Innovation is something everyone calls for, whether you are a developer, designer, entrepreneur or any normal employee. It's a secret sauce, after all; the key to progress and success.

Apple, Airbnbs and Ubers were born to innovate in this world. The challenge now for all of these companies - and no doubt your company - is to continue this innovation in order to maintain or further advance their position in their respective markets. Innovation cannot be one-off; it should be part of the company's DNA.

Design Thinking has for quite some time been viewed as the sacred goal of development and a solution for stagnation.

Enough of vague definitions and abstract descriptions. In this article, we'll go into detail on what design thinking is and what it looks like in action. Let's get into it.

Design Thinking is not your knowledge of design concepts or color palette combinations, but the development of end-user-centric tools and processes. Design Thinking says that that design should attain purpose and business goals, not just beauty.

Design thinking shifts the focus from a business-centric solution (we invent a product based on a series of assumptions and cross our fingers that it will work for customers) to a customer-centric solution (we explore cultural phenomena, observe human behaviour and thinking, understand, what they need and build a product based on that)

What Is the Business Value of Design Thinking?

When a company plans to launch a new product, an enormous,expensive machine gets itself into high gear, especially at large corporations. The costs are huge. Practicing Design Thinking  can save you gigantic measures of cash immediately on the grounds that it focuses on the particular solutions individuals needhe - immediate cost savings are achieved as part of the ROI of design thinking.

The IEEE, the world's largest professional technical organization, in its article “Why Software Doesn't Work,” estimates the amount spent on IT projects around the world at about $ 1 trillion a year.

According to their report, of the twelve main causes of project failure, three are related to user-centric design failure:

Poor communication between clients and developers.

What are the benefits of design thinking?

Integrating a design thinking into your processes and business can be of immense benefit, ultimately ensuring that the products you develop are not only attractive to customers, but also viable in terms of company budget and resources.

Some of the main benefits of using design thinking in your work are:

Tips to introduce design thinking process into your business

Everyone should have the opportunity to speak up. While this may lead to a longer meeting, it is important to listen to all points of view because you never know who might have the best idea until you ask.

Acknowledge differences - however don't allow them to become excuses:

Not everyone is super-creative or super-strategic in every meeting, and that's okay. Working together despite differences in strength level is actually fun. Some people need push and support a little more than others.

Design Thinking is all about the process and being able to have a facilitator to lead is great, but don't use this role to restrict.

If you (the facilitator) are conducting the session, be careful not to take over the conversation. Give opportunity to those who worked to solve the problem, motivate them and praise them for their participation. Creating a comfortable place and judgement free environment gives everyone an opportunity to speak up.

Be prepared to offer something better, not perfect. Design thinking is all about prototyping, iterating, and being able to fix things so you can bring something better to market.

Whether or not you're a CEO, a marketer, a developer, or a designer, here are straightforward justifications for why your organization ought to invest in design thinking.

A little upfront UX exploration can save you many designing hours and a large number of dollars.

Service and product design are the best two ways to benefit from design thinking. However, a design thinking framework can be used to solve all kinds of non-design problems!

Design thinking is progressively being incorporated into business as a method for innovation 

and collaboration. IBM developed its “Enterprise Design Thinking framework” to help multidisciplinary teams meet the real needs of their users, stating that businesses using this framework get their products to market in half the time and are 75% more effective in terms of teamwork. and enjoy a 300% return on investment.

Insurance agency MassMutual utilized a plan figuring way to deal with the challenge of drawing in youngsters to purchase life coverage. In collaboration with IDEO, they conducted extensive user research over a period of two years. Based on what they learned, they embarked on another two years of prototyping and testing. The end result is Society of Grownups, a suite of digital tools that help educate young people to make smart financial choices.

The value of user experience as a result of design thinking is more convincing when comparing a user experience project with other investments with similar business goals. Before Apple's iPhone, there were countless smartphones. Before Uber, there were taxis, and before Facebook, there were social networks and before Tesla there were electric cars.

All these companies have one thing in common. It is their constant focus on their customers and their needs and giving out the best user experience which is deeply rooted in their design thinking methodology.

How design thinking can innovate your business 

UX is a field that demands a lot of time and effort from developers and designers. When developing a product, the development team should always put the end user of the final product in front of them, this will ultimately lead them towards user satisfaction.

The von Restorff effect (also called the isolation effect) predicts that when there are several similar objects, one that is different from the others is more likely to be remembered!

This is the main reason why all calls to action (CTAs) are different from the rest of the action buttons on a website or app. When designing your product, you can use this law to draw the user's attention to certain information or places.

Dropbox underlines its preliminary plan by adding a blue tab at the top and highlighting the plan name and button. The other two plans, Standard and Enterprise, used ghost buttons and a lighter shade of blue in the pricing box, further isolating and making the extended plan an anchor point for the user's attention. 

Experiments show that when participants are presented with a list of words, they tend to remember the words at the start and at the end and are more likely to forget the ones in the middle of the list. This is known as the sequential position effect.

What is the role of serial position effect in UX?

Understanding the limitations of users' short-term memory can greatly improve the usability of an application. Most users have relatively short attention spans. By using menus with few items or grouped options, you can help users navigate a website faster or select a product quickly and easily.

Here are some tips to use the sequential positioning effect in your UI design:

Placing the most important items at the beginning or end of the list (ie, in the navigation menu), and less important items in the middle.

Keep the most relevant information visible so that users don't have to search or use multiple options to find it. For example, rulers in photo editing apps and maps in video games may be more commonly used features, so making them visible will improve the overall UX.

Keep the menu as short as possible - ideally no more than three to five items.

Place calls to action and important information like sales, social proof, and main focuses at the start and end of the page.

The Adobe Creative Cloud sale is displayed in the blue banner above the navigation menu and at the top of the page the hero image.

“ Cognitive load refers to the amount of working memory resources being used. "

In UX design, we can think of cognitive load as the mental processing power required to use a product. If the amount of data to be processed exceeds the user's ability to process it, overall performance suffers. The cognitive load is too high.

Let's have a look at the types of cognitive load explained under Cognitive Load Theory:

It means the effort related to a particular topic.

It shows how information or tasks are presented to the learner.

It refers to the work involved in creating a permanent data store or schema.

Sample Pages on Search Engines is the best example showing the results of cognitive load and therefore the reasons for Google's success.If you look at the search engine page below, you will find that there is so much on one screen that it is sometimes difficult for users to search for their queries and find answers to them.

But we're lucky that someone solved this problem in the first place, and everyone knows the name, Google.

Hick’s law describes that the time it takes an individual to choose depends on the choices available to them. Thus, if the number of options increases, the decision time increases logarithmically.

A great example of Hick's Law applicable to user experience design is lists:

The above principles will help UX Designer use all possible approaches to create a user experience that end users will love. Developing an app or website is great but mainly the design of the website will attract the user, so if a developer wants to be a full package he can take help from these principles for a perfect design. 

Principles that will help UX Designers to create best user experience 

The Psychology Principles Every Developer Needs to Know

An exciting product idea can even flop without understanding the user's problem to solve. Setting a design goal and formulating a design problem statement is an important step in the process of creating truly important products.

The importance of UX design is growing day by day because companies are starting to consciously focus their products on people. What we may not have realized before, and what good UX design strives to achieve, is that in order to create good products, we need to understand people.

Why Is It Important To Understand Your Audience?

When we don't comprehend our audience, we neglect to see the issue they are going through and wind up designing for ourselves. This way of thinking is detrimental because it wastes time and money and we fall prey to our prejudices.  Poor design often leads to a lack of empathy, and when we say empathy, we mean a basic and deep understanding of who we are creating our products for.

In 2006, Microsoft took a competitive step and released the Zune. It was a striking move to challenge Apple, yet in the realm of products, success isn't always about being first.

It could be argued that Zune-only features such as wirelessly sending songs from one Zune to another were as good as iPod-exclusive features, making Microsoft's product a seemingly strong contender…. But instead it was a failure

One significant reason was that Microsoft had not recognized an issue the Zune would solve. There were no reasonable user needs that the iPod was failing to meet or any new innovations that could shake the world. The Zune was solving nothing.

Before we start developing products, we need to understand the market in which our product potentially exists. A rich market is the result of a need. To create “good” products, we need to understand people's desires and problems. What problem do they need help with? What are their inner desires or passions? Are there products that help people cope with this problem? What big goal do people want to achieve, but don't even realize it's possible? When we understand what people want, ideas start to appear.

Now it's time to identify the problem so let's have a look at how we can do that?

Identify The Problem By Doing These Steps

Communicate and know about their problems if you can't identify or if you don't have any in your mind.

What is a person’s basic need and how can we help them? Defining the problem means that you are diagnosing the situation. This will help you take further steps to resolve the issue. You will take measures to formulate the solution.

After identifying the problem, do people really need this design? How will your product fulfill the needs of your clients? It includes the number of people who are anxious to buy your product, how much they want to pay for it, and the availability of your product to your customers.

3. Involvement of people in the design process

People are the core of your product. You help them with their needs, so when you incorporate them into your process, whether it's testing your projects with them or tracking their needs through user interviews, it brings clarity to your design. It also helps in creating constraints and guidelines that can help you with the responsibility of designing with users in mind.

Testing can fix a lot of holes in your design. It also ensures that the design is contextual and accessible

How does your design solve the problem? Make sure you have solid design decisions behind what your product does and how it meets your users' needs to help them achieve their goals. If you can explain these things, you most likely have a “good” design.

When we cannot identify the problem and our audience, the products we create are inherently useless. When we start with people, they influence our design. After all, we create products for people. So for a bomb design, keep in mind the audience from the start.

What we may not have realized before, and what good UX design strives to achieve, is that in order to create good products, we need to understand people.

 A Guide to Problem Framing in UX Design

Designing for an environment comes after knowing what actually happens in that environment. The more the designer is in touch with the intended purpose of the setting, the more the designer will be able to optimize the goal of the design and create value for the firm. Knowing the values and sentiments that will occupy the space will take a designer beyond a cliched and standard mindset. For example, designing an office for a law firm (with all its seriousness) will be very different from designing an office for a marketing firm (which houses creative and fun people). So, it all comes back judging what kind of people will inhabit your structure or what kind of people will look at your design. 

If you take a look around you, you’ll notice how everything has a design element incorporated in it; some are good, and some are bad. For example, are the parking divisions too close to each other and are solely made for sedans and hatchbacks? Is the road sign too small for you to figure out what it says? Is the ‘Buy’ button too small and unnoticeable to the customer that he/she leaves your site in frustration?

According to a study, our behaviour is influenced by factors such as age, gender, health, mental state, personality, emotions, beliefs, and life experiences amongst many other things. It is also affected by the environment we are present in, the people around us, what’s happening, etc. 

Some factors can be designed, like exterior/interior design, and others cannot be changed, but can be designed for. Like if you know your target audience are teenagers with mental health issues, you could create something that would match their personality, according to their age, mental problems, likes/dislikes, emotions, etc. 

It is almost certain that design affects your brain. For instance, colors evoke different actions in your brain; green encourages people to interact and gives off a ‘safe’ vibe, and red forces people to halt and think twice about their actions. By gaining a feel for people’s behaviour and attitudes, a designer can predict what actions would be taken.

Let’s study human behaviour and see what works and what doesn't. 

A research by NNGroup showed that people read webpages with 79% of them only scanning through it all. And newer research showed that email newsletters are more hurriedly scanned through than web pages. So if you’re a designer and are making a webpage keeping these facts in mind, you’d: 

place the important stuff brilliantly so the users don’t miss it,

design an impeccable website/app to capture the user’s attention in the first few seconds and keep them hooked,

group content that is logically related together,

keep paragraphs small to keep it easy on the users’ eyes, and

use bullets instead of commas wherever you can. 

People find it quite difficult to adapt to or accept something new. When material design became popular, it was fairly new, but now everybody knows that a hamburger icon takes you to the menu, the wheels icon takes you to the settings, and a red icon will end your call no matter what device you’re on.

There exist a set of laws that users all across the globe resonate with. So when you design a user interface, don’t stray far from the status quo to keep your design relevant and successful. 

let your design stay consistent throughout an app to make it easy for users to learn, adapt, and then work your app like you want them to. 

 don’t unnecessarily introduce something new to the layout. For example, a navigation tab is at the bottom of an app for users to easily use their thumb which 90% of humans interact with. 

People don’t like to read instructions—they find them boring, especially if they go on for long. For example, you might’ve noticed that you barely read the ‘Terms & Conditions’ and can’t wait to skip to the end and checkmark it. So you need to make sure that your design is anything but complex and is as obvious as possible to avoid getting it chucked like a user manual of a refrigerator. 

In the case where instructions are imperative for the user, and you absolutely have to have them read it, images and illustrations have proven to be effective for grabbing a user’s attention—and we all know that pictures speak a lot more than words do. 

Out of all the emotions a human can display, it could be shrinked into 6 major categories; happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust. Which is why it is imperative to give a long thought to the colors, shapes, layout, etc you use on your UI. Users want to be treated as ‘humans’ rather than ‘website visitors’, so your interface should appeal to people’s emotions rather than simply putting stuff out there.

For the user so when they believe it is made just for them, they’ll be ‘into’ the products. 

with the user by using colors that depict emotions you’re trying to evoke. Like yellow for excitement, lilac for peace and elegance, and red for dangerous or passionate.

 To reduce bounce rate and keep the user hooked to your website/app.

So building an interface starts from understanding your audience, their problems, analyzing info, designing solutions, testing, and implementing amongst many other crucial steps. Adding behavioural study into your design is like adding a new lens to your user experience. 

When you look at the most successful UI designs across the world, you discover that they have one thing in common: they provide excellent functionality. And while functionality of a design is very essential for its success, aesthetics and visual details are equally important.

An integral part of a good UI design is drop shadows and blur effects, serving a number of purposes like attractiveness to functionality and responsiveness to make your design look modern, unique, and interactive. Elements that appear raised look like they could be pressed down, indicating to a user that this can be clicked with a mouse or tapped with a finger. And elements that appear sunken indicate to a user that it has room to be filled, a technique called visual signifier for input fields. 

In Figma, there are four types of effects that can be used simultaneously on a design, object, layer or vector. They are:

Let’s take a look at them one after the other, and determine their purpose. 

Shadows are used to give visual cues in the interface to tell the user what UI elements they’re looking at. Shadows also fall in line with a popular law of physics that says, “Everything in this physical world is dimensional and elements interact in three-dimensional space with each other,” giving importance to the fact that visualizing the position of an element in an interface is what gives a design its edge. There are two types of shadows that serve different purposes.

This effect is mostly used in neuromorphic designs, and uses the same parameters as a drop shadow. But unlike a drop shadow, inner shadows are applied within or inside an object to give it a clicked state of a button/card.

Being the most commonly applied effect in a UI design, drop shadows contribute to the depth and emotion of a design. A typical drop shadow relies on an offset from center (x, y, or both), a blur, and an opacity value. Some tools like Figma and Sketch have the ‘Spread’ option, too, where it makes the shadow look like a smaller element is casting it. 

To make your design more natural-looking, avoid using pure black shadows, and instead, use one that is derived from a primary color instead.

Blurs have the capability of transforming your visual design into an addictive experience. Most design tools nowadays have a Gaussian type of blur that spreads evenly in every direction—the larger the radius, the more prominent the blur. It is human nature to look at things that are in focus and ignore that aren’t, commonly known as accommodation reflex. Designers can use this effect to direct a user from unimportant items to valuable content easily.

Below are some of the types of blurs employed in a UI design: 

Manipulation of Layer Blur, Hex, and Opacity values makes the creation of a design effortlessly professional.

This effect became popular when Apple started using it in their software to achieve that behind smoke-glass effect on screens. Background blur inputs a see-through layer over an object, and is more glassy and glossy. 

A negative X value moves the shadow behind the object to the left, and a positive one moves it to the right.

A negative Y value moves the shadow behind the object to the top, and a positive one moves it to the bottom. 

This softens the drop shadow effect, appealing more to the user’s emotions. 

As the name implies, it spreads the shadow effect across the dimension. 

A negative X value moves the inner shadow inside the object to the right, and a positive one moves it to the left.

A negative Y value moves the inner shadow inside the object to the bottom, and a positive one moves it to the top.  

Very popular these days to keep your design minimalistic and aesthetically pleasing, neumorphic elements tend to extrude from the background, made from exactly the same material as the background. If you look at it from the side, it isn't ‘floating’ 

It’s achieved using both negative and positive shadows, but the background cannot be fully white or fully black; it needs a little bit of tint so the shadows are visible. 

All these effects have different kinds of impact—something we’re going to look deeply into in the next article. If you have a certain kind of impact in mind, you might want to give it a read.Hope you find this helpful!

Shadows, blurs and how they connect to Neumorphism 

No, it’s not the early 90s Microsoft PowerPoint word art. Gradients are the transition of one color to another and are used to add another dimension to a design as though they are interacting with light and darkness. Using a gradient with various levels of opacity can also create a sense of different distances between objects.

Majorly popular back in the 90s, gradients hit a stump until 2015, after which, it again gained popularity in an otherwise flat design-focused world. High-tech companies and social media startups all over the world have started using gradients to make their designs interesting. Nowadays, gradients are a must-have in every UI designer’s toolkit.

Just a few years ago, Instagram’s logo was redesigned with color gradients added to it.

Keep These In Mind While Making Gradients

When you’re employing gradients in your design, these are some of the things you should keep in mind before you start: 

Colors can either make your design or break it. Having a sense of color theory is crucial to a UI designer; colors that are opposite on the color wheel have high contrast and can create an ambiguous design. Since colors set a precedent for an entire website or application, choosing colors from the same family is always an easy solution because they give a unified look to a design, bringing with it harmony and continuity. Otherwise, it’s going to look like something you see on a greenie’s artboard, titled ‘One of My Best Works’. Talk about barf!

You just cannot choose to use gradients everywhere. Know your client and users, and stay true to the content. If your subject is a hospital or a government organization, the use of gradients would be considered too over the top. If a brand has a serious identity, it is best to leave out gradients from your mind when you sit down to work. Always make sure that your gradient embodies the brand image and flows consistently throughout the design.

Take your time to smooth out your transitions. Nobody can perfect it in the first few tries, so don’t pull out your hair just yet. Start with three-stepped gradients, and try adding or deleting different steps, decrease the number of colors, and increase them if need be. Keep consistent, and the end result will always pay off!

It is human nature to associate colors with feelings, and that is exactly what a UI designer should utilize. Choosing the right color gradients can connect you with your audience on a deeper level. Think of what you want your audience to feel when they look at your design. For example, the red-to-orange gradient sparks energy and joy, and the dark blue-to-blue gradient brings out a relaxing state of mind.

Gradients can harm text readability, and throw your compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines off balance. The best way to combat this problem is to use contrasting elements; you should not go below the ratio of 4.5:1 for standard text.

A clear idea of the source of light can make things easy for a UI designer. It allows you to use that information to cut a path and guide the user’s attention to any part of your page, product, or app. Users usually start reading/looking where a shade is the lightest, so be mindful of using light tones where you want the user to start looking at the screen. 

Mixing different colors together form new colors, and designers sometimes go overboard with their canvases, giving birth to something that is messy and just rated poor. The use of gradients in UI, typography, illustration, and branding creates memorable and eye-catching colors only if you reel yourself in from time to time. The best practice of creating a good gradient is to use two colors or a maximum of three. 

So, don’t be scared to use gradients! As a UI designer, a gradient can be another trick up your sleeve when you make attractive designs. As the world moves away from ‘flat’ UI designs, you can hook color gradients on your belt to add that ‘special something’ to your design.

Gradients are the transition of one color to another, and are used to add another dimension to a design as though they are interacting with light and darkness.

Ease is one thing that is increasing day by day and almost every second. From people riding horses to Tesla Autopilot, as far as ease is concerned, humans, in general, have come a long way.  We have also seen people praising or criticizing the increasing trend of introducing ease in everything. Some say ease in everything makes people lazy and dull, which is true to a certain extent. While others say it saves time in a world where everything is moving so fast. You could be from any of this school of thought but one must agree that “Ease” Sells!

Earlier, in the web development game, you had to build everything from scratch writing code for everything. Now with UI kits in the picture, things have surely become easier and faster. UI kits have pre-made components that a developer can use while saving a lot of effort and time. 

One thing that development and coding are famous for is that they takes an immense amount of time. You will hardly meet a developer with a normal sleep cycle because of their nasty routine due to coding all day and night. Suppose you have a client and knowing the nature of clients, they do want things done quickly. Instead of building everything from scratch you can simply get the desired kits and use the components according to your vision, saving a lot of time. 

One can say that they are very helpful in professional life because you need to satisfy the clients while managing your time. However, if you are alone at your home and have all the time in the world you can build things right from scratch and use your creativity. No hard feelings

Continuing the above-mentioned point we all know that time is money and if you are in the money business then you should definitely use UI kits because you don’t want to do one project in the amount of time where you could’ve done three. As a professional, these kits can help you build a reputation as someone who is quick and help you stand out from the crowd. On top of everything, you can get stuff done in less time and earn more. That does sound like a win-win.

Another big plus of using UI kits is Prototyping. Prototyping is a test or some may say a sample of what your end design will look like and how it will work. An easier way of doing this is by using some help from a pre-made template instead of writing a long code and building a prototype yourself when you can easily drag and drop any desired component and make a prototype. It will prevent you from making changes to the final product. 

Accessibility is probably one of the most important things in web development these days. Developers put a lot of effort through different techniques to ensure accessibility. From using color and contrast to adapting designs and using different accessibility tools, there are many ways to make sure that your design is accessible. But why do that when you can simply use pre-made accessible components and add them to your designs. This is a major advantage of using a UI kit. Although not all UI kits have baked-in accessibility, it's a major plus to invest in a resource that has this crucial advantage that saves you a lot of effort and dev hours. Here at TailwindUI Kit, we’ve put a great deal of effort and time into ensuring that you don’t have to worry about this crucial part of web development. All of the components are built using the latest WCAG guidelines that enable you to enjoy the highest standards of web accessibility from the get-go.

A very good point that the people on the other side put forward is that UI Kits are too opinionated sometimes and that results in your design being mundane. To be fair, the argument doesn’t account for the fact that UI Kits serve as a guiding light in situations where you don’t have the time to start things from scratch. Moreover, you can always play around and come up with your own design items using different elements from most UI kits. At the end of the day, UI kits enable you to set the foundation in no time, allowing you to tweak things around, and build things according to your styling preferences and requirements.

Some say ease in everything makes people lazy and dull, which is true to a certain extent. While others say it saves time in a world where everything is moving so fast. You could be from any of this school of thought but one must agree that “Ease” Sells!

Colors are one of the most vital visual experiences for humans as it’s the first thing you notice and easily remember when you see something new. Every time a person opens his/her eyes, their visual senses are stormed by perennial optimus stimuli, with contextual sights vying for attention. Using the right color placement and pallets we can evoke positive emotions and behaviors in humans. Colors have psychological and physiological properties and because of that each one of them hold different meanings in different cultures, for instance, Black color in some cultures represents sophistication and formality but in another culture it represents death or bad luck. 

Colors are an important and very essential tool for any designer as it affects user’s decision making, experience and trust in the brand. It takes a total of 90 seconds for a user or customer to form an opinion about a product, be it digital or physical and this decision is heavily influenced by colors as it’s the first thing a person sees. Colors are usually viewed as aesthetic factors of the product, but in reality it is the core element of the emotional and cognitive impact of a design on users. The notion of psychology of colors can be applied in UX design as well as marketing. 

UI design would not be the same if everything would have been black and white. Colors in UX/UI design play an important role whether it’s designing CTA buttons or whether it’s conveying emotions. Once you choose color as a main language to convey the clear idea of your brand, normal rules of color psychology don't apply to it and from there it starts becoming more and more complicated. 

The most effective App or website may use a 60-30-10 ratio. As it's so easy to use- 60% is the dominant hue, 30% is the secondary color and 10% is for an accent color. Accent colors should be most vibrant as they’ll be used for the most critical parts for example CTA buttons etc. Main color can be kept neutral and the secondary color can be kept in contrast. 

Shadows provide depth precision and the emphasis on the importance of a component or element. Using black color as shadow is one of the most common mistakes that designers make. While creating shadows. If we look around us, shadows inherit the color of the object, especially objects that are semi-transparent. 

Typography is one of the crucial elements of UI Design and so improving it is as important if you want to improve  UI and UX. Always try to keep the color of the body on a darker shade of gray shade rather than black. The reason for this is that the impact of contrast on screens is more severe than that on paper and so it can be really tiring to read the text with black shade. 

Red: Red color is used when you want to draw users attention to a certain element or if you want to highlight something. 

Blue: Blue color depicts professionalism and professional relationships. This color is mainly used to build the trust of your brand among your clients. 

Yellow: Yellow is the color of warmth and happiness. This color can be used to highlight inspiration and motivation. 

Orange: The color of energy, spirituality and enthusiasm. This color is used to cast a shadow on graphics/products that symbolizes the above mentioned characteristics.

Purple: Purple is the color of magic, royalty and mystery. This color can be used to highlight the luxury aspect of the product. 

Green: Green color represents nature and it is used to highlight UI designs that are associated with nature. This may include websites or applications for the travel and food industry.

Colors are one of the most vital visual experiences for humans as it’s the first thing you notice and easily remember when you see something new.

UX maturity assesses an organization's desire and potential to deliver user-centered designs. Jakob Neilson in 2006 came up with one of the earliest UX maturity models with 8 stages of UX maturity. Each stage narrated the presence of User Experience in various organizational circumstances. It caters to organizations and companies that do not engage in UX research to companies that are research focused and dependent on results. 

Since then, a lot has changed in the world of Web Design. The Neilson Norman group later on revised the maturity model and how it should be measured and modeled considering other important factors to incorporate new norms.

This model is a framework that measures user experience related strengths/weaknesses of organizations and agencies. Through this framework, it can be determined where your company currently stands or which stage it occupies. The UX maturity model also provides insights on how an agency or an organization can increase its UX maturity. 

The 6 stages of NNG’s User experience maturity model

Absent: There’s no UX design or UX research

Limited: UX lacks importance and is rare.

Emergent: The UX work is done incongruently and ineffectively but is promising and functional.

Structured: The organization has a semi-systematic UX-related methodology that is widespread, but with varying degrees of effectiveness and efficiency.

Integrated: User experience work is extensive, compelling, and pervasive.

User-driven: Commitment to user experience at all degrees leads to deep awareness and exceptional user-centered–design outcomes.

Organizations in stage-1 lack User experience. Companies at this stage are either insensitive or believe that they do not need UX research in order to develop user center designs. User experience related work is not planned or structured well, let alone incorporated into the organization’s vision and people who consider users important and think about user-centered design, they’re either dismissed or ignored. 

This stage comprises organizations where developers are very well aware of the importance of UX and try to create good experiences through designs but just because they don’t have any access to the resources, methods, and organizational support they fail to do so. 

The approach of organizations at this stage towards user experience is erratic. Small efforts made by the companies are due to the following reasons:

2: If someone in the company that is aware of UX takes initiative. 

3: A ream that tries to experiment with UX methods

Companies and organizations at this stage are aware of user experience and sometimes engage in activities regarding UX but don’t do it consistently, take it up as a routine or part of their work and because it is never a priority it’s never well-executed or considered into strategy or planning. At these organizations, UX is not recognized as a discipline and so there are no dedicated roles and budget for it. 

Organizations at this stage perform UX related work more often, they may also have a budget for it and may also engage in UX related activities and planning. However, these efforts are unstable, small and are usually initiated by an individual rather than the policy of the company or organization. Teams that use design methods and engage in research may begin to see improvements and results of their efforts. At this stage, organizations do have UX researchers or designers but the team is not skilled enough to make a shift from this stage to the next. So, the organization keeps working to provide the value and impact of User experience. 

Another issue is that these organizations don’t have a user experience process in place. Some leaders like to advocate for it but when it comes to trade-off, user experience is usually the first one to go. It is yet not prioritized at these companies as an essential strategy. It is very common to find big enterprises stuck at this stage especially in fields like healthcare and finance etc. 

Organizations at this stage recognize the value of user experience and have a complete team or teams in place working on UX. Leaders at this company are supportive of the UX and incorporate it while making high-level strategies or plans. Organizations at this stage have a good description of design and a shared, iterative human-centered design process and throughout the lifecycle of the product, user research is regularly conducted to make sure it’s benefitting the users. 

Most organizations will land at this level and this is the farthest most of the organizations will ever go in their UX maturity.

Organizations that reach this stage have work that is comprehensive, universal, and pervasive. At these organizations user experience related activities are performed by almost all the teams in an effective and efficient manner. They sometimes innovate their user experience methods that also tend to contribute to the field of UX and the reason for the success of these organizations becomes leaders that are focused on user-centered design. Most organizations should aim to reach the stage of integrated UX because at this level their work serves business goals being highly effective. At this level, sometimes, the staff of the organization may get too focused involved in the process instead of the results and impact or they may concentrate on metrics that are not user-centered.

A handful of companies are on this stage and are loved and respected by everyone. At this level, everyone is very well aware of user-centered design. Understanding the needs of the users through research is the primary aim of the company’s strategy and is the priority. Team leaders, individuals, and teams are user-centered and pay attention to User experience in day-to-day work whether its highest level of strategy or the smallest design elements, there’s always UX research involved. They plan for change and innovation. Organizations at this stage contribute back to industry standards and rely on UX research to manage new investments and markets. The business vision of organizations at this stage is always user-centered design or is highly interlaced with user-centeredness.

Considering UX is very important as it’s a step towards the effort to fulfill user requirements, needs or maybe solving a problem for them. The goal of an organization should be to provide positive experiences to the users that keep them loyal to the brand or product. Moreover, a positive UX also enables organizations to define a journey for users that later define their business success. 

Exploring the 6 stage UX maturity model in organizations 

Today’s blog post is about a widely discussed phenomenon of design that is invisible UX. Throughout the years, designers have emphasized the importance of the invisibility of a design for a good user experience. Design is everywhere, no matter how you define it, it boils down to the experience of a user when they’re interacting with that design. 

In the widely acknowledged book by Don Norman (the father of modern-day design to many), he talks in detail about the design of things and its relationship with user behavior.  

As I said earlier, design is everywhere, but you don’t notice how impeccable the design is in everyday things. We don’t notice how good the AC is working as it does what we expect it to do. We only focus on the flaws of a design when it is unable to perform the function that it’s supposed to do. Irene Au, a pioneer in Web design, says that:

“Good design is like a refrigerator - when it works, no one notices, but when it doesn’t, it sure stinks.”

In the design of most everyday things, the elevation of user experience stems from the effortlessness of the user while interacting with the design and the seamlessness of its experience. Hence, we can conclude that focusing on how well something works is a result of the good design of that product.

Web design has always been focused on user experience and very rightly so. Designers have always believed that good UX is invisible. But there has been some debate in design circles about UX being invisible and the relation of design in this circumstance. Design should be focused on making things easier and simpler for end-users. When we say that a good UX is invisible, what we actually mean is that the experience, by design, should be smooth enough to make it look like that.   

Designers put a lot of effort into elevating the user experience to an invisible degree, yet they misinterpret the meaning of truly invisible UX. The more work/conscious interaction a user has to perform, the more noticeable your design. The most appropriate approach is to try to assess user behavior and make things more intuitive so the user is able to swift through the design.

Generally, this phrase is associated with minimalistic design. However, design can be kept simple without being minimalistic. The approach to truly invisible design is making users feel familiar with the design. In some cases, designers try to go outside the box and end up making things more complicated for users that itself is counterintuitive, as a good design must always have a good experience.

Additionally, users should not be thinking about the effort that goes into making the design. Following the general concept of the design of everyday things, designers can incorporate a major goal of making things easier in their design to achieve invisibility. I suggest you check out our previous blogs on the approaches and stages of the design process & thinking to get more insight into the application of different approaches in web design.  

An easier design is preferred by users over a design that requires their attention and focus. Intuitive design is when a user knows how a design works by intuition. A design is intuitive when a user’s current knowledge matches the target knowledge of the design. The important thing to consider here is that a design can only be intuitive for a user that already has domain knowledge about the design. Hence, it boils down to thorough user research and conducting it to your target users. If you’re not sure about who is going to use your design, you can never make it intuitive subsequently.

We know that good design is invisible, but what really makes design invisible is the extent of the smoothness in the overall experience that it provides to users. Making things easier and knowing your users’ behavior certainly is the key to building designs that are intuitive and flawless. 

Hence, if you want your design to be “invisible”, make your experience seamless to the point where users are unaware of the conscious effort that they have to put in, in order to make things work.

What is invisible design, and why good UX is invisible

A networked virtual reality simulation of the human body, including the circulatory, skeletal, and other vital systems: with your mouse you can peel back the layers of the body, drop pins on interesting parts for future reference, and share a hyperlink with people. This isn’t a trailer or video. This innovation of the future is running in your web browser right now. It’s known as WebGL.

WebGL is an open source Javascript library capable of rendering 2D and 3D interactive objects in a variety of ways. In technical language, it allows you to run GPU-accelerated graphics directly inside an HTML canvas with no external plugins.What sets it apart from other tools is the quality and the complexity of visual elements that it can render. In fact, no HTML and CSS methods are capable of reaching quite the same impact. Unity WebGL, Babylon.js, Three.js are some of the other open source libraries.

Imagine these as shapes and graphics existing in a full 3D space. Ample design heavy, forward thinking websites are using basic WebGL to create unique distinctive headers instead of a full website hero image. With the right creative team behind it, not only is it visually appealing, it can also be absolutely interactive.

It’s free and native in most of the common desktop and mobile browsers

The technology blends easily with HTML and is relatively fast 

No installations on the device to run WebGL API

One can make outstanding 3D web experiences by easy external libraries integration 

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