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Design Systems- What and Why Do We Need It?

Posted on 09/05/202102/06/2021 by Anteelo Master

Have you been struggling lately with your design-development workflow? Are you experiencing the handoff problem resulting in poor product decisions? Looking for ways to significantly improve it? Well, you need a Design Systems. It will help you work better, faster and improve your team collaboration. But what really is a Design System?

Well, a Design System is a fairly new idea in the digital transformation landscape. But one that has stirred up a lot of emotions and interest lately.

Known by many names such as Atomic Design Methodology, Component Design, and Design Language, the idea behind a design system is creating a series of design components that can be reused by you and your team.

Airbnb and Uber have fundamentally changed how digital products are designed by implementing their own unique design systems. By using a series of repeatable components and a set of standards that facilitate the use of these components, these companies were able to drastically change the pace of innovation and production within their teams.

What are Design Systems?

When too many people work on the same project and face the same challenges in a design team, each person finding a unique way to solve the problem can result in an incoherent experience for the user when they use the product. The fundamentals of a Design Systems is to manage design at scale.

The definition of a Design System is a series of elements that can be combined and reused on a product by the whole team. It includes colors, designs, components and character styles. These series of components can be reused in different combinations.

Product Design has always been about consistency and predictability. With a unified Design System, you can build products better, faster and it results in a cohesive experience for the user.

A Design System helps companies render exceptional UX and strengthen their brand.

The Handoff Problem:

Previously, Designers and Developers faced a lot of problems. Due to iterations, requirement changes and siloed nature of design and development, handoff posed a lot of challenges. More often than not, it resulted in developers being blocked by designers and poor product decisions.

By focusing on commonly used components, there has been greater collaboration between designers and developers and previously siloed teams are now working off the same mental model. Seeing already existing design system components eliminates a great deal of duplicated effort.

The component-based design model is a great step. It has significantly reduced the need for handoff.

Design System is a consistent approach to product development, one that encompasses guidelines, principles, philosophies, and code. A design system is a perfect tool for scaling the design practice, eliminating the need for hand-off and facilitating greater collaboration.

Difference Between a Design System, Pattern Library and Style Guide

Design Systems are a comprehensive guide on how to design a product. It is not just the classification of components but a whole process. It is a collection of rules, principles and best practices. The main element of a Design System is a library of UI components.

More often than not, a Design System is interchangeably used with a Style Guide or a Component Library. However, these are sub-components of a Design System.

A Design System is far more complex than simple style guides. It includes everything from colors to documentation. What a Design System really does is, it defines a common visual language for the product teams.

It speeds up the design process. A System Design bridges the gap between the teams involved in building a final product with consistent graphics standards, making it super easy to create websites from components. It is like a rulebook for the design and development teams and can be broken down into:

Design System – The entire set of design standards along with principles, patterns, and components on how to achieve them.

Pattern Library- A sub-component of Design System, a pattern library is a repository of reusable components and user interface design elements. Essentially, a pattern library is a collection of design elements that surface multiple times on a site.

Style Guide- Another sub-component of the Design System, a Style Guide emphasizes the visual presentation and determines how products should look. It includes colours, fonts, brand attributes and logos.

Why should you use a Design System?

There are many benefits of this System. It helps the entire company deliver better and more consistent design solutions efficiently. A Design System eases out the process of designing delightful experiences for end-users.

1. Facilitates Consistency-

Building a System begins with classifying all the visual components within a product. This helps in highlighting the biggest inconsistencies within the product and helps the team decide the product’s relevant and most commonly used elements and components. Consistency in Design is the most crucial Design Principle.

2. Better communication-

For the team involved in product development, Design Systems are often referred to as the single source of truth. It helps the team to plan, develop and maintain product quality.

Single source of truth (SSOT) is a concept that organizations apply as part of their information architecture to ensure that everyone uses the same data when making business decisions.

Since it is a single source of truth, this implies it also includes the vocabulary that may be used in the project. Gone are the days when a developer referred to a button as the red colored one. This leads to better discussions between the developers and designers and allows them to talk in the same naming convention.

3. Clarity to Developers-

With a design system in place, developers have a clear vision of how to build the required components while maintaining the unified styles.

4. Iterate Faster-

By implementing a Design System, teams can iterate a lot faster. You can release new designs with lesser resources in small chunks and with shorter feedback loops. It helps you stay organized and up to date with all the design changes your team makes.

5. Leveraging Each Other’s work–

Since Design Systems can be shared across multiple teams, efficiencies can be extended across teams and products. It has become easy to leverage other people’s work, use each other’s innovation without reinventing the wheel.

Operating at scale and improving efficiency and consistency are the main advantages of using and maintaining a Design System. Since you are reusing components in a Design System, the time and effort spent on building one really pays off in the long run. Your design and development team can just tweak the existing products, enhance the experience or focus on building other products.

Examples of Design System

With a staggering rise in the number of devices, environments, and browsers, there is an ever-increasing need to develop thoughtful interface design systems.

Design Systems are an industry standard. Not only do they provide the best team collaboration and keep your project organized, it also provides design guidance which is especially important in larger design teams. In recent years, leading tech firms have shared their design concepts and conventions, and here’s a list of the best design systems:

1. Material Design

Material Design System is widely known for its simplicity of navigation. It is a design language developed by Google in 2014 to create consistency across all Android design and devices and is widely adopted by Android and Web App developers.

2. Atlassian

Atlassian Design System is quite exhaustive and is widely used to create straightforward and beautiful experiences.

3. Polaris

Polaris from Shopify is widely popular for simplifying the designer-developer workflow.

4. Carbon

Carbon Design System is IBM’s open-source design system for products and experiences, with the IBM design language as its foundation.

5. Human Interface Guidelines

Human Interface Guidelines is a Design System prepared by Apple for all their platforms which provides in-depth UI resources and practical information.

6. Grommet

Created by Hewlett- Packard, Grommet is a design system that can help you embrace atomic design methods and build a library that meets your needs.

7. Mailchimp

Mailchimp’s design system is all about bold and creative designs with a focus to provide a consistent structure to the design language.

8. Digital Telepathy

Digital Telepathy is a Digital Design agency. Over the years they have refined a results-driven design methodology to iteratively improve the experience of customers.

9. Sushi

Since the initial design system was not scalable, Zomato recently came up with a new design system called Sushi. It provides a new and enhanced experience to its users with the Zomato app.

How can Design System benefit designers?

Now that you know what is a design system in UX and UX review, and the many benefits of having one, a design system benefits designers and simplifies the tasks for them. As a leading mobile app design company, we noticed that for Designers it has become easy to break down the UI into small parts rather than consider the whole webpage as one entity. You can think of a particular page as a set of components and quickly find and use the right component, pattern or style option( color, icons, fonts, etc.) from the Design System.

Conclusion–

Instead of re-thinking the foundation of each new experience for your products, a Design System keeps designers, developers, product managers as well as multiple stakeholders aligned with the design vision of the company and allows the team to easily focus on pixel-perfect development.

Become An Immaculate Designer

Posted on 01/05/202124/05/2021 by Anteelo Master

But, if you’re a designer who is a fan of the term ‘hot fixes’ and you roll your eyes at the mention of ‘iterations’, this blog is for you!

I know it’s frustrating when people just don’t get the art in your design. I know the tantrums, the bouts of criticism that clients throw at you all because the submit button was red, not green.

Bloody quibbler!

But you know what, forget it.

*sigh*

Don’t ever lose the feeling that you were put on this earth by the God of Design themselves. Users and designers don’t understand what it takes to build masterpieces.

So, let’s shine some light inside the mind of a despicable designer and try to look at life from their perspective-

Screw the users and their problems

You should start practicing the mantra — a good designer always designs things for themselves. Period.

Users Moosers.

It shouldn’t even come into the picture. You should automatically assume the personas, it’s no big deal. You spent years studying this in school.

Just pretend that you understood their problems. Resist frequent changes.

What people don’t understand is that you have already put your blood and sweat into the project. They will always ask for more. Because perfection is a state of mind. It will always be relative. They will try to throw into the vicious circle of ‘Design. Take Feedback. Repeat’.

Fall back. And charge with arrogance.

Repeat it after me- User knows nothing. They just don’t get it. They never will.

Copy your favorite designer’s work. Blindly.

Whether you are a pro or a beginner, someone will be always better than you. The world is full of them. I never understood this, what’s the big deal about copying work? Find your godfather designer and copy his/her ideas. It’s the right way to learn. How do you think great designers are made? They follow their idols.

If you are a newbie designer, you need to have an industry perspective. And for that, you need a person who has already been in the industry for long. So stalk his/her portfolio and binge copy his/her designs.

You need to do renovation before you start doing innovation, right?

Haters gonna hate!

Alignment is just a passing fad

Always remember- Design means decoration. What looks good, sells well. A good designer always draws what catches his attention. Alignment brings monotony into designs and the job of a good designer is to always bring in contrast.

So, throw elements randomly on the page. It would help the users spend quantity time (don’t worry about quality) on your pages thus making your application a success.

Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds

As a designer, you should only believe in one kind of consistency — being Consistently Inconsistent. That would always keep the users on their toes. If the Call to Action button has been rendered green on one screen, make it red on the other. Give users a chance to learn new things on every screen. The more variety they encounter, the more they would swear by the freshness of your design ideas.

Keep your emotions at bay

Design fanatics will try to make you think about users. What do users want? Why they want what they want? Do you know things like user’s journey, user’s persona, user’s birthday, user’s pet’s name?

Go to hell, you want to yell! I know!

If you start thinking about all this, when will you design? Half of the time, even users don’t know what they want. They are fickle-minded. You are the one with expertise and experience. You went to college, studied sixteen hours every day, submitted research papers. Not them!

Telling a story with motion graphics!

Posted on 28/04/202124/05/2021 by Anteelo Master

How to tell a story with motion graphics

Everyone is a storyteller at heart. Some of us develop an outlet to express our thoughts. Some of us don’t. It’s doesn’t matter if we express it or not but some stories just find their way out in the world. Every incident is a story. Every experience is a narrative. And we drive these conversations, effortlessly. Don’t we?

The incredible thing about stories is that they are not just confined to spoken or written words. They are independent of a requirement of a medium. The only components needed for a good story are- a storyteller and someone to hear that story.

I, for instance, chose to be a storyteller through motion graphics as my medium. I found the idea of breathing life into static experiences exhilarating. Everything in motion is a story in itself. The wind that blows leaves, the sound and movement that a pendulum clock makes, the chaos that rains cause in Delhi, all become my muse from time to time.

My job as a motion graphics designer is all about telling a story with pictures, sound, and videos to create an experience that is meaningful and impactful. But, like everything else in the world, it’s not an easy job. It requires a lot of thought much before I lay my hands on the tools and get into the process part.

I usually spend a lot of time in structuring a fluent storytelling flow, fretting over how to make it appear natural, and most importantly trying to not over-complicate the message. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But the good thing is I know when it works. Every time I follow a structured approach, the result comes out to be spot on. I am happy to share it with all of you, feel free to add yours to it-

Conceptualization

I can’t stress enough this very basic step. Take my words, you are forbidden to skip it. This is THE MOST important step in creating motion graphics. No matter if you are creating a 30-second clip or a 30-minute piece, you can not afford to mess with the structure. Thanks to the internet, the attention span of our users is in seconds. You only have a little time to make an impact.

As a rule of thumb, I start by fleshing out a clearly structured story. I ask myself three questions-

Who am I making this for?
What action I want users to do with this?
What emotion I want them to feel?

Once you have the answers to these questions, it will be relatively easy for you to make progress.

Storyboarding

After conceptualization, I move to create a high-level story (or, storyboarding as I call it )

On a paper, I draw stick figures to identify the core structure of the story- how they are entering/exiting/interacting, what are the transitions needed, what are the text/audio requirements, and things like that. The storyboard helps me stitch together every frame and it helps me visualize the entire story.

As I am the only motion designer on my team, I show my storyboard to my fellow designers and take their feedback. It’s always good to take other people’s inputs before you get started on the final script. I totally recommend that.

Design

Voila! Finally. This is indeed the most exciting part. Here you get to give wings to your ideas and see them come to life, piece by piece. The design part is mostly technical. You might want to use your own style here, but I always stick to our brand guidelines. So the ball is entirely in your court.

Just remember that design is not just about adding popular animation styles or fading in/fading out various scenes. It’s about stitching a cohesive story together so that it flows in the blink of an eye. The timing, the voiceover, everything has to be in perfect sync with motion.

Wanna be a DevOps Engineer? Here’s How!

Posted on 23/04/202131/05/2021 by Anteelo Master

DevOps is the fusion of social thinking approach, practices, and apparatuses that builds an association’s capacity to deliver products and service at high pace: developing and adapting products at a quicker speed than businesses utilising customary software development and infrastructure management procedures. This speed empowers companies to give their customers comprehensive services and stay ahead of their contemporaries. DevOps is the posterity of agile software development – conceived from the need to stay inline with augmented programming speed, and throughput agile strategies have accomplished. Development in agile culture and approaches over the past few years revealed the requirement for a more universal approach for the end-to-end software delivery lifecycle.

Who is a DevOps Engineer?

DevOps Engineer is a professional who comprehends the Software Development Lifecycle and has the inside and out knowledge of different automation technologies for creating advanced pipelines (like CI/CD). DevOps Engineers works with designers and the IT team to manage the code discharges. They are either designer who gets inspired by deployment and network operations or system admins who have an interest in scripting and coding and move into the development side where they can planning of testing and deployment.

In DevOps, there is a need to have a continuous and gradual change in the code so that testing and deployment are conceivable. It probably won’t be persistently feasible for DevOps Engineers to do the coding from the start again and again; in that case, they need to know about it. There is a need for DevOps Engineers to associate different components of coding alongside libraries and programming advancement packs and incorporate different parts of SQL data management or various messaging tools for running programming release and deployments with OS and the production foundation. This article walks you through the skills required to be a DevOps Engineer:

1. Knowledge of Prominent Automation Tools

DevOps is continually evolving. To guarantee that your DevOps abilities are up to the mark, you should keep yourself updated with the best DevOps tools. These DevOps tools facilitate faster bug fixes and improved operational support, along with increased team flexibility and agility. They result in happier and more engaged teams and promote cross-skilling, self-improvement and collaborative working. The top DevOps tools are:

a) Bamboo: Bamboo has numerous pre-assembled functionalities that will assist you to automate your delivery pipeline, from builds to deployment. you needn’t bother with that numerous modules with Bamboo, as it does numerous things out-of-the-box with fewer yet more efficient modules.

b) Docker: Docker has been one of the most significant DevOps apparatuses out there. Docker has made containerisation mainstream in the tech world, mostly because it makes disseminated development conceivable and computerises the deployment of your applications. It separates applications into discrete holders, so they become convenient and increasingly secure.

c) Git: Git is one of the most renowned DevOps tools and is extensively used across the DevOps industry. It’s a distributed source code management tool that is highly appreciated by remote team members, freelancers, and open-source contributors. Git enables you to track the progress of your development work.

d) Jenkins: It is a reliable and most trusted automation tool for a great number of DevOps teams across the globe. It’s an open-source CI/CD server that enables the engineers’ to mechanise various phases of the delivery pipeline. Its vast plugin ecosystem has made it a very renowned and popular tool. As of now, it offers more than 1,000 plugins and still counting, and so it integrates with majority DevOps tools.

e) Raygun: Spotting bugs and finding execution issues is a fundamental need of the DevOps procedure. Raygun is an application execution observing tool that can assist you with discovering bugs and find execution issues through continuous checking.

f) Gradle: Gradle is a developer fabricated tool that is utilized by tech-biggies like Google to assemble applications and is displayed in a manner that is extensible in most elementary ways. For instance, Gradle can be utilized for native development with C/C++ and can likewise be extended to cover other programming languages and platforms.

g) Ansible: Ansible is an open-source application development, config management, and programming provisioning tool that can run on UNIX-based frameworks just as Windows-based frameworks. This DevOps tool designs a framework for software development and furthermore automatic deployment and delivery.

h) Kubernetes: While the Docker permits you to run applications in compartments, Kubernetes goes above and beyond by permitting engineers to run holders in a group in a protected way. With Kubernetes, designers can consequently oversee, screen, scale, and convey cloud-native applications. Kubernetes works as an amazing orchestrator that oversees communication among units and directs them as a group.

Puppet:

A puppet is a renowned tool utilized for configuration management. It is an open-source stage that has a decisive language depicting its framework arrangement. It can run on an assortment of frameworks, including Unix-based frameworks, IBM centralized server, macOS Servers, Cisco switches, and Microsoft Windows. It is basically used to pull strings on various application servers without a moment’s delay.

Elk Stack

Elk Stack is a mix of three open-source ventures – Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana that is helpful to gather bits of knowledge into your log information. With its downloads exceeding millions, Elk Stack is one of the most well-known management platforms. It is a superb DevOps tool for associations that need centralized logging framework. It accompanies a ground-breaking and flexible innovation stack that can streamline the outstanding burden of tasks and furthermore offer you business insights for no extra cost.

2. Programming Skills and a basic understanding of Scripting Languages

A DevOps Engineer need not be a coding expert but must have the fundamental knowledge of coding and scripting. These languages are mostly utilized in designing the automation processes and to achieve continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). Top DevOps Programming Languages are:

C: In this internet era, the majority of the code is written in C, and different languages reuse a significant number of its modules to facilitate the programming experience. Learning C is substantial so as to have the elementary knowledge of coding and to work on KVM and QEMU ventures.

JavaScript: The entire world wide web is the offspring of JavaScript. Many of the most well-known systems and libraries are written in JavaScript, from Angular to React and Node. Back end execution isn’t the only thing that this language brings to the table: the monstrous network of engineers implies that there’s consistently help accessible on GitHub or Stack Overflow. JavaScript is a sure thing for engineers.

Python: It has been utilized to fabricate cloud infrastructure tasks and assists web applications through systems like Django. Python is an agreeable all-purpose with a wide scope of utility. Python additionally upholds great programming rehearses through its elaborate prerequisites, which guarantees that code composed by one individual will be understandable to another- – a significant element in a DevOps world, where visibility should be constant.

Ruby: Ruby advantages from an enormous assortment of community-produced modules that anybody can incorporate into applications to add usefulness without composing new code themselves. It empowers an entirely adaptable way to deal with programming and doesn’t anticipate that designers should adopt a specific strategy to compose code.

3. CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery)

Information on different automation tools isn’t sufficient as you should also know where to utilize these. These automation tools ought to be utilized so as to encourage Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Continuous integration and Continuous Delivery are the procedures where your development squad includes constant code changes that are pushed in the principle branch while guaranteeing that it doesn’t affect any progressions made by designers working parallelly.

4. Software Security

DevSecOps (Security DevOps) has emerged as one of the tech buzzwords in the previous year for a reason being that DevOps helps in creating and deploying programs way more quickly, it likewise makes a lot of vulnerabilities, since security groups can’t stay aware of the quicker cycle. Basically, not just excellent code but bugs and malware can also be sent a lot quicker at this point. Presenting DevOps without having culminated security forms in the IT-association is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Accordingly, DevOps ought to have the fundamental programming security aptitudes to have the option to bring security into the SDLC directly off the bat.

5. Efficient Testing Skills

DevOps is gigantically affected by how well testing is done in a tech-based company. You can’t robotize the DevOps pipeline if effective constant testing, the procedure of executing automatic tests, isn’t set up. Continuous testing ensures that each computerized trial gets executed the way it should, or there is a huge risk of pushing faulty code straight away to clients, which isn’t acceptable.

6. Soft Skills

In addition to the fact that DevOps requires solid abilities like coding and robotization, yet it additionally requires such delicate aptitudes as adaptability, self-inspiration, and sympathy. A DevOps engineer is somebody who constructs associations and mitigates bottlenecks, which is achieved by conversing with individuals. Correspondence and cooperation are the abilities that can represent the moment of truth for a DevOps Engineer in any association. They ought to see how the association runs, who the individuals who oversee it are, and what the association’s way of life is to abstain from making conflict focuses and limitations.

Role of a DevOps Engineer

DevOps professionals come from a multitude of IT backgrounds and begin the role in different places in their careers. Generally, the role of a DevOps engineer is not as easy as it appears. It requires looking into seamless integration among the teams, successfully and continuously deploying the code. The DevOps approach to software development requires recurring, incremental changes, and DevOps Engineers seldom code from scratch. However, they must understand the fundamentals of software development languages and be thorough with the development tools utilized to make a new code or update the existing one.

A DevOps Engineer works alongside the development team to handle the coding and scripting expected to associate the components of the code, for example, SDKs or libraries and coordinate different parts, for example, informing tools or SQL DBMS that is required to run the product discharge with OSs and generation framework. They ought to be able to deal with the IT framework as per the sustained software code devoted to multi-tenant or hybrid cloud environments. There’s a need to have a provision for required assets and for obtaining the suitable organisation model, approving the launch and checking execution. DevOps Engineers could either be the network engineers who have moved into the coding area or the designers who have moved into operations. In any case, it is a cross-function job that is seeing an immense hike in the manner software is developed and deployed in object-critical applications.

Conclusion:

DevOps isn’t very hard to understand. It just requires a person to have a ton of hard and soft skills. DevOps specialists ought to have the option to do a great deal on the tech side of things — from utilizing explicit DevOps devices and overseeing framework in the cloud to composing secure code and checking mechanization tests. They ought to be people who are passionate about what they do and who are prepared to convey the gigantic measures of significant worth. They ought to be interested and proactive, compassionate and self-assured, solid and reliable. They ought to have the option to place clients’ needs over their teams’ needs and make a move when required. The DevOps job isn’t simple, yet it is absolutely justified, despite all the trouble to turn into a DevOps. To take things off the ground, check what number of the DevOps aptitudes highlighted in this article you have. On the off chance that you come up short on some of them, be proactive and start adapting at the present time!

UX Designer Role and Duties

Posted on 19/04/202131/05/2021 by Anteelo Master

The UX designer role occupies an exciting place in businesses today. In today’s marketplace, the customer is the KING! Every business needs to ensure that its customers are having the time of their lives with their products and services. The User-Experience domain is continuously climbing up on the ladder of priority of organizations. This has given the UX designer role a very prominent place in the industry. It has become one of the most sought-after jobs and has opened the gates of enormous scope for anybody who can shine in this niche. However, the definition of how a UX Designer should be like differs from company to company as each of them has different requirements and different customer bases. Nonetheless, the primary aim of a User Experience Designer is to ensure that the customer is not just satisfied but delighted with their services/products. They work towards improving the overall experience of the customer with the brand. It comprises of improvements like making the product more intriguing, engaging, and user-friendly. User-Experience designers think from the perspective of the customer to create the finest UX and solve any problems that a customer might face will indulging with the brand. Although the expectations from a UX Designer can vary from company to company, the general duties of the UX Designer include the following:

User Experience Designer Role:

Generally, the duties of a User Experience Designer includes the following:

1. Finding Innovative Ways To Solve Common UX Problems

A good UX designer is expected to think and move as a user would. He is responsible for figuring out the general issues that a user might face while using the product or indulging with an app. For instance, if the font is too small on your website or if the sign-up process of your mobile application is just too long and tedious. All these parameters come under the UX Designer role.

2. Product testing

A very crucial part of a UX designer’s job is to test various products to see how they are working with the users. A UX designer can conduct multiple surveys, interviews, usability tests, or take thorough feedback from the customers regarding their experience with the products/services and then gather the data and analyze it accordingly. The whole process of being with the users while they use your products creates a better sense of understanding and gives an in-depth knowledge of the customers’ experience with the product.

3. Conducting Comprehensive Product Research

This step is the most initial one while beginning a project. Detailed product research makes a firm ground for the designers to start building their projects and avoid assumptions and work with more factual data. This research enables designers to understand exactly what a user is looking for. It provides them with information about market requirements, customer expectations, and customer behaviour. It helps UX Designers to fathom industry models and perceive prospects for the product/service in a given region. It additionally boosts the planning and prioritizing of various parts of the products.

4. Describing Information Architecture

The primary task involved with Information Architecture is organizing the data and information athwart the product in a way that enhances the whole user experience. They ensure that the information is displayed across the product in a manner that is easily comprehended by the users. IA is the development of a framework for an application, site, or whatever that product/service that empowers users to know where they are on a site or an application, and data about the present location the user is. IA brings about the formation of routes, arrangements, and hierarchies.

5. Wireframing

Wireframing is essentially a mock display of how the final product will look like. This strategy is very crucial to envision the product design and augmenting the entire UX. Wireframes depict each and every phase of the product and give comprehensive information about what a user might go through while interacting with the product. It provides an upper hand to the brand as it can figure out the drawbacks without actually presenting the product to the users. It saves time and maintains the brand’s reputation. However, wireframes are not used for actual product testing.

6. Designing

UX designers sketch the item’s plan dependent on the persona made toward the finish of exploring the target client. In this stage, the UX designer structures the substance per the situations/scenarios. Scenarios are narrative methods for speaking to the client’s excursion or a day in their life. They clarify how the item (regularly a site or application) fits into the client’s life. It is essential for a UX designer to precisely consider every phase of the client venture. In such a manner, UX designers regularly utilize the design practice of information architecture.

7. Testing

At this stage, UX designers find out about any issues that may emerge when clients connect with the product/services. Product testing might be as straightforward as observing clients or it might incorporate complex test strategies, for example, exhibiting differing renditions of the product to realize which performs the best. Designers may likewise conduct overviews and polls. Additionally, UX designers may talk with clients on the off chance that they recognize issue territories. The least difficult of all the client testing techniques is watching clients while they connect with the product/services.

8. Implementation

On the off chance that you’ve not had a lot of experience working with web developers, at that point, it’s critical to think about this pivotal part of the job. During implementation, you will be working personally with engineers to arrive at your ultimate objective for a venture. The engineers will be striving to change your thoughts and ideas into a genuine, working website; how you approach this relationship will decide the achievement or disappointment of your task. Keeping your engineers tuned in all through the procedure will make this last stage simpler for everybody included; you as the UX designer will have realistic expectations of what the developers can deliver (and in what time period) and the designers won’t get any terrible stuns ultimately.

A UX designer is answerable for this whole procedure, and its execution. In any case, bigger organizations will segregate this task into a couple of smaller jobs so that that attention is not divided.

Conclusion

UX Designing is a very vivid field as it does not just cover developing a product or selling it; it involves the through-out journey of a user with the brand. A different approach to the UX Designer role is to ensure that when a user uses the services/products, each component should be efficiently optimized and emerge as extremely easy-to-use and very practical. A company depends on its users, and ensuring that they have a pleasant experience is a serious business. Being a multidisciplinary field, UX Designing has an extensive scope. UX designers come from diverse backgrounds like psychology, engineering, designing, and even hospitality. To structure for human clients also implies that you need to work with an elevated degree of responsibility in regards to as inclusive as possible and consider the limitations and expectations of the masses. A User Experience (UX) Designer must have a solid comprehension of user conduct and business objectives and must be equipped for a wide assortment of aptitudes, going from psychology to structure and innovation. Even though UX designing is a field that feels essential to product improvement, its inherent capacity stays unidentified to numerous in light of its relative freshness.

UX MESS-UPS THAT CAN RUIN YOUR PROJECT

Posted on 28/03/202124/05/2021 by Anteelo Master

Designing isn’t merely about following fancy trends. It is about creating stunning visuals, thoughtful user experience and mind-blowing content! There goes a lot of work in creating a fully competent and workable design.

Creating a great UX is all about learning, observing, analysing, interpreting and testing. It’s the process of making good experiences for the users. Although every designer is aware of the UX core principles, but, there are a few mess-ups that can be troublesome for their projects.

LOREM IPSUM < REAL CONTENT-

Internet usage ultimately boils down to content consumption. What users consume on the internet is what affects them and their thoughts. In the majority of the cases, the consumed content manipulates the users’ decision, which may or not lead to the right conclusion. As designers, you can easily fall into the trap of using ‘lorem ipsum to wrap up your design as quickly as possible. Reality is that, using placeholder copy makes your design look like a half cooked product and so it becomes hard to relate to. Our aim is to create design experiences, not templates. And this is possible only if real content is used in your design. It helps you to create a finely tuned experience tailored specially for your target-audience (TA).

The way to solve this? Is research:

Research your domain thoroughly. From methodologies to terminologies, everything. Use real content that will catch your end-users attention. Start with writing a provisional copy to set a tone and strategy and then later it can be revised again if required. A content writers’ team can do that for you. They can separate the content that matters and the ones with flaws. This ultimately helps experience what the live page would feel like and in return discussions and reviews would be made much easier.

NOT HAVING A DEFINED TA-

Generally what users find on the internet is universally generic content. They find that content, take time to process what they are looking for and then understand it. All of this creates a certain distastefulness in the users. A very common mistake is that designers writing content like it is for them and not for the users. Now, this can land as an issue.

Answer to this mistake? Create Personas:

Persona is the users’ voice. Research your users, their behavioural aspects, preferences and requirements. Now filter out your research and throw your focus on what needs to be done. Create various groups according to the condensed information and then create realistic personas, based on their experiences, needs and behaviours.

IGNORING DIFFERENT LAYOUTS-

You might easily love the ideas and designs that you come up with, but they might not always work. Sometimes they will fail and hence leave your goals incomplete. Even the good ideas fail. And this happens to the best of us.

Want your goals achieved? Answer is testing:

Merely creating designs is not enough. Conduct user experience tests with different variants, so that there’s something to compare your main design with. Such testing techniques will lead you to know, whether or not the intended effect on your users is working.

PLACING IRRELEVANT INFORMATION-

Every user is on a different user phase when they are at your product and hence they might be looking to seek different information. So if you bombard them with truck loads of data, they will get confused and their needs would remain unfulfilled. It is critical to provide your users with only relevant information. The users also might be using your product in a different context, according to their own needs.

Analyse your user(s) journeys to solve this:

The easier it gets for the users to find their required information, the more better acquired your product gets. Based on the realistic personas that you created, further create user journeys. Consider the scenarios your user might be in, the experiences they felt and so the information that would make sense to them. Think of, (a) the users geographical position; (b) what they did before and what they want to do now; (c) and what they want to do next.

UNORGANISED INFORMATION-

When there is a massive amount of information available on the platform, the users might find it hard to find. Now in this situation, unstructured information is just like cherry on top. A user can find it hard to navigate through the product and will end up having a bad experience.

Solution? Become an architect for the information:

Prioritize the most significant features and then create the required navigation. The goal should be to make it easy for the users to navigate through the product. Consider, predict and make it clear as to what their possible actions and scenarios might be. Sort through the information and structure it the right way. remember , it is not for you. It’s for the users. Information hierarchy is very significant for the product to be successful.

Ask yourself the relevant questions and then you will be able to find the answers to solve the said problems. Research, analyse and imply the refined ideas.

Designing with Code

Posted on 04/02/202121/05/2021 by Anteelo Master

It is an old saying- “A picture speaks a thousand words”. But not everyone can understand that language. So to make a design understandable we use code for designing.Code takes the design more near to the real product functionally/behaviorally. As in terms of professional language for a customer-“Interface is the product”. So the interface need to be interactive. And for a better interactivity a designer should design a functional layout. And to make those functional layouts functioning we use code, combination of -Markup language(HTML, XML etc.), Styling language(CSS, LESS, SASS), Scripting language(Javascript, jQuery, AJAX etc.).

There are lots of experiments, inventions that are done to give more life to designs, the mockups are now no longer used or are not enough to satisfy the customer to sell a product. No matter how much strength you put to design a beautiful template, unless it is interactive, even a group of static layouts can’t tell the whole product story. I am saying this because our interface now became more device independent, transitional and alive like a real product.

If we think of a human body, then design is skin and interface are bones, which gives shape to skin and gives it a meaningful body structure.

Let’s stop talking shit and let me show how code do magical designing…

Suppose we have a layout for which our client wants that, it should be viewed properly on all browser supportive devices. So, here comes the magic of code and we will code it once and it will work on all devices automatically. Let’s see how:

Just copy all the code and paste in a text editor and save it as, lets say test.html. And test it on browsers (advanced browsers).

There is a lot more stuff, like a new term which has evolved now a days is “RAPID PROTOTYPING“. It is something we do after design and before we start working on interface designing. The need of this is to demonstrate 20% of the actual product which users use 80% in the product most of the time.

CREATE WONDERS IN A DASHBOARD UI? HERE’S HOW!

Posted on 01/02/202114/05/2021 by Anteelo Master

The world that we’re living in today, is almost entirely technological. And it is evolving every day with the wonders of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Business Intelligence, BlockChains (like NFT), etc. In order to make people’s lives easier, these smart technologies use complex algorithms and theories to quickly compute and summarize data. This data is then provided to users in the name of ‘useful information’. But a question that needs to be asked here is that what is the point of this data if the users can’t understand it? And if so, they might not even find it beneficial for themselves or their purpose. Hence, this is one of the most important reasons as to why dashboard design has grown significant over the last few years.

One of the first things to understand is that as much as UX of the dashboard is important, so is the UI of the dashboard. They are both equally essential. Before jumping into our main motive, let’s take a quick sneak peak into the most prominent features of a great dashboard:

A good dashboard allows its users to interpret, analyse and present the key pointers, or say insights.
What an efficient dashboard do is present the user with useful information that can be put to use. As well as compile a visual representation of the otherwise complex set of data.
The desired dashboard will always be customizable and it generally is quite intuitive.
As an additional point, they are always organized when it comes to use of space. There might be a lot of data on the dashboard but it won’t seem like a mess that is cluttered all in one little space. Rather it looks neat.

NOW WE’RE AT THE HERE’S HOW SECTION

CONSISTENCY MAKES IT EASY

The dashboard should always be consistent. Considering that the users access the dashboard through different devices that also vary in screen size. It is important that the design looks consistent, whether it’s with respect to the colours, font, style of charts or navigation. The user should not get distracted because of the inconsistency in the dashboard design and so sheer attention should be paid to how the design dashboard looks on multiple screen sizes. The key is to start with smallest screen size and then move up along the way. This way of approaching the design is a golden rule, this helps in creating a visually appealing dashboard, which gives both a great UX and a great UI.

SIGNIFICANT INFORMATION APPEARS FIRST

Let’s talk about the heart of designing a dashboard, ‘content hierarchy’. Although this goal is achieved at the UX stage of designing, but is essentially through visual design that conveys the most important information in the most efficient way. This not only guides the layout but also the design guidelines. A couple of things to note here is that; (a) Centre alignment is the most recommended as found out from the users’ behaviour pattern on the dashboard. They acquire that part of the information in the first place ; (b) Another thing is that 18 pixel font is the maximum to be employed and information should be highlighted through the use of distinctive colours.

COMFORTABLE CUSTOMIZATION

Never use the ‘one size fits all’ approach. There are different users with varying business needs and requirements. Designs should be scalable, so that the user experiences customized dashboard. Now this in turn will empower the users, which is the designers’ ultimate goal. Users should feel that they can adjust their fit in consideration to their individual business requirements. This can be as simple as adding or deleting a column, or even adding a whole new table or sheet. The things to remember here are: (a) Always allow for easy modifications like addition/deletion of modules; (b) Give different yet comfortably usable options for viewing and deleting data separately; (c) And lastly, try using easy drag and drop interaction for the users to experience customizable dashboard design.

CHARTS? LESS IS MORE!

When it comes to presenting data visually, i.e., via pie charts, bar graphs etc., they should always be put in simpler form. Cluttering the charts with heavy tools and representation techniques only hinders the user from understanding and using the said data. Instead of using 3D graphs and animation, using flat-laid charts and graphs makes it a lot more comfortable for the users. Colour differentiation although, is sheerly appreciated, since it allows the users to understand the separate sets of data clearly.

ICONS CATCH THE EYES

What is generally ignored in the process of designing a dashboard UI is the ‘icons’. The best dashboard designs always include icons that are familiar to the users. For example, the pen/pencil icon is usually the edit tool. Likewise, the trash icon is for the option of deleting anything. This way, the user would have less time wasted in processing what the icon means and would have more utilized time in wrapping up their work. Thus, familiar icons help create great UX and UI.

RIGHT FONT REMAINS IMPORTANT

Employing the right style of the font and its size is equally important in both the UX and UI designs. It is advisable that while designing, not more than two fonts shall be employed. This is done in order to maintain a clean dashboard design. Creating a visual hierarchy by employing the inverted pyramid style in all the written content is quite significant. This can be done by putting the most important sets of information in the largest and the not-so-important sets of information in the smaller font, along with a hint of colour differentiation.

FILL COLOURS IN DESIGN AS MUCH AS IN LIVE

The concept of colours is such that, it might seem simple, but it also has a complex side. Different colours signify different things. Just like red colour is usually employed to denote danger and green colour is used to denote ease and agreement. Now, imagine if their use is reversed, won’t it be confusing? Therefore, designers are required to be really mindful whilst working on the colour palette of their designs. Besides, it is best not to go overboard with the colours, even if you’re tempted to do so. A good start would be picking two colours in the initial stage, that too something like contrasting contemporary colours.

MAKING THE FINAL POINTS

All of this would be worthless if you don’t know your users’ preferences. Whatever the studying concept maybe, if you don’t have the emotional connection with your users and if you don’t know their choices and requirements, then the whole work would just remain pointless. Therefore, besides knowing the tips and right ways of employing the tools to create a great dashboard, you should also know your users. Research, understand, analyse and imply your methodologies and tools.

Taking your leave with,

“Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does.”

– David Carson

Android: Applying Shared Element Transitions

Posted on 18/01/202121/05/2021 by Anteelo Master

Doesn’t it look cool when one view appears to move across screens without breaking the continuity of motion? It just adds to the flair of your app, thus improving the app’s UX.Now, this can be achieved using Shared Element Transitions; but here is the catch. This transition effect is available only on devices running on Lollipop (Android 5.0 – API level 21) and higher.Shared elements transitions were introduced in Android 5.0 to make view transitions across screens more seamless and easy to implement. Using this transition, the switch between Activities or Fragments seems more natural and unforced.

Before Android 5.0, transition effects across Activities were available, but they would animate the entire root view of our screen. Using shared element transitions, we can animate any number of views, regardless of their view hierarchies.

Now, let’s see how we can implement shared element transitions in our Android apps-

Step 1 : Enable Window Content Transitions in styles.xml

Step 2: Set a Common Transition Name for Respective Views on Both Screens

For the transition to work across screens, you have to assign a common transition name to the shared elements (views) in both layouts. The views don’t have to be of the same type or have the same id, only the transition name must be same.

The transition name can be set using the android:transitionName attribute in xml or using the setTransitionName() method in Java.

Step 3: Open Activity with Element Transition

In order to get the transition effect, you have to specify a bundle of the shared elements and view from the source activity while starting the target activity.

When we specify the source view along with its corresponding transition name, it ensures that even if multiple views exist in the the source view hierarchy with the same transition name, it picks the correct view to start the animation from.

While specifying multiple shared elements transitions, make sure that you import android.support.v4.util.Pair. Please ensure that you do not overdo the transitions, as that can distract the user and degrade the user experience.

Step 4: Close Activity with Reverse Element Transition

In order to get the reverse element transition effect while finishing the second activity, you need to call the Activity.supportFinishAfterTransition() method instead of the Activity.finish() method. Also, you need to make sure that you override the Activity finish behavior everywhere in your activity, for example if you have a back button in your Toolbar or if the user presses device’s back button.

Shared Elements Transitions with Fragments

We can achieve shared elements transitions with Fragments as well.

Step 1: Set a Common Transition Name for Respective Views on Both Screens

Step 2: Define a Custom Transition:

Step 3: Specify the Shared Elements Transition in FragmentTransaction:

Custom Shared Elements Transitions:

In Android Lollipop (Android 5.0), the default shared elements transition is a combination of 4 transitions:

Change Bounds – It captures the layout bounds of target views before and after the scene change and animates those changes during the transition.
Change Transform – It captures scale and rotation for Views before and after the scene change and animates those changes during the transition.
Change Image Transform – It captures an ImageView’s matrix before and after the scene change and animates it during the transition.
Change Clip Bounds – It captures the getClipBounds() before and after the scene change and animates those changes during the transition.

In most cases, the default transition is sufficient. However, there might be cases in which you might want to customize the default behavior and define your own custom transitions.

You can set the window content transitions at runtime by calling the Window.requestFeature() method.

Exclude Elements from Window Content Transitions

Sometimes you might want to exclude the use of the status bar, ActionBar and navigation bar from the animation sequence. This might be particularly required when your shared elements are drawn on top of these views.

You can achieve this by excluding these elements from the transitions. This can be done by adding a <target> tag and specifying the ID of the element you want to exclude.

Shared Elements Transitions with Asynchronous Data Loading

There might be cases when the shared elements require data that might be loaded from a web API or URL. The most common example is when a URL needs to be loaded into an ImageView which also happens to be the shared element we want to animate. However, the shared element transition might get started by the framework before that data is received and rendered.

We can overcome this by temporarily delaying the transition until we know that the shared elements have been rendered with the fetched data.

We can delay the shared element transition by calling postponeEnterTransition() (For API >= 21) or supportPostponeEnterTransition() (For API < 21) in your second Activity’s onCreate() method.

Once you know that the shared elements have been rendered with the data, you can call startPostponedEnterTransition() (For API >= 21) or supportStartPostponedEnterTransition() (For API < 21) to resume the paused transition.

We can start the paused transition in an onPreDrawListener which is called after the view layout and before the view is about to be drawn.

Results

You can expect to see something like this once you are done with all of the steps above.

UX Designer vs UI Designer vs Web Designer

Posted on 16/01/202124/05/2021 by Anteelo Master

To the laymen, digital design can be a puzzling world of systems, acronyms, and programs. Web creation is not just about making a landing page and adding content anymore but a complex world of coding for site function and protection. It is also a fun and artistic adventure to create something visually alluring. If you combine this with the psychology behind all the systems of a webpage, and you have the basics of web development. Sounds simple enough, right? Not for everyone. The software industry has skyrocketed, and many people are still trying to understand key differences in standard terms. Terms like UI design, web design, and UX design are often thrown around and are incorrectly interchanged. However, following the aim of each tool is as simple as knowing the various parts of a house. Web design is the base or the foundation, UI design is the architecture, and the UX design is the electric, plumbing, and other wiring needed. Before we get into defining these terms, we can say there can be a lot of overlap between them. UX, UI, and Web Designer difference is nothing but a fine line but can have great impacts on your project. However, to excel in any of them, you must have a comprehensive knowledge of all three of them.

UX, UI, and Web Designer differences:

Web Designer	UX Designer	UI Designer
A web designer is a professional who generates content for a website following the latest trends. They are responsible for designing the layout of the website, along with its aesthetics, utility, and functionality.	UX is the abbreviation for User Experience. It brings in creativity. A UX designer handles the whole procedure of obtaining and coordinating a product, including parts of marking, development, convenience, and utility. It is a process that starts before the product reaches the customer.	UI stands for User Experience. A UI Designer is responsible for creating the interfaces between the user and the product and ensure that the interaction between the customer and the product is a seamless one.
The role of the web designer is to compile everything, including the UI and UX, and turn it into a highly-functional and efficient website that people can easily interact with using their smartphones or computers. A web designer might emphasize more of the aesthetics of the site rather than how a user might deal with it.	UX design is all about having a deep understanding of the customer, which includes their preferences, behaviors, habits, requirements, and feelings. UX designers must comprehensively understand the issue along with the client whom they are working for so as to design an optimal and streamlined solution.	The UI design is the complement of UX Design. UI designers work on the point of interaction between the user and the service/device and try to improvise the product in a way that is user-friendly and adds value to the users. UI designers work on the look, design, and especially the feel of the product.
A web designer must have in-depth knowledge of programming languages like HTML and CSS, Scripting languages like JavaScript and PHP, web designing packages like Flash, Photoshop, etc.	A good UX designer is expected to have fluent communication, agile and lean development skills, rapid prototyping, revising skills, crowdsourced designing, and relevant soft skills.	In contrary to UX designers, UI designers are in charge of making UX designers’ dreams a reality. Numerous UI designers have a decent comprehension of front-end development along with some coding abilities.
Contemporary Web designers are usually modern era graphic designers trained in visual design to be experts in: Color theory Creative conceptualization Diagrams Interactivity, rollovers, drop-down menus, digital slideshows, call-to-action-buttons, and forms. Icon development Info-graphics Typography	A UX Designer plays a very crucial role in an organization. They have to make sure that a customer is having a good time with the brand. They primarily focus on: Understanding user psychology Comprehending product specification Finalizing the right interaction model Create personas through user surveys Collaborate with UI designers to create attractive and useful designs	A UI designer primarily focuses on: • Color and typeface choices. • Designing the monotonous but necessary stuff: buttons, icons, sliders, and scrollbars. • Forming a style guide for the app or website to ensure consistency for the user. • Responsive designing • The interactive parts • The layout of each screen
Website designers might be visual designers or engineers who have built enough aptitudes to make beautiful and aesthetic websites or applications. Website designers do not tend to adopt the human-focused strategy of UX design. Most website designers don’t dive as deep to consider every element that a UX designer remembers. A website designer will, in general, be less iterative, while UX design is tied in with coordinating persistent enhancements by interacting with users.	UX applies to whatever that can be experienced—be it a site, a cup of tea, or a visit to the supermarket. The “client experience” part alludes to the connection between the client and service or product. UX structure, at that point, considers all the various components that shape this experience. A UX designer considers how the experience makes the client feel and how simple it is for the client to achieve their ideal errands.	UI design is simply a digital approach. It considers all the visual, intuitive components of a product interface—including buttons, symbols, checkboxes, typography, color scheme, and responsive design. The objective of UI design is to outwardly guide the client through an item’s interface. It’s tied in with making an intuitive encounter that doesn’t require the user to think excessively! UI design delivers the brand’s qualities and visual resources for a product’s interface, ensuring the design is predictable, intelligible, and tastefully satisfying.

CONCLUSION

So a UX designer chooses how the UI functions while the UI designer chooses how the UI looks, and the web designer puts it all together into a cutting-edge website. This is a community-oriented procedure, and these three domains will, in general, work intently together. While the UX group is working on the flow of the application, how buttons guide you through your website, and how the interface effectively presents the data that the client’s need, the UI group is chipping away at how these interface components will show up on the screen and the web designers are integrating it all.

If Web Design is the umbrella, then UX and UI design are specialties and focuses on it. Anyone who regards themselves as a web designer should be well-versed in UX and UI. These terms are also industry-specific. Startups and tech companies mostly hire specifically for UI/UX roles. Every so often, a UX role will focus more on research and information architecture. Occasionally, a UI role will include UX. Sometimes, companies are looking for a web designer who can do it all. It’s all a bit of a mess unless the aim is precise. Whichever direction you take, it’s vital to remember that design is not just about making things look pretty, but it’s about problem-solving communication and people.