UI/UX for Digital Product Design

UI/UX design plays a very crucial role in the development of any software product or services. And this goes the same with Digital Products, In the field of UI/UX design, there are principles used to create consistent digital product designs. Now these principles might vary from designer to designer, so in this article, we will discuss how can you create professional Digital Product design using the best UI/UX design principles. And for that, we must also cover the steps in the process of UI/UX designing for Digital Products.

UI/UX for Digital Product Design

Digital Product Design

Digital product design is an umbrella term for creating quality user experiences and visual designs for all sorts of digital products like websites, mobile apps, software applications, and other digital experiences. Digital product designing is the process of creating user experience design, user interface design, and interaction design for any digital product.

Steps for Digital Product Design

A digital product design process can be divided into these 7 steps, follow these steps to create a professional digital product design.

1. User Research
2. Brainstorming ideas
3. Wireframing and Prototyping
4. User Testing
5. Visual Elements and interface
6. Graphic design
7. Iterate and Launch

Designing UI/UX for Digital Product – Principles and Best Practices

Here is a list of design principles and best practices for for Digital Product design that the most important and most commonly used.

Usability Test:

Usability test basically is evaluating a product/service (in this case UI/UX of the digital product) by testing it with some users and implementing the feedback provided by them. In the Usability test, participants have to complete some tasks created by professionals and these professionals watch the users and take notes.

A/B Testing or Split Testing:

A/B testing or split testing is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or an app (here we are talking from the point of view of Digital Product) with each other to find out which performs better. A/B testing is done after the product is launched, therefore we make smaller changes to the digital product.

Accessibility:

Accessibility is designing products, services (in our case, it’s designing UI/UX for digital products) and environments in an all-inclusive manner. In simpler terms, it means designing the digital product for everybody, keeping in mind the people who might have some special needs and taking care of those needs in the product experience and interface.

Information Architecture:

Information Architecture is essentially a document or chart that outlines everything in a particular product or service and how everything inside it interacts with each other. It’s a blueprint that really outlines hierarchy behavior and interaction of content on a particular product.

Persona:

A Persona is a fictional character that we create in order to represent a type of user that will use our product or service. Personas are usually grouped according to certain behavior patterns goals or even demographics.

Personas are a great way to build empathy with our users and it helps to ensure that we are developing and designing and doing everything keeping in mind the needs of our users.

Gamification:

Gamification means taking specific “game-like” elements or elements that you would most likely see in a game and putting them into your product or a service that is not the game in order to drive user engagement. Please don’t gamification as turning everything into a game.

UI Patterns:

UI patterns are reusable solutions that is these are the solutions that have already been created and can be used by us to improve the interface of our product. A good example of UI patterns is Navbar, a Navbar helps the user to navigate the different sections of the website.

User Centered Design:

User Centered design is a series of processes or steps taken by the designers team in order to put the user at the center of the development of the product. With user centered design every decision is made keeping the user and the goals of the user in mind.

Heuristics:

Heuristics is the study and use of heuristic techniques about helping humans discover and learn things for themselves. In UX design, we do heuristic evaluations as rules of thumb or a better user experience.

Here is the list of 10 Heuristic evaluations:

1. Visibility of system status.
2. Match between system and the real world.
3. User control and freedom.
4. Consistency and standards.
5. Error prevention.
6. Recognition rather than recall.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors.
10. Help and documentation.

Mental models:

Mental models are basically a framework or worldview that a person has which helps him/her to interpret and understand the things in the world and how those things are related. Mental models are deeply held beliefs that each one of us has on how the world works.

Design thinking:

Design thinking is basically a creative way to solve problems. It is the sum of all the processes that results in designing of a prototype, The most important skills for design thinking are – having empathy for the users and prototyping.

Conclusion

UI/UX design play a very crucial role in development of a product or service. Specially, when it comes to Digital Products development, UI/UX design is even more important since it is the only way to interact with the product unlike the traditional products. Focus on the principles we discussed in the article and follow those steps in order to create professional UI/UX designs.

We hope that this article helped you improve your knowledge about UI/UX design for Digital Products and you learned about new terminologies and best practices that will help you create better designs for digital products.