What are your best tools/tips for UI/UX design
Pretty much everything in the title.
I feel like this has always been my weakspot, i know i should first focus on the main functionnality of my product, but when it's done, i'm struggling so much to do a decent UI/UX that i feel like potential users will just run away when seeing my product.
Thanks for help !
Hey, welcome to Makerlog!
My favorite tools:
- Figma: it's free, and allows for really quick mockups. I love it!
- A notebook or iPad + Pencil: nothing beats time to express than good ol' pen and paper.
- Canva: really worth the price. Makes your everyday social media pictures really easy!
You know, a great tool is your friends. Stick the app infront of them and get them to navigate it. Most importantly, don't help them! You'll be able to see where they go and what buttons they click on.
As long as your UI and UX isn't horrendously bad and your users have a use case for your app, I'm under the impression that users will overlook the UI/UX for the value added to their lives from your product.
@JoshRozin Damn, this is fantastic advice. Getting people who don't know how to use your app at all helps discover huge UX flaws.
I did pretty much exactly that with the first version of Soundescape. The UI was really bad, but I just wanted to evaluate the basic idea. Instead of asking my friends, I used Hotjar recordings, which is the same technique on steroids I'd say. Sometimes it's really funny to watch how people interact with your app in creative ways you'd never have thought about. It's such a powerful concept to improve UX ✨
I've been learning a lot of UI/UX recently (it's not my strong suit). I enjoy reading UI/ UX designers to share their thoughts on what makes for good UI/ UX and how they would improve. For example, Simon and I recently did a teardown of InVision - shameless self-promo though Simon is very active on Linkedin sharing before and after images which are really good. IMO.
I like to browse other people's designs for inspiration. Don't copy, but you can get more familiar with trends and what elements and styles work for your UI.
I agree with Sergio too, Figma is usually my go to but I'll start with pen and paper if I need to.
Pro tip: Dribbble and Pinterest have TONS of examples of great UI/UX.
I know how daunting it can feel but in all honesty, a lot of it is just research and practice to find out what works and what doesn't. Stick at it and you will start to get the hang of it in no time.
In terms of tools, I highly recommend Figma as it allows you to build interactive prototypes and do so in a way that the blocks of your UI can be reused saving you a lot of time.
I also recommend Stark which gives you a set of tools for making sure the colours you use can be seen by people with visual impairments.
I'm not a designer, but I dabble sometimes! One of the most valuable pieces of design advice I've gotten is that people will give you feedback according to the level of effort you've already put in. E.g. when I put a napkin sketch with page layout in front of my friends, I get a lot more feedback on how the design is structured compared to when I put a full webflow page with completed text, at which point I get comments on colours, shadow, or the content itself.
Some of the things that help me are:
- Drafting low, medium, and high fidelity prototypes (low = napkin layouts, medium = with colors and blocks, high = includes all design assets but no text)
- Getting friends to do timed impressions of your designs with these prototypes. The feedback for 5s, 30s, and 5mins is very different!
- Writing defined questions and goals for your user testing, so you can compare impressions on a better scale.
- Limiting early design tests to 2-4 users max. Keep iterating!
We used these design guidelines to help guide the dashboard designs for https://www.techintern.io/. We got 2 friends to look at our drafts for each level to make sure the important info was being conveyed appropriately before moving on.
Good luck with your product!
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