What is UX design?
When you visit a website or use an application, what decides whether you find it easy to navigate and enjoyable to use? Most of that comes down to user experience (UX) design. UX is about shaping a digital product so it actually works for the people using it, and in web development it touches everything from the layout of a page to whether a site does the job both the business and its users need it to.
It's a deeper thing than graphic design. Graphic design is concerned with how something looks; UX starts with understanding the people who'll use the product, what they're trying to do, and where they get stuck.
At Si Novi we have extensive experience of building web and mobile applications where the user experience and interface are key to the success of the product.
We work with you to research, design and develop the right approach to building web-based software that will delight your customers or end-users. As an outsourced development team we can provide cost-effective development services to supplement your existing design and marketing teams, and deliver high-quality front-end development.
The process of user experience design
For web-based software, digital products and services, user experience covers every part of how someone interacts with the application. The aim of UX design is to make that interaction feel familiar and easy, so the end-user is engaged and able to get done what they came to do.
Much of the work isn't coding. It's the strategy, the planning, and the testing and analysis of how people actually use the software, so they come away satisfied rather than frustrated.
In practice that starts with understanding who the users are and what they want, through methods like surveys, interviews and user testing. From there we map out the structure of the site, or its information architecture, so content is organised logically and people can find what they're after. Then come wireframes and interactive prototypes that set out the page layouts and user flows, which lets us test and refine the design before a single line of code is written.
Collaborating with other creative agencies
Turning a UX design into a working website is a collaborative job, and it relies on close teamwork between designers and developers. Good wireframes and prototypes give developers a clear blueprint for how the site should look and behave, which cuts down on misunderstandings and rework and lets us build it more accurately.
At Si Novi, while we've picked up a huge amount of UX experience architecting and building web applications, we're not graphic designers and we don't claim to be UI or UX experts. Bringing specialists into user experience and user interface design often brings valuable insight that we wouldn't get on our own.
So we often work with other creative agencies to collaborate on web and digital projects. By combining our specialist skills in web software development and the AWS cloud with the design, UI and UX expertise of another agency, together we can produce high-quality digital products and services.
When budgets are tight and the cost of an expanded team isn't viable, we often turn to tried and tested UI frameworks such as Tailwind or Bootstrap. These frameworks offer well tested user interface components and allow us to create highly professional user interfaces with minimal design input.
Use of these off-the-shelf UI libraries can be a huge benefit when scaffolding web applications as prototypes or MVPs, as the components can be used to build functioning applications quickly.
The business benefits of UX design
Getting the user experience right pays off for the business, not just the user. A site that's easy to navigate and built around what people are actually trying to do is far more likely to turn visitors into customers and keep them coming back. That's where the competitive edge sits - a frustrating site loses people, a clear one keeps them and builds trust over time.
There's a cost argument too. Spotting problems during the design phase, in research and prototyping, is a lot cheaper than fixing them after launch. Addressing user pain points upfront means less expensive rework once the application is live, so the time spent on UX tends to pay for itself across the project.
That's why we treat UX as part of building the software rather than a coat of paint applied at the end. If you're planning a web or mobile application and you want it to be something people genuinely like using, we're happy to talk it through - whether that's us handling the front-end build, or working alongside a design agency you already trust.
