User experience and UX design are integral segments of product development. Numerous enterprises across the world are embracing UX like never before! If current market stats are anything to go by, nearly 600 software experts have voted for agile development. It’s quite the trend now, and innumerable organizations are relying on it for improved UX.

However, a trivial issue pops up in this regard. Most of the UX designers and developers are getting confused with lean UX and agile UX. Since they are using both the terms in place of each other, things are getting more complex and difficult. While Agile started out with the mere assumption of user demands and feedback, Lean UX has taken the technology forward.

With UX designing turning out to be imperative for organizational success, it’s high time you develop crystal clear ideas of Lean and Agile UX as well as their differences.

Understanding Agile UX

Agile UX involves iterative, evolutionary, and incremental approaches. The entire process is classified into small divisions, tasks, or iterations and is executed within short terms. A dynamic and efficient team carries out all the iterations with cross-functional approaches in the following stages:

• Planning
• Requirement evaluation and analysis
• Design
• Coding
• Acceptance Testing
• Unit Testing

Every single iteration gets monitored by process developers. As each of these iterations end, stakeholders get to see the working version. These iterations lead to the final product which comes with minimal errors and issues.

With this brief introduction on Agile UX, it’s time to take a look at the features of Lean User Experience.

What’s Lean UX design?

Over the past decade, Lean UX has garnered huge popularity in the software and product development arena. It’s turned out to be the buzzword with innumerable users choosing it over the other UX design technologies. As an inexpensive, analytics-driven, and swift approach to uncover and develop exceptional usability, Lean UX revolutionizes UX design to a great extent. Lean UX works on three crucial principles that include:

• Unnecessary inconsistencies
• Wasted efforts
• Undesired and wasted outputs

If you own a tech company, you will surely not want to develop a product that’s of no practical use to your target users. It is here that developers need to be careful thus experimenting with their development process and technologies. Experimentation, user feedback, and iterative designs are always more important than detailed planning, intuition, and traditional designing. That is where Lean UX takes up the vital role.

Best practices involved in UX design

Collaboration within multiple teams happens to be of paramount significance. If you wish to take UX designing to the next level, here are some best practices to follow:

1. Fitting UX deliverables within agile timelines
2. Eliminating or reducing unrequired internal deliverables
3. Collaborating and partnering with non-UX members
4. Receiving consumer feedbacks at regular intervals

Parting thoughts-

Both Lean and Agile UX revolutionize product designing thus catering to the contemporary demands of the modern user. Your choice of these technologies will entirely depend on your user-base, their requirements, and your iterative capabilities.

Whether it’s a website or a product, users are the most crucial success drivers. They are the key factors determining a product’s usability and performance. While designing a product, even developers think about the use and application it’s going to have in users’ life. That speaks a lot about the significance of UX or User Experience design. Irrespective of what the product does or can do, it’s the benefits reaped by the users that matter the most!

So, what’s the general notion or thought process in this regard? Whenever we think of a product and its UX, we imagine a particular set of features that can make things easy and smooth for users. However, that’s just a part of the entire story. It is imperative to think about aspects within products which will lead to the identification of its true purpose.

That’s exactly what ‘Product Thinking’ means – identifying a product’s purpose

What does ‘product thinking’ mean?

Every developer has some objectives and goals in mind while creating a product or application. Say, for instance, the main purpose or objective behind creating the biggest cab service, Uber, is to reduce traveling hassles for commuters.

It’s here that product thinking comes into the picture. Every application or product has a core UX and its here that developers need to think when developing the products.

Why is ‘product thinking’ important?

What do you see when you book a taxi on Uber? You get real-time updates on the arrival of the vehicle along with the approximate time. These arrival updates or time schedules aren’t a part of the core UX. They are just additional features which enhance and improve the User Experience. What we get as the inference is that a product and its features share an interrelationship. The former supports the latter which is incomplete without the product.

Quite naturally, that compels developers to change their thought processes and development ideas. You need to think about the usability of a product and how it adds to the User Experience.

Here are some effective ways to strike a balance between the two:

How to engage in product thinking?

If you want to identify the importance of product thinking in UX designs, you will have to uncover the goals of the product. Try finding out its goals or the job it is expected to do. Every product meets users’ demands or fulfills a certain requirement. In other words, a product solves the user’s problems. If it fails to do so, the product loses its usability. For unmatched User Experience, developers will need to identify a product’s objectives and the problems solved by it.

1.     Identifying your target audience

Does your product cater to a particular group of people? Most of the products have their target audiences, and developers should know these audience groups. That will give you an idea of the purpose of your product.

2.     Strategy and vision

Always try to have a vision while working on product development. That will help you create and devise the right strategies. Once you achieve successful strategizing, it’s time for effective implementation.

Signing off

If you wish to improve the core UX, thinking in products will be of paramount significance. These tips will make your job a lot easier!

How Icons can affect User Experience

A user-friendly interface is one that can help in effective communication and ensure that things are done in the right manner. The user interface of a website thus has a crucial role to play to increase its online traffic and repeat visits. The job of a web designer or a mobile app designer is to create the interface in such a way that the user finds it easy to complete his or her actions.

But what role does an icon play in this? App icons are just apt for interfaces since they are able to express the meanings without using words. The catch here is whether the icons can convey the core idea to its target audience or not. They should be designed carefully to bring out the objective of an action or a product. Icons provide other benefits too like improving aesthetic appeal and saving the real estate of your mobile screen or desktop. Moreover, a majority of the websites and apps use them since it is a pattern with which users are quite familiar.

What can impact the functionality of an icon? Though icons offer innumerable benefits when designed properly, there can be issues if the functionalities get hidden. This means the icons fail to communicate their usability due to design errors. The most important job of an icon is to support the online or mobile users on where they need to go next.

Check out some of the ways to select the best icons for your app or a website so that your users enjoy using them.

• Make sure that the icons help in enhanced navigation

The basic function of the icons is to help the visitors to enjoy a smooth navigation experience in your website. Choose icons with visuals, which the users are already familiar with and so feel comfortable using them.

Is it your dream to see more and more users download one of your apps on their mobile phones? Your icon can create all the distinction between the app getting overlooked or being immediately recognized.

• Simplicity is the key

Keep your icons simple. Avoid using too many images or colors into the icon for your mobile app. An icon is tiny and overcrowding it with too many concepts or colors can create chaos, which should be avoided by all means. Your main intention while designing the icon for a mobile app should be that its functionality should be instantly recognized.

• Your icons should have a unique symbol or shape

Your app will be competing directly with thousands of other apps when a user navigates through the App Store or scrolls through the home screens. So, you need to go for an icon that can be recognized immediately.

• Do not use words in them

Since the icon does not have much space in it, when you use long words, they become quite difficult to read, especially when it is pitted against so many other icons that look equally appealing. How about using the first alphabet of your brand instead? That will enhance the functionality of the icons for sure.

Keep these tips in mind while designing the icons for your mobile app so that the users can have an enjoyable experience.

Chatbots and UX Design:

Delivering seamless customer experience is the top most KRA for many web and app developers. But are they really scoring well on this front? How can customers get 24 x 7 support in the face of personnel constraints? How can user engagement be lifted with timely, prompt, and accurate support, right when they need it?

Chatbots emerge as viable answers to address these critical questions.

How does a Chatbot Provide Value to Your Business?

• Offers personalized services
• Caters key consumer experiences, including Customer Service, Content Interaction, and Productivity
• Offers simple, seamless, and engaging platform to consumers
• Helps businesses to respond faster to consumers
• Assist you to distribute content with higher information dissemination rate
• Helps in delivering targeted content as per user’s feedback or past records
• Works as a source for lead generation
• In the future, the platform can be used to incorporate AI and machine learning for responding to customer inquiries

Here is how we feel Chatbots will re-define UX Designs

1. Defines the Problem Clearly

Chatbots are one of the most popular platforms that can help your define your marketing and branding strategies, before you actually invest anything into development. It helps you to identify a user problem that you have a solution for, and can help you analyze its capabilities for being a business opportunity.

2. Helps in Analyzing and Measuring Success

It is agreeable that many game-changing products have not delivered their expected results, just because the development team failed to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs). Since your bot has the capability to impact your business in a positive way, it can assist you to design certain metrics that can assist in showcasing success rates, when pre-defined goals are met.

3. Offers Better Understanding of Customers and their Preferences

The platform assists in segmenting information as per persona groups and develop user stories by deciding with whom the bot will interact, how it will behave, and what purpose it will serve. It not only helps you to understand your target users’ feelings, but also assist in customizing the application as per their requirements and preferences.

4. Helps in Deigning UX Conversational Flow

Unlike designing screens, the bot enables you to design a UX conversational flow that will answer queries as per bot’s intelligence. In the designing phase, developers will think of all the potential questions, answers, and logic paths that the bot will require communicating with humans in an efficient manner.

5. Ensures a Personalized Experience

Lastly, the most important factor is the bot’s personality, and it should link directly to your brand. Start with naming your bot, and work on its presentation styles, appearance, and other vital factors to deliver a personalized experience to your wide and trusted customer base.

Conclusion

Providing a fascinating experience to customers by the way of timely support helps in keeping them engaged with your brand. It can also assist in capturing important details to let your business improve and expand.

Undoubtedly, users would wish to access something that can answer their queries at the earliest and can assist them in better decision-making. If your bot can do that, then it can bring tremendous success to your current business activities and can enhance the chances of overall growth.

UX Design Challenges

What is it that will help app developers deliver a tailored and intuitive experience on the mobile?

How can developers satiate user demand for applications that are fast, deliver instant results, and can be customized to provide a personalized experience?  What is the one key that prevents app uninstalls and engages better with customers?

It is UX or User Experience around the mobile app.

Because of the problems UX tries to address, it becomes a complex field strewn with challenges at every step. If you are looking to make a mark in the field of UX design then it is worth your time reading about the top 5 challenges that every web app developer requires overcoming while designing UX:

1.     Follow the Concept of KISS

Keeping It Short and Simple (KISS) is the essential rule to attract users to an application. Using technical jargon, complex terminologies, and jazzy words ruin user experience as they may fail to understand what exactly does the app wants to convey.

Incorporating features like accepting users’ comments, feedbacks or ratings, and even options to share the content with others can help in enhancing the overall experience.

2.     Make Possible Efforts to Bridge the Gap

Since a web designer is responsible for delivering an output that can ensure engaging user experience, it doesn’t mean that everything in the development should be at par with his/her interests.

Studying target audience, understanding their behaviors, and determining their requirements plays a major role in laying out the entire roadmap for any web development project. Market experts suggest understanding user’s interests and expectations to ensure that the outcome connects with users on all levels.

3.     Always Keep User Security & Privacy on Priority

Keeping the emphasis on design and user experience, a web developer should never neglect web app security or treat it as a secondary factor. Nowadays, apps contain payment details, contact information, confidential data, and other sensitive details of a user. Therefore, application security features should be carefully coded to offer protection against threats and vulnerabilities.

4.     Make it Appealing and Impressive

Apart from focusing on fitting the app to today’s technological demands, it is important to offer impressive packaging to attract users and deliver a pleasant experience.

Adding transitions, animations, and responsive designs can help in boosting your app’s presence on the global front and can help in gaining ample downloads within a fraction of seconds.

5.     Create for One, But Aim for Universal

Today’s users may have multiple devices with different screen sizes; hence, it is important to design your app for multiple platforms. Ensuring its capability to run on as many devices as possible helps web developers in attracting as many users as possible. Develop an application for a single platform, but start testing its capabilities for other platforms using Beta versions.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, UX designers may face one or more of these challenges from most unexpected sources. But it is imperative to keep user’s expectations in mind while designing and delivering a streamlined and memorable mobile app experience to them.

Lean UX Design is the way to go

What is the one key design differentiator that helps to enhance overall user experience?

What aspect help in bring the user closer to your brand over the digital ecosystem?

Yes, it is UX design that we are referring to!

Lean UX design helps to power up a range of digital products – from simple business websites to dynamic applications. Today we explore the different ways in which lean UX can propel your business past your competition.

The truth about ‘Lean’

The term ‘Lean UX’ has a unique connotation. If we take a look at the origin of this term, we will come across the concept of ‘lean ideas’ and ‘lean thinking’. The term ‘lean’ refers to streamlined business objectives and laser-like focus on identifying true business value.

Lean UX design principles aim at identifying consumer preferences. These practices will identify what appeals to your target audience thus helping you ensure unsurpassed User Experiences.

On that note, lets take a look at how lean UX design practices can add significant value additions to your business.

.1. Uncovering the crucial business requirements

Lean UX design practices will help you identify the pain points in your project. You can delve deep into the nuances of these specific problems thus solving them with lean design principles. With ‘lean’ design principles, you will have the opportunity to discover crucial business requirements. It will help you understand what works for your business and what doesn’t.

2. Customize business needs as per industry standards

No two organizations are similar in nature. Quite naturally, their processes and operations will also differ from each other. When big companies and enterprises work on application development projects, they are often unable to identify crucial requirements. Lean UX will help them identify these needs thus showing them what will work for target users. That’s a huge benefit when it comes to seeking funds for your project.

3. Breaking ideas for hypotheses

While developing a product or application with lean UX design principles, you will have the opportunity to break your ideas into small units of testable hypotheses. That’s a great way of identifying whether the product is marketable or not. Results of the hypotheses will determine the product or application development processes.

4. Determining the UI

At times, product developers have crystal clear ideas of their target users, product needs, and user stories. However, the problem lies with the UI designs. The perfect combination of Lean UX and Agile will help you identify the right User Interface designs. Quite naturally, compelling and attractive UI designs will lead to improved customer engagement.

5. Direct exposure for products

Lean UX ensures fast and swift product deliveries. Most importantly, it helps you take your products directly to your target users. Lean UX design principles show a remarkable upward movement through the ‘think-make-check’ loop. Business owners and product developers can create highly scalable products and applications.

So, if you have been wondering on how to add the “WOW” factor to your software, Lean UX design is the way to go! Nothing beats a crisp design and a fulfilling User experience to scale up your business.