yourself these three basic questions:

• What problem am I solving?
• Who has this problem?
• What are we trying to achieve?

Answering these questions honestly will help you to tap into the three core elements of product design (focus, form, and functionality) but will also help you to crystalize the purpose of your design project as well as how you expect it to benefit your users once your product hits the (digital) shelves.

Perhaps equally important to the why of digital product design is the how of digital product design. Whether you are designing an app or website, a UX design tool is, more than likely, going to factor into your product design flow.

You might be an experienced designer working in a multi-disciplinary team or a non-designer launching your first product, either way, your product strategy will likely need an design tool such as Uizard to realize your design accurately on a screen in front of you.

Digital product design collaboration

Paramount to the success of your digital design project is collaboration, not just with your product testers or beta users, but also with your team members, co-designers, and the various other stakeholders you might be aligning with. Successful product design cycles rely on the continuous input of new information and recommendations that are actionable and testable (also known as the iteration process). Uizard’s smart collaboration features make rapid collaboration easier than ever before, helping you to really streamline your design flow.

Uizard is free to use and super easy to pick up for new users, meaning you could be collaborating with your teammates on your app, web, or tablet design quicker than you can say “minimum viable product”. To get started, simply follow the link below and invite your team to your Uizard project. We even have a range of pre-built UI templates to fast-track your project.

Want to learn more about the world of design? Check out the official Uizard Talk Blog where we discuss everything from a guide to wireframes to the democratization of design. Ready to give Uizard a whirl? Sign up free now.

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Want to know the importance of UI UX design in web development? This article carefully explains why user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) are top priorities in creating advanced websites for a dynamic user base.

User interaction with technology is at an all-time high. Any business with a good online presence will tell you the importance of UI UX design for creating user-friendly websites. With so much emphasis on the UI UX of a website, the role of UI UX design in application and software development cannot be neglected any longer. 

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) have evolved from mere buzzwords to essential elements that can make or break a website’s success. In fact, according to Uxera, 70% of businesses fail, with bad UI/UX being one of the pillar reasons.  

People now want something more than just bland content intertwined with sloppy designs and subpar user experience, and designers think so, too. In an article, Hubspot revealed that more than 73% of web designers believe that non-responsive websites are the primary reason for increased bounce rates.

But no need to panic. With a little effort, businesses can now achieve attractive UIs and enjoyable UX, thanks to the increasing advancements in technology and UI UX web design tools. Stick around to find out why UI UX is important for a seamless user experience and better customer satisfaction. We’ll also explore the relationship between UI/UX and conversion rates that lead to business success. 

What is UI and UX?

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

– Steve Jobs

Often used together, UI and UX are technically two branches of the same tree used to increase the engagement and experience of the user. UI and UX have some distinctions that separate each other. However, it together, works in unison to provide exceptional and user-friendly websites, applications, and software.

1. User Interface (UI)

User interface (UI) design is the overall graphical layout of your website or application. It focuses on the visual elements of a website that users directly interact with. UI design encompasses elements like buttons, icons, typography, colors, and overall layout of the website. The primary motive of UI is to create a visually appealing and aesthetic interface that aligns with the brand identity while ensuring easy navigation throughout the customer journey.

2. User Experience (UX)

Unlike User Interface, User Experience (UX) design refers to the overall experience a user has while browsing your website. UX is the complete experience of a user in accordance with the quality of services and products provided by the website or company. It works on the usability, accessibility, and emotional impact of the user-friendly website design to connect with the user on a more personal level. 

Some tasks of UX are creating seamless pathways for users and ensuring that their interaction with the website or application is efficient and ultimately satisfying. Moreover, it also involves thorough research to understand user behavior, creating user personas, and crafting user journeys to provide a seamless and enjoyable experience.

How UI/UX Design Helps in Crafting User-Friendly Websites

In an era where online presence is pivotal for businesses, the demand for impeccable UI/UX designs has grown exponentially. A primary reason being the value it adds to the website. An attractive UI of a website is seen to increase the conversion rate by 200%, while a good UX bumps up this number to 400%, according to a study by Forrester. 

1. Enhanced First Impressions

As we all know, first impressions matter, especially in the business world, where you have to showcase your credibility and expertise at a glance. The same concept goes for a website when a user first interacts with a website. Not to mention, users’ rapidly decreasing attention span is adding insult to injury. Many studies have shown that users can now form an opinion about a website in less than 50 milliseconds. 

It means that companies have to impress their users in less than a second. A well-designed UI captures users’ attention and provides an instant positive impression. Moreover, an aesthetically pleasing interface with clear visuals and layout can further influence this first impression significantly.

2. Intuitive Navigation

One thing that makes a website scroll-worthy is its navigation. Users want a seamless experience, meaning they want to browse your website without much hassle or effort. A prominent UI UX design company simplifies navigation to ensure users can effortlessly find the information they seek. 

To achieve this milestone, top web development companies prioritize creating clear menus, logical site structures, and strategically placing calls to action. 

Intuitive navigation reduces bounce rates and keeps users engaged for longer periods. For example, browsing on Amazon is so convenient that users often spend hours and hours surfing through the website.

3. Optimized Performance

How often have you left a website just because it was taking too long to load? Pretty much a lot, right? Well, you’re not alone. According to Google, as page load time goes from 1 second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases by 123%.

This lack of performance often results in a bad website experience, not to mention the frustration of users that leads to abandonment. An ideal UI/UX design tries to eliminate this problem by optimizing elements for fast loading times, thus enhancing the overall website performance. 

4. Building Trust and Credibility

Creating a sense of trust and credibility is increasingly essential in today’s climate when data leaks and hacking are an everyday possibility for users. No user will spend time on a website in which it feels unsafe. Moreover, if the user is confident about your website and finds your services credible, they are more likely to promote your page via referrals and word of mouth. 

A thoughtfully designed UI/UX instills trust in users. A professional and user-centric design conveys credibility and reliability. Users are more likely to explore and engage with a website that looks and feels trustworthy.

Here are some tips for enlisting trust and credibility into your website via UI and UX web design:

• Avoid technical jargon and use easy-to-read or concise language
• Keep the image and video quality on a premium level 
• Build relationships with your customers through social media networks and by offering personalized offers and discounts
• Personalize your website according to the user by analyzing their preferences, search histories, and other data sets. 

Seamless Mobile Responsiveness

In a mobile-driven world, responsive UI/UX design is paramount. A study by Statista showed that more than 58% of website traffic was generated via mobile devices in the first quarter of 2023.

A website with a mobile-friendly user interface (UI) adapts easily to different screen sizes and resolutions, providing a consistent and optimized experience across devices. A constant and seamless experience across devices—be it a smartphone, tablet, or desktop enhances user satisfaction and encourages return visits, leading to better conversion and sales.

Assists in conversion and engagement

What is the main purpose of a user-friendly website design? The end game of any UI UX for web development is to attract customers, keep them engaged, and ultimately push them through the sales funnel to generate revenue. Well-organized content and smooth navigation improve user satisfaction, leading to reduced bounce rates and increasing time spent on the site. 

As a result, users are more likely to stay engaged, explore further, and eventually convert into customers or take desired actions, such as signing up, making purchases, or filling out forms.

1. Emotional Connection

Great UX goes beyond functionality. It’s about creating an emotional connection with users. Only then businesses can break free from the generic class category of typical websites and propel their website to the mainstream class. For instance, websites like YouTube and Pinterest have created an emotional bond with their users, making them a household name across the globe. A website can evoke positive emotions through empathic design, leading to stronger user engagement and brand loyalty.

How to create a compelling UI/UX: UI/UX Design Process

UI UX design of a website is a vital component that should be handled with a proper flow and necessary steps. Taking the gorilla approach often leads to confusion and poorly constructed web development and UI UX design. Hence, following a clear-cut UI UX design process is adamant.  

1. Problem-defining and user research

The first thing to do before starting the designing phase is to clearly acknowledge and understand the problem and requirements of the project. This step is crucial as the UI UX web development is a group effort and requires a team of designers rather than a single UI UX web developer. 

Hence, defining why you’re creating the website and the primary goals can help create the entire roadmap for the project so that everyone is on the same team and clearly understands the project’s objectives. This phase includes conducting conversations or a set of meetings with the key stakeholders to understand the core pain points and requirements deeply. Then, product designers create a foundational approach that aligns with a high-level business strategy.

2. User Research and Analysis

After gathering details and evaluating the stakeholders’ expectations, the next step is to dive into the users’ minds. The foundation of any successful UI/UX design process lies in understanding the target audience. In this step, thorough user research is carried out to gather insights into user preferences, behaviors, needs, and pain points. 

To gather this data, top UI and UX web design companies conduct surveys, interviews, and analytics to create user personas and journey maps. By comprehending the users’ motivations and expectations, designers can make informed design decisions that cater to their specific requirements.

3. Wireframing

Wireframing is like creating a rough diagram of the website’s layout and structure. It is basically a 2D visualization of the website that describes the placement of elements in a simple drawing, sketch, or basic design format. Wireframes allow designers to focus on the website’s user flow, hierarchy, and functionality. Wireframes of the website are created with different UI UX design software and act as a tool to align stakeholders on the overall layout before moving on to more intricate design aspects.

Typically, wireframing is of 3 types:

4. Information Architecture

While the wireframing was largely design-centric, information architecture leans more toward the content part. Content plays a big role in designing as the amount of text could edit the UI UX design of a website. Designers organize the website’s content into a clear and intuitive hierarchy during this phase. Information architecture ensures that users can navigate the website effortlessly, finding what they need without unnecessary confusion. This process also involves defining the menu structure, categorizing content, and planning the site’s navigation system.

5. Prototyping

“If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a prototype is worth 1,000 meetings.”

– Tom & David Kelley

This is a pre-designing phase of the UI UX of a website in which high-end wireframes are converted into interactive designs that present the rough look and feel of the website. Prototypes simulate the user’s journey through the website, showcasing how different elements will respond to user actions. This stage often employs tools like Figma, Adobe XD, or InVision to create clickable prototypes that offer a realistic preview of the final product. 

6. Designing

After requirements gathering, wireframing, and prototyping, the designing part begins. The visual design transforms wireframes and prototypes into attractive interfaces with the help of several UI UX design software. It includes selecting colors, typography, icons, and other visual elements that align with the brand’s identity and resonate with the target audience. 

This step is not just about optimizing the look and feel of the website. Designing also puts tremendous effort into maximizing the functionality of the website. For a successful UX, the primary thing is to think like the user. The end customer of any UI UX web design is the user, so developers often need to ask questions like How will users interact with the interface? And What kind of information do users need to find easily?

7. Usability Testing

Before launching the website to the general public, there is a need to test the UI UX of a website. Testing usability is a paramount step that puts the design in front of real users to monitor their interactions. Testers thoroughly navigate the website and identify any remaining pain points, navigation issues, and areas of confusion that users might encounter. 

The more testing data you gather, the more refined the website will be. It provides valuable last-minute insights into how users interact with the website so that designers can make informed refinements and optimizations.

8. Deployment and iterations

After successful testing and refinement, your UI and UX web design is ready for launch. The entire UI UX web design gets handed over to the deployment team to make it live. However, the journey doesn’t end here. Designing is a contentious endeavor that requires periodic and constant iterations to keep the website updated with the current trends. 

Continuous monitoring and gathering of user feedback help identify areas that require further enhancement. Hence, the role of the UI UX design process is constant, driven by changing user needs and technological advancements.

DO’s and Don’ts of UI and UX Web Design

As we all already know, web design is complex, and if approached with the wrong methods, not only can it ruin the website experience but also lead to ginormous UI UX design costs. Let’s look at some do’s and don’ts you should keep in mind while creating user-friendly websites.

Do’s:

• User-Centric Approach: Base design decisions on user research and behavior analysis.
• Simplicity: Keep the design simple and clutter-free to avoid overwhelming users.
• Consistency: Maintain consistent design elements throughout the website for a cohesive experience.
• Clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs): Design actionable and visible CTAs to guide users through desired actions.
• Whitespace Utilization: Effective use of whitespace enhances readability and visual appeal.
• Accessibility: Ensure the design is accessible to users with disabilities, following accessibility guidelines.
• Feedback Mechanisms: Provide feedback for user actions, such as form submissions or button clicks.
• Responsive Design: Optimize the design for various screen sizes and orientations.

Don’ts:

• Overcomplication: Avoid complex designs that confuse users and hinder navigation.
• Inconsistent Branding: Stick to the brand’s established colors, fonts, and imagery.
• Ignoring Mobile Users: Neglecting mobile responsiveness can alienate a significant user base.
• Excessive Pop-ups: Intrusive pop-ups can disrupt the user experience and lead to frustration.
• Unreadable Typography: Using illegible fonts or insufficient font contrast strains users’ eyes.
• Autoplaying Media: Autoplay videos or audio can catch users off guard and lead to annoyance.
• Lack of Feedback: Failing to provide feedback for user interactions can leave them uncertain about their actions.

Summing Up

The Role of UI UX design is getting increasingly important in developing advanced websites with a user-friendly interface. Visitors are now looking for the ‘IT’ factor in websites, and the traditional designing methods are not just cutting it anymore. To get the best-in-class UI UX for web development, it only makes sense to opt for a prominent and driven UI UX design company. 

The symbiotic relationship between UI and UX is the key to a successful website, and companies are now realizing that in order to make their website a top player in the market, showcasing their capabilities with attractive designs and the best user experience is the way to do so. We hope that this article helped you in the resolution of your queries and gave you an idea about the importance of UI UX in web design. 

By Sakshi Kaushik

Content Writer

A passionate writer and tech lover, she strives to share her expertise with mobile app developers and fellow tech enthusiasts. During her moments away from the keyboard, she relishes delving into thriller narratives, immersing herself in diverse realms.

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UI/UX Principles for Building Great Generative AI Tools

Don Norman’s 1988 design classic, “The Design of Everyday Things,” laid out user experience principles that have influenced great hardware and software design ever since. While Norman drew on analog examples like door handles and light switches, his principles are broadly applicable to software, including generative AI products. With all the hype about generative AI, it’s easy to forget that products powered by even the most sophisticated models will fail if they lack good UI/UX.

Many new AI tools have generated loads of interest, followed by lackluster user retention (as detailed here by Sequoia). AI hype drives “tourist” signups, but new users struggle to understand or derive real value from the product. This is the classic “trough of disillusionment”, which occurs when a core technology (generative models) jumps ahead while supporting technology (UI/UX design) lags behind.

This post details how to apply three core UX concepts to generative AI products: 1) affordances, 2) feedback, and 3) constraints. Applying these concepts to generative AI leads to conclusions we’ll explore, including:

• Don’t aim for a Hole-In-One
• User feedback isn’t free
• Treat chatbot interfaces skeptically

The examples to follow are drawn from workplace productivity tools (and partly inspired by learnings from my work at Tome, an AI-powered medium for shaping & sharing ideas), but the strategies apply broadly, from dev tools to social media to e-commerce.

Providing quick, clear feedback to the user about a requested action is critical for any technology. Feedback is especially important for generative AI systems, due to the latency and complexity of their output. And feedback goes both ways. A system must solicit relevant feedback from the user without being annoying, to generate better output for that particular user in the near-term, and to enable better versions of the product in the medium or long-term.

Build for latency

Generative AI model response times tend to range from single to double digit seconds. At first glance, waiting ten seconds for a compelling memo, a brilliant image, or a beautiful video might seem like a non-issue. Without generative AI, these actions take hours — who cares if it takes 10 seconds, 1 second, or 100 milliseconds?

But users aren’t economists optimizing for opportunity cost. They’ve been conditioned by non-AI tools to expect software so fast it’s perceived as instant. This leads to a number of user challenges with obviously non-instant AI products:

1. Confusion whether the system is working and if they need to retry/restart.
2. High perceived cost of iteration. And since most of the time the first artifact an AI generates is not exactly what the user wants, the user wants to iterate.
3. High likelihood the user starts to multi-task. Once a user has switched away from your app, there is no guarantee they will ever come back.

There are good strategies for mitigating latency effects that pre-date generative AI. These include loading animations, progress bars, and background processing (in which the user is routed to another task and receives a notification when the current task finishes). A newer tactic, specific to LLM features, is streaming text word-by-word (or character-by-character) to the UI, rather than rendering the full output all at once. Since many models can generate words faster than a user can read, this can reduce perceived latency to near zero.

Don’t aim for a Hole-In-One

One particularly effective strategy for mitigating latency is to break workflows into small steps, in which system feedback is provided and user feedback is solicited at each step. This allows the user to progress towards an output with increasing confidence that the system will deliver precisely what the user wants. In a well-designed iterative workflow, the latency of initial steps is low — and the user’s trust increases with each successive step that the final output will be what they want. If you’re quite confident that you’re going to get back the artifact you want, then you will be willing to wait ten seconds for the final step to run.

Iterative workflows have an even more powerful benefit than increasing latency tolerance: they enable users to generate output that matches their expectation better. Generative models can sometimes produce exactly what the user wants, from just a simple user prompt. And going straight from input to “nailed it” final output is an amazing user experience; it’s like hitting a hole in one. And like hitting a hole in one, it’s very rare.

The challenge is not how “smart” the model is, but rather what context and information the model needs to produce the user’s vision. Consider a sales manager who wants to summarize her team’s quarterly performance. She’s seen dozens of quarterly sales reports, and she’s deeply familiar with her company’s norms that govern such artifacts (norms like tone, detail level, length, and visual layout). If she needed a colleague to write her such a report, she’d simply ask for “a quarterly sales report” and expect the colleague to already know these norms.

So when this sales manager wants to get such a report from an AI tool, it’s not obvious to her what norms she needs to tell the tool, and what it already knows. This is where iterative workflows are particularly helpful. She can start with something easy and familiar, like requesting “a quarterly sales report” and the tool can then help her hone in on precisely what she has in mind. Zach Lloyd calls this pattern “ask and adjust” in this well-reasoned piece on AI design.

User feedback isn’t free

In many classical ML products, each user interaction generates a new piece of training data for the model, improving the next version of the product. Every user click on a search result helps the search model improve. Every email a user marks as spam helps a spam classification model improve.

But many generative AI products lack the inherent “physics” where user interactions mechanically lead to model improvement. For AI products where the output is a sophisticated piece of text, image, etc, it can be hard to distinguish between a frustrated exit (where the user couldn’t get the output they wanted, and quit) vs a satisfied exit ( the user got what they wanted and left). Some products solicit opt-in feedback (e.g. thumbs up/down), but the completion rates tend to be very low and the feedback itself often suffers from selection bias.

It’s far better to design a workflow where the user’s natural next action indicates their perception of the preceding AI output. One pattern, most commonly seen with text models, is in-line suggestions: if the user accepts the suggestion and keeps writing, that’s a strong signal they viewed the suggestion positively. Another pattern is to instrument what AI output gets saved, edited, or shared. These are not perfectly correlated with user satisfaction — a user may share an image because it’s particularly bizarre — but they’re decent proxies when used in the aggregate.

An affordance is a cue (normally visual) that suggests how and when to use a feature. Good affordances make it intuitive for users to interact with a product, without extensive instructions or experience. We’ll explore affordances for generative AI at three steps in the user journey: discovering entry points to AI, proving the right input for the AI, and using the AI output.

Discovering AI entry points

Many work tools are adding lots of AI features, and these features are applicable at different points in the creative process. High-level entry points for using AI features include:

1. Help me start from scratch
2. Extend what I’ve started
3. Edit what I’ve created

These different entry points have led to significantly different interfaces, even at this early point in AI interface evolution. For (1), free text or “blank canvas” interfaces have emerged as early leading paradigms. For (2), in-line generation (aka autocomplete) tends to dominate text generation features (like Github Copilot), while “show me more like this” tends to dominate image generation features (like Midjourney). For (3), interfaces tend to focus on highlighting, selecting, or uploading existing content (like Grammarly).

For a user who has discovered one AI entry point in a tool with multiple AI features, it’s easy to conclude “this is where the AI lives” and fail to discover the other features. Great products mitigate this by introducing users to their various AI entry points at the times in the user’s workflow when each entry point is most likely to be useful.

Entering input for AI

The core input of many generative AI workflows is free text input, aka “prompting”. Unfortunately, good prompting is complicated, fast-evolving, and inconsistent across tools. Good products help users craft prompts with strategies including example prompts and tooltips.

Good interfaces also help the user understand the context the AI has — and what it lacks. When working with a powerful AI, a reasonable user may conclude that whatever they can see in the app, the AI must also be able to see and understand. For example, if I can see my past conversation with the AI, surely the AI must also be aware of it (this is a behavior ChatGPT popularized). But not every AI works like this! Some systems are aware of the user’s previous prompts, some are aware of even more context than past prompts — and some are only aware of the user’s current interaction and nothing else. The user should not have to figure out what the system knows and what it does not through trial-and-error.

Using AI output

It’s tempting to think that when a system has produced generative AI output, and the output is good, success is at hand. But even when the output is good, this can be a confusing moment for the user.

First, new users are often left wondering how to persist the output. Even when the output is good, many users immediately want to iterate and see if they can go from good to great. But fear they may lose their existing work can lead to hesitation and frustration.

Second, users may be confused how to improve the output. Assuming they used a “start from scratch” AI feature, should they go back to the beginning? Do they need to move to a different AI entry point like “extend” or “edit”? Many users will have encountered products like ChatGPT where the output is not directly editable; if output is editable, users likely need an editing affordance.

Constraints restrict input and output to help users work faster and better. Good constraints are clear to the user. If a system can help a user achieve a goal — but only part way or part of the time — it can be better to prevent that path altogether, rather than deliver an unreliable experience.

LLMs open up vast new user experiences (it’s why I love working on them!) and product creators should be eager to relax traditional constraints from deterministic software. Nonetheless, regardless of how intelligent LLMs become, there will always be a place for some thoughtful constraints.

Input: don’t fear controls

Inspired by the success of ChatGPT, many generative AI tools use a free text box as their only, or primary, user input. But many aspects of a user’s intent are best expressed via categorical or numeric inputs. When creating a document, most users have attributes in mind like language (a categorical) and length (a numeric value). Users may not mention these attributes in a free text prompt, but it doesn’t mean they don’t care about them. By soliciting this input via discrete, bounded controls (like a drop-down or slider), a system helps solicit the input it needs to deliver what the user has in their head. And there are time-honored principles for helping users navigate discrete controls: setting good defaults, grouping controls logically, and explaining controls with tooltips or labels.

When it comes to controls, setting good default values is a critical part of the design. The vast majority of the time (well in excess of 90%) users will not change the defaults, even if they would benefit from doing so. One opportunity to combine good defaults with user preference variance is to adjust defaults dynamically, either via hard-coded rules or AI.

Output: not everything that can be generated should be

For generative AI products, there are many situations in which the underlying model can produce some content, but where the user would nothing vs struggling with misleading or jarring output.

For most work-related tasks, users would prefer “I don’t know” rather than a potentially false answer they’re must verify or refute . This Harvard study at consulting firm BCG shows how AI can diminish work quality when AI answers questions beyond its “confidence frontier” and users, unaware where the frontier is, don’t sufficiently scrutinize the output.

Methods for reducing hallucination are fast-evolving (for example, retrieval-augmented generation), and I suspect hallucination will be a mostly “solved” problem a few years from now — but today, output where factuality is critical remains an important place to consider constraints.

Legal and ethical concerns are a second reason to constrain user-facing output. Just because the underlying model can generate text or images on a topic does not mean it’s conscionable to do so. However, much of the time that a system classifies a user request as “out of bounds”, the user’s intent is actually benign. With a bit of help, the user could rephrase their request to stay in bounds. For example, some image generation tools deny prompts that include the word “child”. But if a user wants to generate a picture of a family with children, they could prompt “family of four” or “parents with son and daughter”. The key is that the constraints are clear to the user.

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It’s true what they say, the homepage really is where the heart is. If you’re in the process of bringing your digital product to market, or you’re refining your UX design flow, then we’re here to tell you that your homepage design matters.

Think about it. Your homepage is effectively your shop window, it’s the first thing your potential customers are going to see when they land on your website. Sure, months down the line you’ll likely start to see customers landing on your secondary landing pages, but when you first get going, how you’ve set up your homepage is going to be crucial to your success.

People really do judge a book by its cover when it comes to websites and mobile applications. Get your UI wrong, make a mess of the branding, or confuse your users with cluttered design elements and you might just find that your bounce rate hits the roof before anyone has even had a chance to read your mission statement or find out about the service or products you are offering.

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Why great homepage design really matters

How to design a homepage in 3 easy steps

Homepage design best practices

How to design your product homepage with Uizard

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Why great homepage design really matters

Great homepage design will not only help you to transform your web or app clicks into converting customers, but it will also help you stand out from the crowd in what is becoming an increasingly noisy market for most niches. Sure, you might be building a completely unique product in an emerging niche but, more often than not, you are going to be taking on a market leader when you go live. Creative homepage design can be a great way to stand out from the crowd and truly hammer home what makes you different and demonstrate why you are a market disrupter and not just the latest rip-off.

The 10-second rule of digital product design

When it comes to all things digital, whether that be homepage visits or product display page conversions, you should always keep in mind the 10-second rule. Countless web and app usability tests have found that, by and large, most users will abandon a session if they do not find what they are looking for in the first 10 seconds of a visit, whether that be hard transactional activity or a specific piece of informational content they might be searching for for research purposes.

Bearing this in mind when you are creating wireframes or prototypes for your own web or app homepages can be a great way to help you solidify the purpose of your page however, it is often a lot easier to do when the page in question has a clear and obvious customer touch point. Creating a Contact Us page that has clean and simple contact information, for example, is always going to be a lot more straightforward than crafting a great homepage that instantly makes your product or service clear whilst also outlining your mission statement.

How to design a homepage in 3 steps

So, what’s the best way to achieve your dream homepage design? And what do you need to include in your project to ensure you create a homepage that will smash your conversion goals and truly stand the test of time? Here is how to design a homepage in 3 easy steps…

Step 1: Keep things simple

The main thing you need to bear in mind with your app or website homepage design is to keep it simple; this isn’t the kind of space where you want to be reinventing the wheel (remember the 10-second rule). Most homepages only need a handful of elements to drive success. This usually includes the following:

• A main navigation calling out secondary landing pages
• A clear headline and descriptive content block clearly defining your brand or MVP and its benefits
• A small amount of supporting content for secondary messaging
• Descriptive imagery that supports your primary messaging
• Social proof (this could be testimonials or a banner calling out third-party reviews)

Step 2: Centralize your product or service

This one might sound obvious, but you need to make sure you center your product or service on the homepage so that it’s the first thing your potential users see. When you initially launch your website or app, it’s likely that word of mouth will be the main driver of visits, but you’ll also generate incidental traffic and, eventually, non-branded traffic through search engines.

Make it super clear for those that don’t know (and those that do) what exactly it is you do, why you do it, and how you do it better than everyone else. This goes for SaaS homepages, e-commerce homepages, and even blog homepages.

Step 3: Think about your user journeys

And, finally, make sure you don’t fall into the trap of thinking your job is done once you’ve perfected your homepage design, there are still plenty of opportunities to really annoy your users and drive them to one of your competitors. Make sure you use clear CTAs and navigational elements to guide your user on to the next step of their journey whether that be making a purchase, signing up to your newsletter, or reading some of your blog content.

Homepage design best practices (homepage dos and don’ts)

If you’re ready to brave the world of homepage design with our easy three steps, then just be aware that there are some common dos and don’ts that you will want to factor in to your design flow…

Homepage imagery

Do: Use images that explain your product or service or reinforce your messaging
Do: Use images that are formatted appropriately (WebP is the preferred image format for search engines)
Do: Make sure your images are responsive to device type to accommodate both mobile and desktop users

Don’t: Use images that have no relevance to your MVP, everything you include on your homepage should support your core mission statement
Don’t: Upload images in outdated formats or formats that will add a huge load burden to your page (we’re looking at you JPEG)

Homepage typography

Do: Use consistent fonts throughout your homepage. Although it is fine to use multiple fonts, a single font keeps your brand image cleaner
Do: Ensure you make a clear distinction between headings and regular content with headings typically larger and bolder than plain text
Do: Markup your headings with the appropriate tags for search engines (H1s, H2s etc.)

Don’t: Use more than one or two colors for text, it’s just jarring
Don’t: Use technical jargon in place of clean and clear language unless it is wholly relevant to your target market

Homepage CTAs

Do: Have clear navigational links both in the main navigation and across the page itself
Do: Use clear descriptive language in your CTAs that accurately describes the target page (this ensures you are meeting your user expectations)

Don’t: Use popups that bamboozle your users as soon as they land on the page (the exception here being a footer popup for cookie consent which is a must-have (for now at least ))
Don’t: Use misleading text in your CTAs such as a ‘shop now’ button that doesn’t lead to a transactional page

Design your product homepage with Uizard

There we have it, our ultimate guide to building the best landing page for your mobile app or website designs. If you’ve read this guide and still feel you need support with your landing page design, then Uizard is here to help. You can sign up to Uizard for free and start building out your own homepage rapidly and collaboratively. Simply start a new project, invite your team members, and let the wireframe and design fun begin.

Looking to streamline your homepage UI design flow even more? Our landing page UI design template comes with everything you could possibly need for a great homepage design (we’ve taken care of the dos and don’ts, so you don’t have to). Simply open the UI design template and customize it to fit your own brand, service, or MVP.

Want to learn more about the world of design? Head over and check out the Uizard blog now where we talk about everything from wireflows to prototyping for beginners. Ready to give Uizard a try, sign up now and get your homepage design underway.

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]]> https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/29/our-guide-to-homepage-design-homepage-design-tips/feed/ 0 433 https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/23/6-ways-the-progress-design-system-kit-makes-ui-design-fun-sitepoint/ https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/23/6-ways-the-progress-design-system-kit-makes-ui-design-fun-sitepoint/#respond Tue, 23 Apr 2024 08:23:00 +0000 https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/23/6-ways-the-progress-design-system-kit-makes-ui-design-fun-sitepoint/

In this article, we’ll feature Telerik’s Progress Design System, an end-to-end design language for creating simple, intuitive and beautiful experiences. We’ll discuss how the Progress Design System is a UI design solution that stands out from the crowd, and how this approach can position the component library as the basis for good UI.

We created this article in partnership with Telerik’s Progress Design System. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Telerik’s Progress Design System

Telerik’s Kendo UI component libraries are very popular in the development community, and the demand for UI design is growing. The Progress Design System has a unique approach to UI styling, because it’s tailored for both developers and designers alike. This ensures that a development effort is able to deliver in a timely manner, without being bogged down with UI issues.

Progress is set apart from the competition via its unique approach that enhances team collaboration. This design system offers themes, tools, and documentation to support most design needs. A good guide for getting started is available in the Design System Introduction page.

Many users of Telerik and Kendo UI are back-end developers who don’t have time or the skill to handle advanced styling requirements. Designers also work with developers via tools to help them contribute to the design effort. Progress tackles both of these uses cases in a design and development effort.

About Design Systems

A design system generally helps a team deliver a consistent UI that’s user friendly and intuitive. This is what cements the look and feel of an application.

A key success of any application development effort, whether for internal or external use, is its ability to meet UI design requirements. If the UI isn’t consistent, pleasant, and intuitive, users won’t enjoy using it. the support burden and costs will also increase, because the UI experience is inconsistent or confusing.

If the UI isn’t best in class, the competition will outshine. A development team can create the most innovative application, but this is all for nothing when users don’t adopt the new UI.

The problem is time, resources, and talent. Developers must waste time to get the CSS just right, when they would rather be working on functionality and engineering. A development team may get mock-ups from a design team, a style guide, or even a full-blown design system. In any case, the perilous CSS work, and the back and forth between development and design, makes this whole effort daunting and sometimes even unrealistic. Even a well planned development project can quickly go sideways when team members have to redo any of the work.

Teams that don’t have any input from designers can also benefit from the Progress Design System. Full-stack developers often don’t have the design chops to build good UIs. Progress is aimed at helping achieve great UI design with minimal effort.

Progress has a unique approach to solving this problem, which is the Progress Design System kit.

Let’s talk about what this Design System has to offer.

Out-of-the-box Themes

The Kendo UI component libraries come with four professionally designed themes (Default, Material, Fluent, and Bootstrap). Developers and designers can choose any of these, and this will be automatically applied consistently across the project. This is the easiest path to a great UI if no customizations are needed.

The themes are a carefully crafted collections of visual attributes like colors, fonts, and spacing. The design systems available like Material, Bootstrap, and Fluent are widely popular and well known. Once you apply a theme, you achieve a consistent look without any further effort.

There are hundreds of demos on Telerik’s website. Be sure to change the theme and color palette to see these themes for yourself. For example, check out the grid component and the out-of-the-box options that are available.

CSS-free Customizations (Basic or Advanced)

The ThemeBuilder is a very powerful design tool that helps developers and designers make either global or granular customizations without the need to write complex CSS.

There’s almost no learning curve with the ThemeBuilder, because it’s a visual tool. You can style every element of your Telerik and Kendo UI component, from the high-impact primary color to the smallest detail.

Developers can focus on rich functionality while designers can create beautiful experiences that delight users. CSS is hard, and it’s a skill set that’s best left to hardened professionals.

You can set global properties such as color, border radius, and typography in a few clicks, or you can go into advanced mode and make customizations down to the atomic level. The ThemeBuilder is a web application that allows you to style components with ease.

Once a designer nails down the project design, they’re able to share their customizations with just a few clicks.

You can check out ThemeBuilder via a 7-day free trial.

Collaboration Built In

The ThemeBuilder is a cloud app that stores projects securely in your account. When team members need to contribute, all they need to do is log in and open the project. There’s no need to share files manually or via source control. This allows designers to collaborate and share ideas with developers seamlessly.

ThemeBuilder is accessible to both designers and developers. This puts the tool at the center of all UI customizations and minimizes silos between team members.

Additionally, managers can set permissions to each project for additional team control. The team can simply focus on getting the job done without being buried by a bunch of irrelevant projects.

DIY for Designers

Generally, designers lose track of the project once they hand their design over to a developer. This can mean a number of round trips between the designer and the developer as the application is refined.

ThemeBuilder is code-free and easily accessible, so designers can log in and update the actual design themselves without any back and forth. Developers can also be granted access to the tool, so they can stay up to date with the latest designs available. The tool helps the development project gain momentum, so the team can tackle challenging UI design issues with relative ease.

As Telerik and Kendo UI evolve, designers are able to keep up with the latest component features via automatic updates. This seamlessly adjusts your styles to match the updated HTML, ensuring a consistent experience and exciting new component features.

Figma Support

Designers can incorporate Sass/CSS variables from Figma into ThemeBuilder. Design tokens like colors, typography, and effects can also be imported.

The ThemeBuilder plugin for Figma can export the following from Figma:

• Styles such as colors, typographies, and effects: these are Sass or CSS tokens
• Custom SVG icons: these are exported and converted to icon fonts

To install the plugin for Figma, all you need is a Figma account as a prerequisite. Then, find the Progress ThemeBuilder plugin for Figma (available via Figma’s Community page) and click Install.

To further enhance the designer–developer handoff, Telerik and Kendo UI support Figma in two ways:

• Figma UI kits: Progress provides Figma UI kits that represent every component in the library. Designers can make pixel-perfect designs of what they think the final product should look like.
• Import design tokens in ThemeBuilder: Developers can get design tokens straight from Figma to further streamline the designer–developer handoff.

The Progress Design System is built with both designers and developers in mind to minimize unexpected delays in delivering a project.

Detailed and Interactive Frontend Documentation

Telerik and Kendo UI have best-in-class documentation. It’s detailed, comprehensive, and interactive. Developers and designers can read about the Progress design system in general, and can also learn about the markup, styling, and configuration options for each component.

For example, a developer can visit the docs, set some properties, and inspect the markup. For a quick look at the docs, check out the documentation available for the button component.

One specific example is the autocomplete component documentation built in React. Developers can quickly assess the markup and what props are available. They can also pick between JavaScript or TypeScript as the markup language.

If React isn’t your tool of choice, there are other options available, such as Angular, Blazor, jQuery, and Vue. The documentation is comprehensive, so you’ll get support no matter which tool you pick.

This technique can greatly enhance the development of backend systems — such as APIs that must integrate with the UI design. For example, a backend developer can inspect the design and begin to imagine what the domain data model might look like. With a clear vision of the domain, a developer can quickly begin to flesh out other parts of the solution like DTOs, backend storage, and caching.

Note: Telerik and Kendo UI are still working on the documentation and as of this writing not all components are covered. The hope is to reach that point by 2024.

Change the Way You Work

Telerik and Kendo UI have been trusted by developers for great UI experiences for decades. As UI styling demands continue to evolve, so does the Progress Design System and its tools. Today, Progress has reached a point where designers and developers have a unique styling solution that stands out from the competition. Whether you need something out of the box or a truly unique custom design, this path gives you the easiest way to truly delight customers.

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]]> https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/23/6-ways-the-progress-design-system-kit-makes-ui-design-fun-sitepoint/feed/ 0 432 https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/16/find-things-to-do-this-weekend-and-beyond-2/ https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/16/find-things-to-do-this-weekend-and-beyond-2/#respond Tue, 16 Apr 2024 08:09:32 +0000 https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/16/find-things-to-do-this-weekend-and-beyond-2/

Boulder Events: Find the Best Things to Do in Boulder, Colorado and surrounding communities.

Looking for things to do in Boulder? Whether you’re looking for a weekend festival, a free concert, or a family-friendly event, we’ve got you covered. Our comprehensive calendar of events includes 1000s of local events, from outdoor adventures to cultural events. The event information is courtesy of Daily Camera and other local media outlets, and the calendar is updated frequently, so you can be sure you’re getting the most up-to-date information. Upcoming Boulder Events Quick Search: 3 Days | 7 Days | 14 Days

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]]> https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/16/find-things-to-do-this-weekend-and-beyond-2/feed/ 0 431 https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/15/digital-product-demos-what-is-a-design-demo/ https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/15/digital-product-demos-what-is-a-design-demo/#respond Mon, 15 Apr 2024 13:09:57 +0000 https://uxdesigningtips.com/2024/04/15/digital-product-demos-what-is-a-design-demo/

Whether you are a fledgling founder or a product consultant, how you present a product to various audiences is going to be a crucial step in the success of your MVP. Selling products, or rather selling the core concept behind a product, is largely dependent on building buyer or investor confidence, and a strong product demo can be the best way to do just that.

Not only are product demonstrations for SaaS and startups one of the most effective strategies for piquing the interest of potential investors, or for helping you to connect with a specific target market, but they are also a great way for you to test ideas with different stakeholders. Unlike app prototyping, mapping out a product demo that outlines specific user flows helps you to showcase the purpose of your app, but also the feel of it, and exactly what pain points you’re aiming to solve.

So, what is a product demo? Why do you need one? And how can you fast-track the digital product demo design process to streamline your workflow for clients and buyers? We explain all in our guide to digital product demos.

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What is a product demo?

Why do you need a product demo?

When will you use your product demo?

How to create a digital product demo

Digital product design templates for consulatants and founders

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What is a product demo?

A product demo is a presentation that demonstrates the purpose, value proposition, and USPs of a product to potential customers, investors, or stakeholders. Product demos typically include interactive elements allowing full or partial demonstration of a product or service however, having a final iteration of the product in question is not necessarily a requirement for a product demo. Product demo collateral can be made from functional prototypes or early-stage designs as well.

Within the realms of mobile applications and web designs, a product demo can be a crucial way to demonstrate purpose. The core aim of a digital product is to provide a robust solution to a specific problem, or set of problems. A digital product demo can help to demonstrate directly how a problem is solved, whilst also outlining what makes a product unique.

Why do you need a product demo?

You know what a product demo is, but why do you really need one? If your product design is good enough it will sell itself, right? Well, not exactly. Evidence shows that a well-constructed product demo can significantly impact success, conversion, and uptake.

If you are an early-stage startup demoing your app prototype to potential investors, or a product consultant looking to hook in potential clients or customers, then a fully fleshed-out product demo is a must-have. Here are four reasons why a great product demo is so useful…

1. Helps you to demonstrate your MVP
2. Helps you win over various audiences
3. Strongly supports conversion rates
4. Helps to showcase the USPs and innovations of your product

When will you use your product demo?

When you use your product demo will largely depend on what stage of the product journey you are on. You may be demoing for stakeholders or you could be demoing for potential users during an event or webinar…

During design & development – An early-stage product demo can be a great way to convey your goals to your wider team or to external stakeholders. This might be the case if you are a startup designing your product and you want to showcase improvements or features. Or you could be demoing low-fidelity mockups or early functional iterations of your actual product to convey form, function, and core USPs.

For investors – A product demo is a really strong way to show people what your digital product does and how it does it. If you are a startup founder or a digital product consultant, you might just find a product demo is the magic element that really gets people on board with new products at seed rounds and beyond.

For sales – Once you have the final version of your product (or something close to it) a digital product demo is likely going to be the number one way of selling your product. If you have innovative mobile app, you might be demoing to customers and businesses alike. If you are a SaaS startup then you might be making use of your product demo at events, during webinars, or during strategic meetings with other brands.

How to create a digital product demo

The steps involved in creating a digital product demo will largely depend on the purpose of the demo you are creating – a demo for internal or external stakeholders is going to be a lot different to a product demo for a potential investors (although some of the assets that you may use could be the same).

Regardless of audience, you will likely be demonstrating your product’s core features and purpose with either a practical demonstration or a video demo. Here is how to create a digital product demo to really showcase your product’s strengths and overall vision:

1. Decide the aim of your demo – are you selling the finished thing to customers? Are you winning over investors? Are you showing off an early prototype to convey your core mission?
2. Identify your target audience – think about what your audience expectations are. Are they seeing your brand and product for the first time? Is this a demo of new version of your app that you only have in prototype form?
3. Define what collateral you need – are you running a practical demo with a focus group or talking over a demo video? Define what content you need to make your demo a success for your target audience
4. Build out visual assets or outline your practical demo – create your assets and plan your approach
5. Create a script to suit your aim and audience – create your script to really sell your idea
6. Test your demo for feedback before the real thing!

Digital product design templates for consulatants and founders

In an ideal world, you would be blessed with endless runways and weeks of design time to create your app or web designs, turn these into workable prototypes, and subsequently fold these into a product demo however, time isn’t always on your side, sometimes you need to go from idea to demo in a matter of hours.

More importantly, if you are turning around multiple demos for multiple audiences in a short amount of time, you need to ensure you are maintaining a certain level of quality with each project you are working on.

If you are designing a web, mobile, or tablet app, or working on a website design to showcase your product idea or service, then Uizard templates are here to expedite your product design flow, giving you the superpowers of rapid speed and consistently high quality.

To get started, simply sign up to Uizard for free and select one of our predefined design templates to get your demo creation underway. All our UI design templates come with all the necessary UI design considerations and click journeys built in, meaning you can update them to fit your product or service quickly and easily.

Of course, you can always design your product prototype from scratch with Uizard however, our templates empower you to design multiple products at speed which can easily be folded into your practical product demonstrations.

Ready to give Uizard a try? Sign up now and streamline the product demo design process. Want to learn more about the world of design? Head over to the Uizard blog now.

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Happy New Year people of ET

To start 2024 off, we’re sharing the story of an Entering Tech reader who refused to gree for everybody. 

Donald Apakhade Ogah—or Donald Y.O.T.A.Y (ears Of The African Youth) —is a 25-year-old Nigerian who started his career in music, and is now building a tech career as a UI/UX designer. Our conversation with Donald started on X (Twitter) early this week when he shared his success story (and how we played a part ). 

So for today’s edition of #EnteringTech, Faith and I have invited Donald to write to you about his journey through music, network marketing, and tech. Here’s how Donald Yotay is hustling his way towards building an audio tech unicorn.

by Timi Odueso & Faith Omoniyi

Some trivia before we begin. Answers are at the bottom of this newsletter. 

• Which African country has the most startups?

I have documented my job search journey on LinkedIn and Twitter, and my goal is to share a well-rounded story. I hope that you gain one or two things that can apply to your job search, business, or brand.

I started off studying computer science at the University of Lagos (UniLag), but in 2018, I dropped out in my third year to pursue my dream of becoming an artist. I won’t go into details on how that went, but by 2021, after years of being an artist without any sponsor or record label, I decided to look for ways to make money. This time, I tried network marketing. I believe that our dreams change, and we should allow ourselves to pursue new dreams. 

By 2022, I switched roles again, and this time to tech—design. In a conversation about entering tech, my cousin, a full-stack developer, suggested I try product design. At the time, I didn’t even know what Figma was. But then I spent the whole of 2022 learning from free YouTube tutorials, Udemy and Coursera. I learned mostly UI design and had just a brief idea of UX design.

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A year later, I was ready for a job. In January 2023, I enrolled in a boot camp at Side Hustle to build an MVP for a startup idea, where I got my first taste of working on products.

Recording/Performing Artist
2016 – 2020

Entrepreneur (Network Marketing)
2021

Product Designer, Freelance
Apr 2022 – Dec 2023

UI/UX Design Intern, Analytics Intelligence Africa
Jan 2024 – Present

I created a portfolio, and got a mentorship on ADPList where I spoke to mentors from Tesla, HomeDepot, and American Express. There’s a lot I learnt from these mentors from creating my core values to identifying industries I wanted to work in, but one of the most critical things that would help me down the line was creating a unique portfolio. “The job market is saturated,” they told me. “And if you want to stand out, you have to create something that’s different, something you’re passionate about. This way, even when you’re speaking about it, your passion will show.”

And that’s what I did. I created a portfolio that said something about my interests. In it, there’s a prototype for Moosic App, a music streaming platform that stems from my background as an artist (with songs being used in Nollywood films), a UX design for Google Chrome bookmarks, and even a brand design project for my sister’s scented candle shop. 

I designed things I was passionate about.

The work paid off. In November 2023, I clinched an interview with a construction startup that needed a designer for an app and a website.

Did I get that job? Yup. But I declined because it didn’t align with my career objectives. My mentors advised that even greenhorns with no experience can still stand firm on their core values, preferred industries, and dream workplaces.

I didn’t relent though. I consistently reached out HR departments and even had another interview in December 2023, and in January 2024—this month— I received two job offers! These jobs might have come a year after I started job hunting, but the seeds were sown in September 2023 when I changed strategies. Here’s what I did:

Starting in September, I started considering offline strategies for job hunting since the online approach wasn’t as fruitful. I shared my CV with everyone—friends, family even a bartender I once met. I would tell them to be on the lookout for UI/UX opportunities, and follow up with calls and texts.

In October, I volunteered at a conference, SwitchCon Africa, and strategically snagged the “green room” access to chat with speakers. I shook hands, and collected LinkedIn details, Twitter handles, and even phone numbers from every single one! (You never know.) One of the speakers—Chide Idoga—I met would be instrumental in helping me get my first job. She was the only one who would contact me weeks later, forward my CV to the HR team at the company she worked for, and hint at a possible internship.

I read an edition of #EnteringTech on the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) Programme and I applied. At that stage, I had two job interviews but no job offer. I was torn; it was painful, but then I received news, in November, that I had been selected for the 3MTT programme. 

By December, I posted the new certifications I got as part of 3MTT on Twitter and LinkedIn and the posts got zero engagement, but I didn’t think about it too much. But then, on New Year’s Eve, Minister Bosun Tijani—who created the 3MTT Programme—himself validated my LinkedIn post. I mentioned that I was looking for job opportunities, and the minister asked his network to view my profile and reach out if interested.

“Within a few hours, four different brands had asked for my CV, and by January 5, I had two job offers!”

Both were fully remote paid internships in my dream industries: edtech and data organisation/management. The company I eventually chose was Analytics Intelligence Africa. I’d met Chide, an Investor relations manager, who works there earlier in October, and she’d forwarded my CV to the HR department! I had been on their necks for 3 months, following up with the HR department. They finally sent me an employment letter when they noticed the minister’s spotlight on my profile. My discipline in 3MTT is UI/UX design, but I took additional artificial intelligence certifications just to impress the company.

This might sound weird and obsessive, but it makes perfect sense to a guy coming from a background in music and network marketing. The amount of “No”, “Stop trying”, and “Leave me alone” I had gotten from my time as an artist and a distributor cemented my hustle philosophy.

For anyone in a similar position, please keep at it. Try and FAIL repeatedly until the only option you can see is your win; when people say “No”, hear N.O.T.O. instead, or “Not on this occasion.”

People love tips, hacks, and tricks, and I am sure a few of the readers are wondering what I said in the 3 interviews that got me hired or what level of design expertise I have that made me stand out. For me, I know my secret is aggressive learning. Learning is a hobby for me. I know that sounds silly, but instead of doing the normal things others do when trying to relax, I open a book, watch an informative video, listen to a podcast, or start an online course. And like I mentioned, building an intention portfolio with passion projects also defined my path. 

In conclusion, let me share my top resources from 2023, for life and UI/UX design. First, of course, is Entering Tech. It’s a newspaper for the tech era. Our parents often whine about us missing the news, but influencers know every detail about YouTube millionaires. Entering Tech was my digital paper: industry updates, relatable newbie journeys, and even job leads like the 3MTT in the October issue. That one story? It brought me here. Here are other resources I enjoyed:

Life: The Diary Of A CEO, Founders Podcast, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Happy Sexy Millionaire by Steven Bartlett, the Duolingo App—where I am currently learning German, French, Maths and Music and the You Version Bible App.

Music:Dejavu by Seyi Vibes, Wire by T.I Blaze, and Awodi by Asake.

Design: ADPList — mentorship platform on different fields, this Free Figma Web Design Course on YouTube, Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger, Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski and The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.

Donald has documented his job search journey on LinkedIn and Twitter, and his goal is to share a well-rounded story. We hope that you’ve learnt one or two things that can apply to your job search, business, or brand. If you’d like to connect with Donald, please check him out on LinkedIn (Donald Yotay) and Twitter (@Donald Yotay).

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When it comes to transforming your mobile app vision into something more tangible, there’s no better way than sitting down with a pen or paper, gathering your team around a whiteboard, or mapping your app idea out with online wireframing software.

As we discussed in our beginner’s guide to wireframing, the beauty of app wireframing is that absolutely anyone can get involved and have a crack at it. If you are drawing your wireframes by hand, all you need to do is pick up a pen and get to work. That’s not to say there is no skill involved though. Sure, there is a low barrier to entry, but there’s more to perfecting your design than just scribbling a few boxes down on a piece of paper.

Looking to streamline the mobile app wireframe process like never before? Maybe you’re new to the world of wireframing and want some tips on how to turn your mobile app idea into a digital design? We cover everything in our step-by-step guide.

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Skip to section:

What is a mobile app wireframe?

What does a mobile app wireframe actually include?

How to create a wireframe for an app: 6 steps for designing the best mobile app wireframe

How to create and edit app wireframes with Uizard

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What is a mobile app wireframe?

A mobile app wireframe is a sketch or digital visualization of a mobile app design that outlines how an application will function in terms of user flows, click journeys, and CTA placement. Mobile app wireframes are typically low-fidelity and so don’t include visual and stylistic elements or any branding, and also don’t include any copy aside from page titles and subheadings to demonstrate core page intent (you can find out more about wireframe fidelity in our dedicated guide).

What does a mobile app wireframe actually include?

Whether you are using a UI wireframing tool such as Uizard to map out your wireframe, or you’re taking things back to basics with a good old fashioned, hand-drawn wireframe, what you need to include in your project will largely remain the same.

We cover this in more detail in our step-by-step guide below, but really, all your mobile wireframe designs need to include are the core elements and interactions to convey the overall purpose of your app idea i.e., what each screen will need in terms of basic elements and components, and how screens are linked together to demonstrate user journeys.

How to create a wireframe for an app: 6 steps for designing the best mobile app wireframe

Ready to get to work? If you have a mobile app idea in mind that you are itching to bring to life, here are six steps for creating the perfect mobile app wireframe…

1. Identify what user journeys you want to cover
2. Decide what screens/pages you need in your mobile app wireframe
3. Map out your mobile wireframes in an intuitive order
4. Populate each app wireframe with appropriate elements and components
5. Link app wireframe pages through CTAs and navigational elements
6. Share your mobile app wireframes and test your assumptions

1. Identify what user journeys you want to cover

Depending on the size of your app idea, there might be several user journeys you want to map out in your initial wireframe to really give an idea of what you are trying to achieve and why. Before you even begin to actually design or draw any screens or elements, try writing out your user flows in list format or as a flow chart so you can get a clear picture of what pages and elements you are going to need before you’ve even begun the design process.

2. Decide what screens/pages you need in your mobile app wireframe

Once you have your list of user flows, you can then start thinking about what screens you need to include in your early-stage wireframe design. For example, you might be designing a food delivery app that takes the user from order to basket. This particular user journey will have a limited number of conversional screens however, these will likely be supplemented by more foundational screens such as a homepage or a search screen.

3. Map out your mobile wireframes in an intuitive order

The next step is to sketch out your screens in an intuitive order. This might again depend on what user flow you are trying to demonstrate, with most being fairly linear. If you are demonstrating a user journey that is cyclical or many user journeys that flow in different directions, then you might want to center your homepage screen with the various user journeys mapped out around it.

4. Populate each app wireframe with appropriate elements and components

Once you know which pages you need and what order you want them in, you can start populating them with various elements to demonstrate the purpose they fulfill within the scope of the wider design. There will be a number of elements that will remain consistent throughout each screen (such as navigational elements so your users don’t get lost), but many pages will have their own unique elements.

5. Link app wireframe pages through CTAs and navigational elements

CTAs and page interactions will really make your wireframe go from basic illustration to useful demonstration of how your product will actually function. If you are hand-drawing your wireframes, you can illustrate page interactions through a series of lines, sort of like a spider diagram.

If you are using an app wireframing tool such as Uizard to design your app however, you can actually link elements to other screens within your design and explore how the user flow would work using a dynamic preview. This will effortlessly transform your static wireframe design into a functional wireflow. To do so, simply select an element and use the lightning bolt icon to connect it to another design screen.

6. Share your mobile app wireframes and test your assumptions

Once you have populated all your screens with appropriate elements and added in your page interactions, you can then share your idea with various stakeholders for first-round feedback. With Uizard, you can even add people directly to your wireframe app project, meaning they are only one click away from seeing your brand-new design!

Having shared with your team, you can then look at adapting some user journeys or adding in additional screens based on feedback. You likely won’t have hit all the necessary touch points the first time around, and collaboration can be a great way to develop ideas and improve the solutions your app idea provides.

How to create and edit app wireframes with Uizard

Using Uizard as your app wireframing tool, you have three possible opportunities to create mobile app wireframes. The option you pick will depend on how you want to start your wireframe project: from scratch, from a template or by uploading your own app wireframe sketches. Wireframing with Uizard is quick, simple, and will get your app wireframe project up and running in no time.

Upload app wireframe sketches to Uizard

With Uizard Wireframe, you can import an app wireframe sketch directly onto a design screen in the Uizard editor. All you have to do is snap a picture of your app wireframe drawing and upload it via the wireframe scanner located in the magic tab on the left panel in the editor. For a detailed look at this process, check out the blog ‘Uizard Wireframe Explained’ or watch the video walkthrough below.

Use a Uizard app wireframe template: Low and medium-fidelity

If you don’t want to draw your own app wireframe by hand, you can instead use a low-fidelity Uizard app wireframe template. From here you can edit the template to create various wireframe design screens, and once you’re finished, simply head to the magic tab and use wireframe mode to convert your mobile app wireframe screens into a mockup. Alternatively, start with a medium-fidelity app wireframe template for a further headstart with your mobile wireframe design.

Start from scratch: Create a digital app wireframe

Looking to create a digital app wireframe from scratch? By starting a blank project in Uizard, and switching wireframe mode on, you can do just that. You can then drag-and-drop premade components onto your design screen to start creating your app wireframe.

What comes next?

Uizard is here to take your app wireframe to the next level, but what comes after wireframing your mobile app design? Populating your app design screens with detailed images, text and colors will transform your app wireframe into a mockup, which you can also achieve by switching to high-fidelity via wireframe mode in the Uizard editor. If you’re interested in how Uizard can help you go from wireframe to mockup, check out the article ‘How to create an app mockup’ for more information.

Uizard is an AI-powered design tool for non-designers, helping users to map out their designs and advance them to functional prototype designs. Sign up to Uizard for free today and bring your idea to life in magical high fidelity.

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