Mastering the art of prototyping is akin to wielding a powerful toolset that empowers designers and developers to iterate, refine, and ultimately deliver products that resonate deeply with their audience.

In this article, we embark on a journey through the spectrum of prototype fidelity, from low-fi sketches to high-fi interactive simulations. Each step of the way, we’ll unravel prototype examples that illuminate the nuances and possibilities inherent in each approach. Whether you’re a seasoned UX designer seeking inspiration or a newcomer eager to grasp the fundamentals, this exploration promises insights aplenty.

But before we dive in, allow me to introduce you to UXPin—a comprehensive prototyping platform that empowers designers to bring their visions to life with unparalleled ease and efficiency. By seamlessly integrating design and prototyping capabilities, UXPin streamlines your workflow, enabling you to iterate rapidly and collaborate seamlessly. Ready to elevate your prototyping game? Sign up for a trial today.

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What is a prototype?

A prototype is a preliminary version or model of a new product, system, or design that is developed to test and validate concepts, features, or functionality before proceeding with full-scale production or implementation.

Prototypes are used in various industries, including product design, software development, engineering, and manufacturing, to gather feedback, identify potential issues, and refine designs early in the development process.

Prototypes are created for several reasons, all aimed at improving the final product or system. Here are some key reasons why prototypes are created:

1. To Validate Product Idea: Prototypes allow designers and developers to validate concepts and ideas early in the development process. By creating a prototype, they can test assumptions, explore different design options, and gather feedback from stakeholders before investing time and resources into full-scale development.
2. To Clarify Requirements: Prototypes help clarify requirements by providing a tangible representation of the product or system. They enable stakeholders to visualize and interact with the user interface design, facilitating discussions and ensuring that everyone has a shared understanding of the project goals and expectations.
3. To Identify Issues: Prototypes help identify potential issues and challenges before they become more costly to address later in the development process. By testing prototypes with users or stakeholders, designers can uncover usability problems, technical limitations, and design flaws early on and make necessary adjustments.
4. To Explore Solutions: Prototypes allow designers to explore different solutions and design alternatives. By creating multiple prototypes, designers can compare different approaches, evaluate trade-offs, and determine the most effective design direction for the final product.
5. To Gather Feedback: Prototypes serve as a tool for gathering feedback from real users, customers, and other stakeholders. By testing prototypes with target users, designers can gather valuable insights, preferences, and suggestions for improvement, which can inform subsequent iterations of the design.
6. To Reduce Risk: Prototyping helps mitigate risks associated with the development process by allowing designers to experiment with ideas in a low-risk environment. By identifying and addressing potential issues early on, prototypes help reduce the likelihood of costly mistakes and delays during later stages of development.
7. To Improve Communication: Prototypes serve as a communication tool for conveying ideas, concepts, and design decisions to potential investors. They provide a common visual reference point for discussions and facilitate collaboration among team members, ensuring that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals.

Read about prototype definition and types in this article: What is a Prototype?

Types of prototypes

Types of prototypes include:

1. Paper Prototypes: These are low-fidelity prototypes created using paper, sketches, or mockups to visualize the layout, structure, and flow of a design. Paper prototypes are inexpensive and quick to create, making them ideal for early-stage concept testing and brainstorming sessions.
2. Wireframes: They are basic, skeletal representations of a design or interface, typically created using wireframing tools. They focus on layout and functionality, omitting detailed design elements such as colors and graphics. Wireframes help designers and stakeholders visualize the structure and interaction flow of a design.
3. Digital Prototypes: They are interactive representations of a design or product created using prototyping tools. These prototypes can range from low-fidelity mockups to high-fidelity simulations, depending on the level of detail and realism required. Digital prototypes allow for user testing, usability evaluation, and iteration before product development.
4. Functional Prototypes: Functional prototypes are fully or partially functional versions of a product or system that demonstrate key features and capabilities. These prototypes often involve interactivity to replicate the behavior of the final product. Functional prototypes are used to validate technical feasibility, performance, and user experience.
5. Proof-of-Concept Prototypes: Those are experimental models created to demonstrate the feasibility of a new idea, technology, or approach. These prototypes focus on validating core concepts and principles, often with limited functionality or polish. Proof-of-concept prototypes are used to assess the viability of an idea before investing further resources in development.
6. Throwaway Prototypes: Throwaway prototypes, also known as disposable or rapid prototypes, are quick and rough prototypes created with the intention of being discarded after use. These prototypes are often built using tools and are not intended to represent the final product accurately. Instead, they are used to explore ideas, experiment with design concepts, and gather feedback early in the development process. Throwaway prototypes are valuable for generating new ideas, iterating rapidly, and validating design decisions without investing significant time or resources.
7. Workable Prototypes: Those prototypes are working models of a user interface. Unlike throwaway prototypes, workable prototypes are more polished and refined, aiming to closely resemble the final product in terms of functionality and performance. These prototypes may involve the use of actual components, hardware, or software code to simulate the behavior of the final product accurately. Workable prototypes are used to validate technical feasibility, test usability, and gather user feedback in real-world scenarios. They serve as a crucial step in the product development process, helping to identify and address potential issues before proceeding to full-scale production or implementation.

Prototype examples you need to see

Example 1: Paper prototype

Paper prototypes are are low-fidelity representations of user interfaces created using pen and paper. They are simple sketches of user interfaces that include rough sketches of UI elements such as buttons and tabs while every new paper piece shows a simulation of next steps of a user flow. They are great communication devices during brainstorming or talking with stakeholders.

Here is an example of a mobile app paper prototype by Aaron Barko found on Medium.

Notice that the prototype has a cut-out an iPhone and the designer can move it to indicate next step. Its kept in a black-and-white color scheme and all UX writing is written by hand. The designer prepared a smaller pieces of paper to indicate different options in a drop-down menu.

To create a paper prototype, prepare sketching materials such as pens or pencils for drawing your interface elements. Your pens may be of different thicknesses to represent different types of UI elements (e.g., thick lines for buttons, thin lines for text). You may want to have different sizes of paper depending on the complexity of your prototype and the level of detail you want to include.

Your paper prototype doesn’t have to be black and white. You can use markers or highlighters for adding emphasis to certain elements or highlighting important areas of your prototype.

Example 2: Wireframe

A wireframe is a simplified visual representation of a digital interface or product. It outlines the basic structure, layout, and functionality of the interface without getting into detailed design elements like colors, images, or typography. Wireframes are typically created using basic shapes, lines, and text to convey the placement of elements and the flow of information.

The focus is on capturing the overall layout and structure of the interface, as well as the interactions and navigation paths that users will follow. Designers usually use digital tools to make wireframes, such as UXPin, Figma or Balsamiq.

Here’s an example of a website wireframe in Balsamiq.

You can see that its a low-fidelity representation of a real-life website. There’s a frame for asset, some placeholder text, but overall, details don’t matter. It’s still early in the design process to be able to tell how the UI will look like beside the structure and layout.

Before diving into this type of prototyping, it’s helpful to have a clear understanding of the user flows and basic layout of your user interface. User flows map out the paths that users will take through the interface, while wireframes provide a simplified visual representation of the interface structure.

Example 3: Mockup

A mockup is a higher-fidelity representation of a digital interface or product compared to a wireframe or a paper prototype. While wireframes and paper prototypes focus on the basic structure and layout of the interface, mockups add more visual detail, including colors, typography, images, and other design elements.

Here is a design mockup found on Dribbble, a website where digital designers share static mockups, video prototypes, and graphic designs to showcase their understanding of design or prototyping process.

Notice that this mockup provides a more detailed representation of the final look and feel of the interface. They incorporate colors, typography, images, and other visual elements to showcase the visual style and branding of the project. They include realistic visual elements and often simulate the appearance of the final product as closely as possible.

Mockups still focus on visual design rather than functionality what makes them great for gathering feedback on the visual design and aesthetics of the interface. They are often shared with stakeholders, clients, or team members for review and approval before moving on to the prototype development phase.

Example 4: High-fidelity prototype

High-fidelity prototype can be in the form of a static mockup or functional prototype. What matters here is the level of detail. They serve as powerful communication and validation tools in the design process, allowing designers to convey their design concepts effectively and gather feedback on the user experience before moving into the product development phase.

High-fidelity prototypes closely mimic the visual appearance of the final product, including detailed graphics, typography, colors, and branding elements. They often use actual assets such as images, icons, and logos to provide a realistic representation of the interface.

One example of a high-fidelity prototype is this website made by UXPin.

You can see that it has a well-defined color palette, carefully picked font pairing, great use of whitespace and clickable form. You can use this prototype as a template for practicing UX design, add a FAQ section, new sites, and more. Try it now by signing up for UXPin trial.

Example 5: Functional prototype

A functional prototype is a type of prototype that not only demonstrates the visual design of an interface but also simulates its functionality and behavior. Unlike static prototypes, which focus solely on the appearance of the design, functional prototypes provide a tangible representation of how the final product will work and behave.

Functional prototypes help validate the technical feasibility of the design by demonstrating how different components and features work together in a functioning system. They can identify technical issues, bottlenecks, or limitations early in the development process.

Similarly, startups may build functional prototypes to get buy-in from investors. It works similarly to a 3D model of a physical product as other people can get a feeling of what you want to build and how it will behave like. Some people need physical models to spark their imagination.

Those prototypes include interactive elements that simulate user interactions and behaviors. This may include clickable buttons, input fields, dropdown menus, and other interactive components that allow users to navigate through the prototype and perform tasks.

In some cases, functional prototypes may include real data or content to provide a more realistic user experience. This could involve integrating dynamic content feeds, sample data sets, or actual text and imagery that would be used in the final product.

Here is an example of a functional prototype by UXPin. It’s an auction app.

It’s fully clickable and it looks like a final product that has been developed by engineers. But it’s not. It’s a functional prototype. You can use it as if you use a regular app that’s on your phone. It’s responsive to user action and it transfers data from one step to the other. Such an app is possible to build in UXPin.

Example 6: Coded prototype

The final prototype example we want to show you is coded prototype. This prototype isn’t build in code by a developer. It’s build in a designer’s environment with coded components – a small building blocks of most apps. UXPin, unlike most design tools, renders real code, so there is always code in the background that you can hand over to development.

The example here is a sign-up flow build with UXPin. Here’s a full tutorial on how to build a sign-up form like this one.

If you want to learn coded prototyping, follow our mini-course on using UXPin Merge.

Create code-first prototype with UXPin

Those prototype examples demonstrate versatility and applicability across various design contexts, including paper prototypes, wireframes, mockups, and functional prototypes. Each type of prototype serves a specific purpose in the design process, helping designers to effectively communicate ideas, test functionality, and refine designs before final implementation.

With UXPin, you can turn your ideas into reality quickly. It’s like having your design and prototype tools all in one place, saving you time and hassle. Plus, it makes teamwork a breeze, allowing you to collaborate smoothly with others. Ready to take your prototyping skills to the next level? Try UXPin for free today.

The post Examples of Prototypes – From Low-Fidelity to High-Fidelity Prototypes appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Modern websites and apps rely on front-end frameworks to develop, maintain, and scale user interfaces. React’s Javascript library is arguably the most popular front-end framework with many component libraries to build digital products.

We’re going to explore the top React libraries and how to choose the right one for your next project.

With UXPin Merge, you can sync a React component library, so you can assemble production-ready layouts super fast. Discover UXPin Merge.

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6 Things to Consider When Choosing a React Component Library

Below are six things to consider when choosing a React library for your next project. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and some of these factors may not apply to the product you’re building. 

Popularity

GitHub’s star rating allows you to quickly compare each React library’s popularity. The weekly downloads on npm also show how many people use the component library. Generally speaking, a React library’s popularity means it’s well established and serves its purpose.

Issues

Like star rating, a library’s GitHub issues can tell you a lot about its popularity and how well it’s maintained. Even if the library has minimal issues, do any of these affect the product you’re trying to build? 

Documentation & Support

Documentation is an important consideration when choosing a React library. You want to avoid running to Stack Overflow every time you run into trouble or want to know how to use specific components. Good documentation is updated regularly and gives you a comprehensive understanding of the library.

You also want to know if the React library has support directly from the creators or via a dedicated community forum. There are times when you need expert advice to overcome challenges. The ability to reach out for help (even if that means paying) is crucial to get issues sorted quickly and keep the project moving.

Customization

One of the downsides to using a component library is its constraints and lack of customization. For some projects, customization isn’t a factor, but if you’re looking to develop a unique UI, the ability to build your own design system is vital.

Explore the library’s documentation to see if they offer instructions for customizing the components and how easily you can achieve your desired results.

Browser or Device Compatibility

Depending on the app you’re designing, you’ll want to know the component library’s browser and mobile compatibility. The quickest way to research browser/device compatibility is by searching GitHub’s issues or Stack Overflow.

Accessibility

Accessibility is a time-consuming but necessary consideration for digital product design. If a React library hasn’t considered accessibility when designing components, then it’s something you’re going to have to do yourself, which takes us back to points 3 and 4–documentation and customization.

Which is the best React component library?

The best React component library for your project depends on your specific needs and preferences. It’s recommended to evaluate each library based on factors such as documentation quality, community support, active development, and alignment with your project requirements before making a decision.

Comparing the libraries involves assessing various aspects such as design philosophy, component offerings, theming capabilities, documentation, community support, and ecosystem. Take Material-UI (MUI) and Ant Design as examples.

Material-UI provides a comprehensive set of React components following the Material Design system. It includes components like buttons, cards, forms, navigation, and more, with a wide range of customization options.

Ant Design offers a rich collection of components tailored for enterprise applications, including layouts, forms, navigation, data display, and more. It provides components specific to data visualization and business logic.

5 React Component Libraries

These are our five best React libraries for 2024.

Note: Information regarding GitHub stars and NPM downloads are accurate as of March 2024.

MUI (Material-UI)

• GitHub Stars: 91.3k
• Weekly NPM Downloads: 3.4M
• Official website: mui.com

MUI is one of the most comprehensive and widely used React component libraries. The library is built on Google’s Material Design UI, one of the most extensive UI kits in the world.

MUI – Components

MUI has a massive component library for designers to build everything from mobile and web applications, websites, and even wearable apps. 

MUI Core features fundamental UI components you see in everyday digital products, while MUI X offers a list of advanced React components for building complex user interfaces, like data tables, data pickers, charts, and more.

For those of you who would like to try design with MUI code components, sign up for a UXPin trial and get 14-day access to UXPin. Read more about MUI 5 Kit in UXPin.

MUI – Theming & Customization

One of MUI’s biggest appeals is the ability to theme and customize components. Designers can use MUI as a foundation to scale designs fast but also adapt the library to build a custom design system for their product or organization.

Designers can also take advantage of Material Design and MUI’s comprehensive guidelines to avoid usability issues when customizing components.

MUI also has a template marketplace to purchase React theme templates for dashboards, eCommerce websites, landing pages, and more.

MUI – Documentation

MUI’s documentation is as detailed and comprehensive as its component library. Its curators have taken great care to provide designers and developers with step-by-step instructions and guidelines for installation, usage, customization, accessibility, and more.

There are also tons of videos on YouTube from MUI’s large community of users and contributors offering best practices, tutorials, tips and tricks, how-to guides, and more.

React-Bootstrap

• GitHub Stars: 22.2k
• Weekly NPM Downloads: 1.3M
• Official website: react-bootstrap.github.io

Founded in 2011, Bootstrap is one of the oldest and most popular open-source CSS frameworks for websites and web applications. Bootstrap was one of the first CSS frameworks to prioritize mobile-first web development, allowing designers to build and scale responsive websites quickly.

React-Bootstrap replaced Bootstrap Javascript while ditching resource-heavy dependencies like JQuery to build a comprehensive but simplistic React component library.

React-Bootstrap – Components

If you’re familiar with Bootstrap, then you’ll instantly recognize React-Bootstrap’s generic-looking component library. Like its CSS predecessor, React-Bootstrap features UI components that favor web design rather than mobile applications.

React-Bootstrap – Theming & Customization

React-Bootstrap is very generic with minimal styling, making it easy for designers to tweak and customize. Bootstrap’s defined classes and variants make it easy to select and customize components using CSS.

Due to Bootstrap’s long history and wide usage, you can find tons of free and premium React-Bootstrap themes and templates for everything from admin dashboards to multiple purpose websites, eCommerce, landing pages, and more.

React-Bootstrap – Documentation

React-Bootstrap has excellent documentation, albeit not as detailed and comprehensive as MUI. React-Bootstrap’s simplicity and naming convention make it one of the easiest React libraries to understand, use, and customize.

Bootstrap is also featured extensively on Stack Overflow, so you’ll likely find answers to most issues. There are also loads of blogs and YouTube videos offering advice, tutorials, design projects, and more.

Semantic UI React

• GitHub Stars: 13.2k
• Weekly NPM Downloads: 253k
• Official website: react.semantic-ui.com

Semantic UI React is a popular alternative to React-Bootstrap. Like React-Bootstrap, Semantic UI started as an open-source CSS framework that its contributors used to build React components.

Semantic UI React – Components

Semantic UI React offers an extensive range of UI components for websites and web applications. The components provide cleaner, more modern styling than Bootstrap while remaining minimalist and simplistic.

Semantic UI React uses the FontAwesome icon set, including over 1,600 free icons and 7,864 Pro (paid).

Semantic UI React – Theming & Customization

Semantic UI uses an intuitive, straightforward naming convention that makes it easy to customize components. The documentation also provides a step-by-step guide for theming with Semantic UI React. Unlike MUI and React-Bootstrap, Semantic has very few template options. 

Semantic UI React – Documentation

Semantic UI React’s interactive documentation provides you with CodeSandbox examples to inspect the code and play around with components. 

The docs also allow you to switch between an example, code, and props to visualize the component from multiple angles.

Ant Design (AntD)

• GitHub Stars: 89.9k
• Weekly NPM Downloads: 1.2M
• Official website: ant.design/docs/react/introduce

Ant Design (AntD) is another popular, widely used React component library developed by Ant Group–parent company to Alibaba, China’s biggest online marketplace. Like MUI, AntD offers a vast component library for both web and mobile applications.

AntD is the only React library featured in this article that uses TypeScript – a form of Javascript.

Ant Design – Components

AntD has a massive component library for desktop and mobile, including UI patterns like infinite scroll and pull-to-refresh for mobile devices. Ant Design ProComponents offers a range of advanced React UI elements ( similar to MUI X) for building complex interfaces.

You can also find a vast library of pre-made templates and scaffolds to kick start your project and build UIs much faster.

Ant Design – Theming & Customization

AntD uses design tokens or variables for devs to customize and theme components. The UI library uses Less and provides a complete list of all AntD variables in GitHub.

Ant Design – Documentation

AntD’s comprehensive documentation provides step-by-step instructions for using and customizing. You can also inspect each component in CodeSandBox, CodePen, or StackBlitz.

Chakra UI

• GitHub Stars: 36.4k
• Weekly NPM Downloads: 523K
• Official website: chakra-ui.com

Chakra UI is a Nigerian-based React component library founded by Segun Adebayo. You can choose between Chakra’s free component library or Chakra UI Pro, which offers pre-made complex UI components to build interfaces faster.

Chakra UI – Components

Chakra UI’s component library caters to web-based applications and websites. The library offers the choice between TypeScript or Javascript React components, depending on your preference. Chakra’s designers follow WAI-ARIA standards, so every element is accessible.

The stylish UI components look similar to Semantic UI, with dark and light options available.

Chakra UI – Theming & Customization

Chakra’s designers created the UI library to be fully customized using variables to meet product and brand requirements. Charka also integrates with Create React App, Framer Motion, React Hook Form, and React Table to extend the library’s usage and customization.

Chakra UI – Documentation

Chakra UI has excellent documentation with guides, video tutorials, examples, FAQs, links to connect with core team members, and an active Discord community. 

Chakra’s users are extremely passionate and enthusiastic about the React library, and there’s always someone to connect with to ask questions.

Design Using React Components With UXPin Merge

One of the challenges of using a React library is that only few tools allow you to design UIs with real components. UXPin Merge allows you to assemble layouts with React components from Git repo, Storybook, or npm. See how it works. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post Top React Component Libraries appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Are you ready to elevate your design workflow to the next level? In this comprehensive tutorial, we’ll delve into the world of UXPin Merge, empowering you to seamlessly integrate your React app components into the UXPin editor for high-fidelity prototypes.

Gone are the days of static designs. With UXPin Merge, you can dynamically link your React components, ensuring that your prototypes are always in sync with the latest developments in your codebase.

Get ready to unlock the full potential of UXPin Merge – let’s dive in!

Create beautiful layouts without designers

Design production-ready prototypes 8.6x faster. No pixels. pure code.

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What is UXPin Merge?

UXPin Merge is a technology for designing with coded UI components that are backed with production-ready code. It’s part of UXPin – a code-based design tool for highly realistic and accurate prototyping. With this tech, you can grab all the specs, JSX code, and any other asset and hand them over for developer to make the entire product development workflow 8.6x faster.

UXPin Merge tutorial – How to use this technology?

UXPin Merge technology works like a drag-and-drop UI builder. You take a component out of the design library in UXPin and put it on the canvas. Then, after you’ve done arranging the layout and setting up components props, you can copy a ready React code (or CSS code for Tailwind library) to your development environment or open it in StackBlitz.

You can build anything you like. From simple dashboards that automate your team operations to more complex, e-commerce stores which front-end is decoupled from the back-end. UXPin has a few templates and patterns to get you started.

We highly recommend you watch a video tutorial of how to use UXPin Merge presented by a real-life web developer, Rachel. She did a wonderful job of walking you through all the panels, functionalities, and features of Merge technology, and she also shows you how to do a design handoff with UXPin Merge.

Watch it on Youtube. Here’s the full playlist of UXPin Merge tutorial.

How to integrate your own components, step by step

UXPin Merge supports Storybook components and React components from open-source libraries, such as MUI, Ant design or Bootstrap.

We want to give more details and show you how easy it is to integrate a React-based library into Merge to design with code on a day-to-day basis. All that without learning how to code!

UXPin Merge allows users to import their existing custom React components in a seamless fashion to create interactive prototypes using real code, which is unlike anything else traditional design tools offer.

This eliminates the need for designers to manually maintain a “second” design system within their design tool and instead provides the entire team with a single source of truth. The result? The disconnect between designers and developers is gone when building digital products. 

We want to save you time so we’ve designed this tutorial to integrate Mozilla’s React Todo App example with Merge. After the integration, you’ll be able to use the app’s components to design an interactive Todo list prototype within UXPin!

Remember to start by requesting access to Merge – you can do it here. After the verification process and the setup, you’ll be ready to design with code! Also, don’t worry about integrating with GitHub – we don’t have any requirement of where the codebase should be located, so you can use whatever you want!

The components

The Todo app has three React components:

1. Form – create a todo item.

2. FilterButton – filter todos by their current state.

3. Todo – a todo list item.

These components are in the `src/components` directory and are outlined in the screenshot below:

When this tutorial is completed, a designer will be able to create a prototype with these components. Your real-world custom design system (DS) likely has many more than three components. However, the concepts we’ll illustrate in this tutorial should apply to your DS as well.

Set up UXPin Merge

To begin, fork then clones the following link https://github.com/mdn/todo-react. Then install our UXPin Merge NodeJS package, which includes our CLI.

1. Navigate into your project folder cd todo-react
2. Install UXPin Merge and It’s CLI NodeJS bundle with: yarn add @uxpin/merge-cli–dev
3. Ignore the UXPin Merge build directory with: echo ‘/.uxpin-merge’ >> .gitignore

A custom design system requires two additional config files:

1. uxpin.webpack.config.js
2. uxpin.config.js

UXPin typically doesn’t need to use your entire existing Webpack build process. We’ll use a more minimal and default build for UXPin. Create a uxpin.webpack.config.js file and paste the following code into it:

const path = require("path");
const webpack = require("webpack");
 
module.exports = {
    output: {
      path: path.resolve(__dirname, "build"),
      filename: "bundle.js",
      publicPath: "/"
    },
    resolve: {
      modules: [__dirname, "node_modules"],
      extensions: ["*", ".js", ".jsx"]
    },
    devtool: "source-map",
    module: {
      rules: [
        {
          test: /\.(s*)css$/,
          use: [
            {
              loader: 'style-loader'
            },
            {
              loader: 'css-loader',
              options: {
                importLoaders: 2
              }
            },
          ]
        },
        {
          loader: "babel-loader",
          test: /\.js?$/,
          exclude: /node_modules/,
          options: {
            presets: ['@babel/preset-env', '@babel/preset-react'],
          }
        },
      ]
    }
}

For components you want to use in UXPin Merge, you must specify their file directory in the uxpin.config.js file at the top of the directory of the repo. As you can see in the code snippet below, we’ve only added the ‘Form’ component src/components/Form.js  for now and will add the other components later in the tutorial. 

Create a uxpin.config.js and paste the following content into the file:

module.exports = {
  components: {
    categories: [
      {
        name: 'General',
        include: [
          'src/components/Form.js',
        ]
      }
    ],
    webpackConfig: 'uxpin.webpack.config.js',
  },
  name: 'Learn UXPin Merge - React Todo list tutorial'
};


Lastly, Babel-loader will be used by Webpack to create the app bundle. To install babel use the following commands: yarn add babel-loader –dev then yarn install .

CONGRATULATIONS👏 You’re all good to go and have the minimum configuration required to view the Form component.

Experimental Mode

Using the settings provided in `uxpin.webpack.config.js`, Experimental mode bundles your components and opens a browser window. You can lay out components in a similar fashion as the UXPin Editor. After Experimental Mode loads, drag and drop the Form component from the sidebar onto the project canvas:

We have the Form component but it lacks styling. For that, we’ll create a Global Wrapper Component.

Using a Global Wrapper Component to apply CSS styles

Just like your custom design system, this Todo app contains global styles. These are specified in the `src/index.css` file. All of our components need the styles specified in this file. We can load this file via a Global Wrapper Component. This component will wrap around every component we drag onto the UXPin canvas.

Create a wrapper file:

Copy and paste the following into `UXPinWrapper.js`:

import React from "react";
import '../index.css';

export default function UXPinWrapper({ children }) {
  return children;
}

The `import ‘../index.css’;` line ensures our CSS styles are loaded prior to rendering each component.

We need to tell UXPin to use this wrapper file. Add the following to uxpin.config.js:

wrapper: 'src/wrapper/UXPinWrapper.js',

Experimental mode should open a new browser window with a styled Form component:

Adding the FilterButton with a customizable name

Now we’ll work on adding the FilterButton to UXPin Merge. These buttons are displayed below the Form component:

Adding this component will be similar to the Form component. However, I’d also like to give designers the ability to specify the text that is displayed within the button. We’ll do that via the `prop-types` package.

Component propTypes are mapped to the UXPin properties panel when editing a component. The existing FilterButton component doesn’t use prop-types so let’s add this to `FilterButton.js`:

import React from "react";
+ import PropTypes from 'prop-types';

function FilterButton(props) {
  return (
@@ -15,4 +16,9 @@ function FilterButton(props) {
  );
}

+ FilterButton.propTypes = {
+   name: PropTypes.string
+ }

+FilterButton.defaultProps = {
+  name: 'Button Name'
+};

export default FilterButton;

Two of our three components are now working with UXPin Merge. We have one component remaining: the Todo component.

Adding the Todo component with a wrapper

We’re moving on to our final component: the Todo. These are displayed within the list of todo items in the UI:

When adding the FilterButton, we edited the FilterButton.js file to add propTypes. What if you want to isolate your Merge-specific changes and don’t want to modify the source code of your components? We can create a wrapper that is specific to the Todo component for this. It’s similar in concept to the Global wrapper component we used to apply CSS styles but will be specific to the Todo component.

Type the following:

mkdir -p src/components/merge/todo 

touch src/components/merge/todo/Todo.js

Copy and paste the following code into Todo.js. 

import React from 'react';
import PropTypes from 'prop-types';

// Import the original component
import TodoM from '../../Todo';

function Todo(props) {
  return <TodoM {...props}/>
}

Todo.propTypes = {
  /**
   * If `true`, the todo will be marked as completed.
   */
  completed: PropTypes.bool,

  /**
   * The name of the todo.
   */
   name: PropTypes.string,

  toggleTaskCompleted: PropTypes.func,
}

Todo.defaultProps = {
  name: 'Do Laundry'
};

export default Todo;

We’re importing the original Todo component as `TodoM` and returning this component in our newly defined `Todo` function. We specify propTypes just like we did with the FilterButton component on our newly defined `Todo` wrapper function.

Add ‘src/components/merge/todo/Todo.js’ to uxpin.config.js and restart using ./node_modules/@uxpin/merge-cli/bin/uxpin-merge –disable-tunneling. After Experimental launches a new window, click-and-drag the Todo component onto the canvas:

You’ll see the Todo component along with the default “Do Laundry” todo name. This default name is only applied when using Merge.

Pushing to UXPin

Until you push your design system to UXPin the components are only visible to you. To let your design team use these components we need to push the component bundle to UXPin. Creating and pushing a Merge design library requires two steps:

1. Create the library within the UXPin UI

1. Go to your UXPin account

2. Enter the UXPin Editor

3. Create a new library

4. Select the option import React components

5. Copy the Auth token (don’t share it with anyone and do not place it in any files checked into git repository. This token provides direct access to the library on your account.) The process looks like this:

2. Push the library via the uxpin-merge CLI

Using the token created from the previous stop, run the following from within the project repo:

./node_modules/@uxpin/merge-cli/bin/uxpin-merge push –token YOUR TOKEN 

Your design team can now access the Merge library.

Using the Merge library within UXPin

Now that the Merge design library has been pushed its time to test it out within the UXPin editor:

• Reload the UXPin Editor in your browser.
• Select the “Learn UXPin Merge” design system in the bottom left corner of the editor.
• Click and drag the components from the sidebar to the canvas.

You should have a solid looking prototype:

How does a designer hand off a prototype back to a developer?

Previewing and Exporting

Now that we’ve built a quick prototype in UXPin we’re ready to export it back to our app. We can preview the output and then use Spec mode to copy and paste the JSX code for our components.

Click the play button in the upper right corner of the editor. Once the preview loads click the “Spec” link at the top. You can now click on the components and view the JSX code to generate them in the right panel:

It’s great to push an initial version of our design system. However, you’ll likely need to push out quite a few updates over time.

Pushing an Update

The FilterButton has a “pressed” state to indicate the currently active filter. Looking at the live React app, here’s the difference between the pressed and not-pressed state:

Let’s add support for this state. Make the following change to `src/components/FilterButton.js`:

FilterButton.propTypes = {
-   name: PropTypes.string
+   name: PropTypes.string,
+   isPressed: PropTypes.bool
}

Commit the change to git and push to UXPin:

Merge components are automatically synced to the most recently pushed code. To show the latest, reload the tab showing the UXPin editor. Select a FilterButton. In the right panel of the editor you should see a new “isPressed” property.

Select it to activate this state:

Follow this same flow (git commit + uxpin-push) when you make future changes. Prototypes will automatically use the latest pushed version of components.

Speed up building your product by 8.6x

You’ve taken a React app and pushed its components to UXPin Merge. You’ve also learned how to push updates when you modify components or add new ones. Now your design team can use these components to create high-fidelity prototypes within the UXPin editor.

You can browse the source code for this project on GitHub. To learn more advanced Merge techniques see our Merge docs or reach out to us at hello@uxpin.com.

Don’t have UXPin Merge yet? First, remember to go through the process of requesting access to make the most of designing with code! Try UXPin Merge for free.

The post Design with Code – UXPin Merge Tutorial appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

A perfect website isn’t made in one smooth creation and launch effort. Seamless and fully functional sites are the result of careful prototyping. Prototypes allow early imperfections to be weeded out of websites and offer opportunities to maximize the effectiveness of your site.

A business’s website is, oftentimes, the first impression made on investors and customers. Understanding how to perfect your website through prototyping is crucial for early success, which is why this article covers website prototyping in depth.

Create a website prototype that you can actually test with users. Build an interactive prototype in UXPin and design a UI that brings the whole team together. Try UXPin for free.

Build advanced prototypes

Design better products with States, Variables, Auto Layout and more.

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What is a website prototype?

A website prototype is an early version of a site that serves as a starting point. The ability to prototype creates room for exploration, refinement, and perfection in an effective way. One of its best aspects is that it creates a space for development prior to publishing a website.

A prototype can start out in a low-fidelity format and contain a simple outline of the site’s form and function. This outline can evolve into a high-fidelity prototype with all of the details and interactive design intended for the final product.

The flexibility of website prototyping benefits all parties. Designers and developers have a space to perfect their products, while stakeholders can get a realistic idea of the interface early on. Even clients benefit from the flawless user interface that prototyping helps develop. 

Benefits of website prototypes

Let’s highlight the most notable impacts website prototyping offers, so you can visualize how your business will benefit.   

Visualization

Visually appealing platforms are best created through a visually informed process, like prototyping. A powerful system allows multiple iterations, as the early image of a site develops into something fully functional.

The ability to visualize each step of a site’s development in real time gives everyone involved a chance to be included and inspired. Designers and developers have the option to constantly tweak and interact with their work to find the perfect fit for a site. The ability to actively assess the direction of a project also benefits stakeholders who may not fully understand a team’s progress and goal without interactive visuals. 

Early feedback

Nothing is more time-consuming and fruitless than completing a project only to find that, at some point, things are headed in the wrong direction and need to be redone. Prototyping is an effective strategy for avoiding these late-development pitfalls.

When teams are able to interact with their design during all stages of construction, feedback is easily generated and implemented. With the ability to test and reorient the direction of a platform at any time, it is far less likely that the end product will miss its goals at completion. 

User experience testing

The final product is all about its users, so why not integrate user input as early into the design process as possible?

Prior to a product’s completion, the user interface and user design can be tested on real users with a prototype. This allows for a fully interactive experience, so users can test and provide feedback on all functions of a website. 

Risk reduction

Website design can be riddled with hidden pitfalls that only become blatantly apparent when the site is published. User interface issues like confusing navigation and inconsistent design styles can diminish your website’s impact. 

Interactive prototyping helps mitigate these risks by bringing issues with website form or function into plain view prior to publishing. What would have been a costly complication, is little more than a slight tweak with a prototype.

You can even reduce risks beyond functionality by using a prototype to ensure the product aligns with the visions of stakeholders. An alignment with company goals is much easier to assess when the site can be easily reviewed during its creation by anyone in the company.

Clear communication

A cohesive and smoothly functioning platform is the result of a well-connected team. While there are plenty of ways to foster general teamwork, communication on a singular product is best accomplished with a shared source of information.

A prototype is the perfect central point of information for a website design team to communicate through. Contributions from all members can be seen and interacted with in this format, allowing all members to be on the same page and discuss various points of improvement. 

Efficient iteration

Editing a fully published website is a very complex process that can be avoided with the right tools. The ability to repeatedly create new iterations of a project with ease helps build the best product you can.

An effective and efficient process for creating new iterations of a project encourages teams to make more edits prior to publishing and pursue more creative concepts. As a result, final sites are more likely to run smoothly and stand out from cookie-cutter competitors’ sites.

User-centered design

User research can only go so far. This form of user integration may work for concept creation, but as platforms are developed, more specific user input is needed. Prototypes offer an opportunity to explore user interactions in a way that is unique to your website.

By granting test users access to interact with and review a prototype of a site, teams gain a better understanding of what improvements can be made. Issues that may have otherwise been missed by a busy design team can be highlighted by users, and this information can inspire impactful improvements. 

Defining the scope

Defining and maintaining scope is an important part of any project, and websites are no exception. With multiple individuals involved in the creation of a website, a loose scope can result in projects taking up more time and resources for developments that are not necessary.

Prototypes act like an outline, allowing teams to define the scope of their work early on. Specifying what features are needed creates a foundation for focus, where any additions that fall outside of the project’s scope can be easily caught and redirected.  

Stakeholder approval

Stakeholders may not have an in-depth understanding of website design, making it difficult to describe a product and receive approval. Prototypes provide an accurate visual reference that makes projects easy for stakeholders to perceive and approve.

Cost savings

The later mistakes are caught, the larger and more costly they tend to be. Early resolution of design errors or flaws in a prototype can prevent mistakes from growing into a financial burden in the final version of a site.

Design exploration

Exploration tends to be most inviting and effective when it is easy and without risk. Prototypes provide designers with a risk-free space to indulge in creative whims and the best prototyping systems allow easy access to a variety of design tools.

This form of exploration opens up opportunities for new design styles that might help your website stand out and impress its audience. 

How to create a website prototype

If website prototyping sounds like it would benefit your business, that’s great! Here are a few important things to consider before getting started to maximize your prototype’s potential.

Run preliminary work

Well-executed ideas tend to have one thing in common, research. Understanding how, why, and for whom you plan to design a website should come before all else. Take time to identify your target audience with some preliminary user research studies. Understanding what users want and marrying those concepts with what your website is meant to do can set up a successful foundation.

While you can’t expect to have every answer at such an early phase, it is worth trying to answer every core question you can think of regarding your future website. For example:

• What is the purpose of your site?
• How would you categorize your website; as a blog, a sales platform, or something else?
• Who is your intended audience?
• How will your audience interact with your website?
• What features will your site need to succeed?
• How will your website be similar to others in its category?
• How will it be different?

The more preliminary work you do, the easier and more precise the following design steps will be. For more information on preliminary work, explore the product development guide.

Sketch out your first visuals

With all of your key elements and goals in mind, it’s time to create the precursor to your prototype. This original outline is often referred to as a wireframe and its goal is to outline your website’s key features.

This rough draft should detail things like the site’s information architecture, interactive elements, and basic design ideas. Details and precision are not the main goals during this phase, so wireframes can be generated with mockup tools or hand-drawn sketches. A little paper prototyping know-how can go a long way in this stage. 

Create a prototype with UXPin

Now it’s time for the main event; a prototype that is flexible, interactive, and capable of representing a completed product. Your wireframe initiates this process, by directing focus towards the key aspects of your design. Meanwhile, the prototype allows for the addition of new details.

The traditional prototyping process can be lengthy and complex, but advancements in technology have simplified prototyping. UXPin is one such tool, designed specifically to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of prototyping in website design.

UXPin prototypes are designed for simplified previewing so your team can check for imperfections and get feedback with ease. Previews can be tested in multiple browsers or even viewed on mobile devices to ensure they meet your standards in all formats. With UXPin Mirror, you can even see the difference your updates make in real time on mobile devices.

A library of advanced features ensures that your UXPin prototype will accurately encapsulate every detail you intend to have in a completed website. Create various states for interactive components, design a drop-down menu that supports smooth navigation, or organize with tab menus, navigational drawers, and many other options.

The opportunities for customization in the prototyping phase don’t stop here. Variables can be added to personalize user experiences and expressions can be used to compute a variety of values, like those in a virtual shopping cart. You can even generate conditional interactions to have your site respond differently based on users’ interactions. 

UXPin’s professionally designed prototyping tool allows you to create all of the complex functions necessary for a professional website, through a simplified system that does not require you to learn how to code.     

Validate your concept and refine your website prototype

Once you have generated a prototype that fits your goals, it’s time to test. An interactive and fully functioning prototype can be used to test how well users are able to navigate your website. Record how long it takes users to discover and use specific features, identify challenges, and observe how your design is received.

With a flexible prototype, revisions can be easily implemented based on user response and then those revisions can be retested to refine your website into its final form.

A Practical Example of a Website Prototype in UXPin

When designing for users, you need to know their end goals and actions along the way. The two are called content and user flows, respectively, and together they form the heart of any great website.

But how do we go from an information outline to interactive design? In this post, we’ll discuss how to turn a set of content into a prototype, rapidly.

Step 1: Assemble a content inventory

What are we designing? Many designers start from the outside and work their way in, crafting the containers and framework before examining the information that users spend more time with.

When you start designing from the inside out, you design with the user in mind. What they need to see immediately will gain prominence over what you want them to notice second. Navigation bars deserve less attention than the call to action, for example.

As importantly, a content-first approach is also naturally a mobile-first approach. Mobile devices have more limitations, screen size, and bandwidth to name a few, and so designing within these parameters force you to prioritize content ruthlessly.

A content inventory is an organized list, spreadsheet, or equivalent document containing all the elements relevant to the end-user. A good inventory acts as a hierarchy of information divided into sections.

Your completed content inventory lays out all the possibilities for your user flows.

Step 2: Plan the core flow with informed decisions

A complex project like a banking website will require many flows, such as:

• Changing a password
• Viewing investment options
• Reviewing 401k
• Ordering checks
• Opening a new account, or closing an old one
• Transferring funds to or from a different bank
• Paying the credit card balance

Each flow requires a user to weave through multiple content pages. For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll focus just on the credit card payment process, one of the most crucial flows. When you prototype, focus first on the riskiest or most fundamental user flows.

Let’s write it out this user flow:

• The user lands on the homepage.
• The user completes their login information and redirects to their dashboard.
• The user clicks into their credit card balance.
• The user chooses an account from which to pay the balance. Then submits the request and confirms their balance is paid off.

That sounds like a lot of steps, but there are only three decisions involved: deciding whether or not to pay, choosing an account from which to do so, and choosing to confirm the transaction. Each step must be clear and effortless in our prototype.

Step 3: Build the prototype

In this case, we’ll build a user flow that lets people pay off their credit card balance at a fictional bank.

Given real content, our goal is to build a mid-fi. Unlike lo-fi prototypes, which act like boxy wireframes, or hi-fis, which show branding in place, mid-fis demonstrate the flow of decisions users take to accomplish a task.

If you’re limited on iterations, mid-fi prototypes are the perfect choice since you don’t waste time on visual design but still provide enough detail for user testing.

In a mid-fi, functional prototype, you’ll want to show:

• Correct layout of UI elements (navigation, primary content, etc.)
• Basic colors
• Basic interactions (no advanced animations or states yet)
• Correct typography
• Images in the correct dimensions

Here’s how we’d make it work for our bank website.

Login page

Logging in is easy: a simple form on the bank’s home page lets users securely enter their account. But we don’t neglect this obligatory step because it’s the user’s first interaction with the bank and its brand. Everything from the color scheme to the microcopy must fit with the friendly-yet-professional tone.

Account overview

Upon entering their username and password, they see a dashboard that includes their account information. The purpose of this screen is to give the person an overview of their accounts. There are no ads, no upsells, and secondary information is pushed to one side. It’s all about their money.

To help them decide if it’s time to pay, we’ll include their credit card balance on this screen.

Payment process

According to the user flow, we know that the person’s next move is to choose to pay the card balance. That’s an easy click — and presents a second decision. At this point, he or she must choose the account to withdraw money from.

Decisions take time and cognitive power, so we should make choosing an account dead simple. Each account is listed with as little information as necessary (the account name and balance).

Next, the person reaches their third decision: whether or not to commit the transaction. At this point, all they need to know is what the transaction’s about. That means we can eliminate the previous decision’s options.

A new screen, or even a simple modal window, will present the information they need to make that decision. Specifically, the account name, the amount to pay, and the approve and disapprove buttons.

Success! Clicking the right button confirms that the balance is now cleared.

Getting close to reality makes it work

Notice that each screen in this design uses both realistic colors, typography, and layout — in addition to real microcopy. It’s not fully polished, but enough to start testing.

At this point, we just need to add some basic interactions so people can click through the screens. Once that’s finished, it’s time to collect feedback, iterate as needed, and then test with our users.

To complete your prototype, just repeat all the above steps with each user flow.

Build your own prototype in UXPin

People visit an interactive website to accomplish a task, not use a widget or admire its graphics. That makes the flow along with real content as important as developing a prototype’s UI.

Content-centric design helps find their way along that path. If you’d like to try what you learned in this guide, go ahead and start your free trial in UXPin.

The post Website Prototyping: The Hands-on Guide appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

We asked UXTweak to write for you about prototype testing. The following article is a guest post by Daria Krasovskaya, their Head of Content and Designer. Enjoy!

If you have just finished your design prototype and you are looking for ways to validate your design look no further. In this article, we have collated everything you need to know about prototype testing including best practices to take on board when implementing it.

Prototype testing is an excellent way to test a design and to ensure that it meets the needs of the user while serving the goals of the business. Prototype testing is a quintessential user research methodology that can massively help UX teams make data-informed decisions and create user-centered products.

What is a prototype?

A prototype is a tangible representation of a product that is constructed to validate design concepts and processes, enabling refinement before the product goes to full-scale production. Based on the unique needs of the product and the stage of the product lifecycle different types of prototypes can be deployed:

• High-Fidelity Prototypes: These are detailed models that can imitate the final product. This type of prototype is used later down in the product development process to refine the usability of the product.
• Low-Fidelity Prototypes: These are simple models that are used early on in the product lifecycle to test and validate the design concepts that the product will be built upon.
• Wireframe or Paper Prototypes: These are very basic representations outlining the structure and layout of the product and can take the form of either wireframes or hand-drawn paper prototypes

What is prototype testing?

Prototype testing is a UX methodology that involves the evaluation of a prototype to validate a design or identify areas for improvements before the product advances to full-scale production.

Prototype testing occurs in a critical phase and can help UX professionals ensure that the product aligns with the needs as well as expectations of its users. Depending on the type of prototype, the test can assess general user experience, functionality, usability as well as the overall aesthetics of the product in question.

Why Is It Important to Test a Product Prototype?

Engaging in prototype testing can have a host of advantages for the development of a product as it is an unmissable opportunity to see the product through the eyes of its intended users. This adds a unique value to the whole design process and the development of the end product. 

Here are the main benefits of conducting prototype testing:

Iterative Improvement

Prototype testing is the epitome of the continuous improvement mindset in UX design. Prototype testing allows UX professionals to identify potential areas for improvement when it comes to the usability, functionality, and aesthetics of a product aiding in this way in the incremental rectification of any flaws. UX is an iterative process and so is prototype testing!

Cost and Time Savings

Creating prototypes and testing those early on in the UX process is an excellent way to save money, time, and resources. Prototype testing allows for cost-effective and time-efficient tweaks in the product before this goes into production, saving product professionals from expensive redesigns and reworks.

Stakeholder Communication

As mentioned earlier prototypes are tangible representations of a product. Hence, those can act as great tools to ensure that teams are on the same page when it comes to the development of the product.

On top of that, prototype testing offers an unmissable opportunity to gather feedback from internal stakeholders as well as ensure that the product still serves the strategic goals of the business while meeting user needs.

Risk Mitigation

Another critical benefit of prototype testing is that it serves as a risk mitigation mechanism. With prototype testing, UX professionals can identify and address risks and challenges early in the development process boosting in this way the chances of the product being adopted by its intended users.

When it comes to prototype testing, mobile prototype testing should not be neglected. According to Unswitch, the global mobile phone market statistics show that as of 2023 there are 4.6 billion smartphone users worldwide.

When Should You Test A Prototype?

Prototype testing is an iterative, dynamic process and should not be perceived as a one-off task to be ticked off a list. Thus, the testing of prototypes can and should happen through product development. In those earlier stages, prototype testing can be a great method to validate a concept.

Once the idea has been validated, prototype testing can help you test basic functionalities and ensure that the product is not against the main mental models of its intended users.

At later stages, just before or after the launch, testing of prototypes can help assess overall user experience and continuously pinpoint areas for improvement to meet the constantly changing user needs.

Kinds of Products for Prototype Testing

Prototype testing is a versatile tool, hence why it can be applied to a host of products, spanning software applications and platforms. Any digital product entailing some sort of user interface can be tested using a prototype. However, it is worth noting that physical products such as household appliances or even medical devices can also benefit from prototype user testing.

Types of Prototype Tests

There are an array of prototype tests out there each serving distinct purposes when it comes to evaluating a product. Quantitative and qualitative testing are the two most well-known categories. Additionally, prototype testing can be characterized either as moderated or unmoderated depending on the presence of a facilitator.

To better learn and digest the unique nature of those categories we have created two handy tables outlining their main characteristics and differences:

Qualitative vs Qualitative Testing

Moderated vs Unmoderated Testing

How to Conduct Prototype Testing?

If you are just starting your prototype testing journey, this step-by-step guide can help you conduct effective software prototype testing and make data-informed decisions toward more user-centric products.

1. Plan Your Prototype Test

Start by setting clear objectives for your test. For example, you might want to focus on usability or maybe user satisfaction. Once your goals are all set it is time to choose the type of prototype testing that best suits the needs of the project. Begin by creating testing scenarios that align with the goals of your study. Use your user personas to define your audience and recruit your test participants.

2. Choose a Prototype Testing Tool

Selecting the right prototype testing tool can make or break your prototype testing efforts. Choose the appropriate tool based on the unique requirements of your testing but also on the ease of integration with your prototyping tool.

3. Run the Test

Run the prototype sessions and try to capture both qualitative and quantitative data. Do not forget to take thorough notes and create reports so that you don’t miss a beat!

4. Analyze Results

Next up is analyzing the results. Identify patterns and take into consideration both your qualitative and quantitative data before drawing any conclusions. Prioritizing the issues that you identify based on their severity or impact.

5. Iterate & Repeat

Now it is time to translate the findings into actionable recommendations for the design team. Implement the changes on the prototype and make sure to add additional rounds of testing to validate the positive effect of the improvements made. Continue to refine and test until you are happy with the final product.

Best Prototype Testing Tools

Here is our top pick when it comes to the prototype testing tools that are currently in the market:

1. UXtweak

Featuring a seamless integration with the major prototyping tools like UXtweak allows for effortless prototype testing. Its easy-to-use interface makes UXtweak accessible to professionals of all levels while its dedicated support team offers specialist guidance throughout. Last but not least, UXtweak’s platform boasts a user panel for recruitment that can massively streamline your prototype testing studies.

2. Lookback

Lookback is another robust tool that enables prototype testing. It boasts a live remote testing tool that allows UX researchers and designers to interact with participants in real-time while its collaboration features foster collaboration among team members.

3. Userlytics

Userlytics is a comprehensive UX analytics tool that features a remote prototype testing tool. It also boasts a nicely done multimedia feedback tool that allows the participants of the prototype testing to give feedback in different forms such as written notes and audio as well as video.

4. Optimizely

Optimizely is another great experimentation platform that allows for prototype testing. Boasting tools like A/B testing and remote session recording, this platform offers data-driven insights and personalization features that can up your prototype testing game.

Tip: You can also test the prototype inside of UXPin with our FullStory integration. Nevertheless, we encourage you to give our friends at UXtweak a shot. Try UXtweak for free. 

How to Recruit for Prototype Testing

Recruiting participants for prototype testing is a quintessential step in every prototype testing study. The validity of the insights is highly dependent on recruiting quality, and diversified participants who are representative of the target demographic. To achieve this make sure to define the specific characteristics of the targeted population and consult your user personas before you engage in participant recruitment. 

Another great tip is to use specific screening questions to ensure that the participants are representative of the demographics you are targeting. Once this is done, do not pigeonhole yourself into recruiting participants solely from one channel.

Instead, use an array of recruitment channels such as social media or relevant online communities to attract diversified participants that will offer richer insights into your study. 

Always remember that thoughtful participant recruitment can yield quality and actionable results contributing to a more user-centric product.

Best Practices for Prototype Testing

If you are looking to start your prototype testing journey, here are a few golden rules to keep in mind:

Combine Quantitative and Qualitative Data

Integrating both qualitative and quantitative methodologies into your prototype testing studies can go a long way. While numerical stats can help you quantify user behavior, qualitative insights can reveal the ‘why’ behind user behavior. This allows for a more rounded understanding of the intrinsic motivations and needs of the user and results in a more user-centric design process.

Include Realistic Scenarios

When conducting prototype testing it is easy to get carried away and jump pack the sessions with multiple scenarios and edge cases. Stay on track by crafting realistic tasks for the participants. Using real-world tasks will help participants to engage with the prototype in a more realistic way making the insights more actionable.

Diversify Test Participants

This is one to treasure! As mentioned earlier, participant recruitment is the alpha and the omega of every prototype testing study. Always aim for diversity in your test participants as this will provide broader insights into needs and expectations and will give you a more comprehensive understanding of your target users.

Ensure Consistency Across Tests

Last but not least, always ensure consistency across the different prototype testing sessions.

Consistency ensures that the insights gained from your prototype testing sessions are reliable and most importantly comparable.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Testing Prototypes

Here are some common pitfalls to avoid when testing prototypes:

Neglecting Accessibility Considerations

Tempting as it might be, do not fail to take into consideration accessibility in your prototype testing sessions. Failing to do so can result in designs that are not inclusive and that overlook basic user needs.

Ignoring Mobile Testing

Mobile users are on the rise so do not ignore mobile prototype testing. Always test the mobile experience and never assume that the desktop performance can be a good indicator of the user experience on mobile devices.

Failure to Document Insights

Yes, you’ve read this right! Failing to document insights is one of the major pitfalls when it comes to prototype testing. Do not neglect to thoroughly document and take quality notes from each prototype testing session to avoid losing valuable insights or jumping to conclusions.

The gist of it

Prototype testing plays a crucial role in aligning the design with both the needs of the users and those of the business. This is one of the top user research methodologies that are worth integrating into your UX design process as it can hugely help UX teams build more user-centric products. To get the full out of your prototype testing, adopt an iterative approach towards prototype testing and never treat it as a one-off task to be crossed off your list.

Build interactive prototypes with UXPin, an all-in-one design tool that covers the entire design process, from ideation to design handoff. Try UXPin for free.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Prototype Testing appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Prototyping tool is a product that helps designers create a replica of the final product, used for user testing, presenting to stakeholders, and handing off to developers. Most design tools offer a prototyping as an additional feature, but you will get to an advanced prototyping with dedicated tools.

UXPin is one of the companies leading the code-based design revolution. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to explore UXPin’s advanced prototyping features for your next digital product or web design project.

Build advanced prototypes

Design better products with States, Variables, Auto Layout and more.

Try UXPin

UXPin

UXPin is a code-based prototyping tool which means that your design can be fully interactive. Unlike many leading design solutions, UXPin doesn’t need plugins – everything you need for prototyping and testing is built-in!

UXPin gives you the option to download the software on your desktop (Mac & Windows) or use it in the browser. The benefit of downloading UXPin is that you can continue working even when you’re offline.

You can test prototypes in the browser or use UXPin’s Mirror app to run prototypes on mobile devices (including iOS and Android). UXPin’s documentation is excellent, covering every aspect of the tool with step-by-step instructions and video tutorials.

UXPin also has another advantage over the rest of prototyping tools – UXPin Merge for building fully-functioning prototypes with React components.

With Merge, you have the option to sync React components via Git repo, npm or use the Storybook integration for Vue, Angular, Web Components, Ember, and more. It helps design a layout and launch a product 10x faster.

Figma

Figma is one of the most widely used design tools. They have a big, engaged community with lots of YouTube content and detailed documentation.

Figma has built-in prototyping functionality with a mobile app to test prototypes on multiple devices. You can work in the browser or download Figma to work offline on your desktop.

While Figma is excellent for early stage concepts, advanced prototyping is still not perfect, and it’s unlikely that designer can create a prototype that’s ready for user testing.

In 2023 Figma added a lot of features that simplify interactive prototyping, yet Figma’s inputs are still limited, and UX researchers can’t test any actions that require users to enter information. The tool makes it difficult to create dynamic user flows that adapt to user interaction.

Add interactions to your prototypes made in Figma. Use a plugin for importing Figma designs to UXPin for interactive prototyping. Check out the tutorial: Quick Tutorial: Make Figma prototypes interactive in UXPin.

Adobe XD

Adobe XD is another popular user experience design tool. However, it got discontinued in 2023.

One interesting Adobe UX prototyping feature was Auto-Animate which saved time for specific interactions. With Auto-Animate, you could create the first and last frame of an animation sequence and Adobe XD filled in the rest. The feature didn’t work for all animations, but it saved a significant amount of time when creating something like a parallax effect.

Invision

Invision was a strong prototyping component for many years, yet it decided to shut down. It was an amazing prototyping tool, yet compared to other tools on the market, it wasn’t not strong enough for creating interactive UI designs in 2024.

Invision had a great Design System Management feature, which is handy for managing your design system and providing developers with CSS and starter code at handoffs. DSM integrated with Storybook so that designers and developers could create one sharable design systems that would fit into both worlds. Unfortunately, teams using Invision couldn’t use Storybook components to build prototypes like you can with UXPin Merge.

If you’re looking for an InVision’s alternative in 2024, talk to us and see what you can create with UXPin Merge.

Framer

Framer is one of the top prototyping tools in 2024 for creating web layouts. It has an AI feature for rapid prototyping. Users type in what kind of a website they want and Framer gives them a design to customize. It embraced AI very quickly.

Other notable features include Layout and Insert Menu, which allow you to design and iterate concepts fast. Although impressive, UXPin offers similar features with Auto-Layout and built-in design libraries.

Framer’s Smart Components feature offers similar functionality to UXPin’s States, but not as comprehensive. Using Variants and Variables, you can give elements a hover or pressed state, like toggling a switch or activating a checkbox.

While Smart Components is a step up from other vector-based design tools, it still doesn’t give you as much fidelity as you get from UXPin’s States, Interactions, Expressions, and Variables features.

More Design Tool Comparisons

Check out more popular prototyping tools and how they stack up against UXPin:

• Marvel App
• Justinmind
• Proto.io
• Axure
• Zeplin
• Balsamiq

Would you like to try UXPin?

If you’re looking for a design tool, there are plenty (including the five listed above) that designers can use to create beautiful low-fidelity wireframes and mockups.

But designing a user experience requires testing, which means you need high-fidelity prototypes, not mockups! UX designers design products for coded products but conduct user testing on image-based prototypes. It’s impossible to get accurate and meaningful results. Invariably there will be usability issues that make their way into the final product.

With code-based tools like UXPin, designers can build functioning high-fidelity prototypes. Usability participants don’t have to “imagine” that a button or input works; they can use it as they would with a final coded product.

Join the user experience design revolution. Sign up for a 14-day free trial and discover better prototyping and testing with UXPin.

The post Top 5 Prototyping Tools for 2024 appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

One of the questions organizations ask themselves at the start of a new project is, “do we adopt a component library or start from scratch?” There are pros and cons to weigh, and it depends on the project’s scope and priorities. 

One of the most popular component libraries is MUI – a comprehensive React UI library modelled at first on Google’s Material Design UI. 

We’re going to take a look at MUI, why you’d want to use it, what makes it different from other component libraries, and how you can get started designing your next project.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to design in code? UXPin Merge is a revolutionary technology that allows teams to create fully functioning layouts without design skills. Find out more about Merge.

Create beautiful layouts without designers

Design production-ready prototypes 8.6x faster. No pixels. pure code.

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What is MUI?

MUI is a massive library of UI components designers and developers can use to build React applications. The open-source project follows Google’s guidelines for creating components, giving you a customizable library of foundational and advanced UI elements.

MUI also sells a collection of React templates and tools, giving you ready-made user interfaces to tweak for your project. 

Why Would You Use a Component Library Like MUI?

Designers often use UI kits to build new products or feature add-ons for existing projects. These libraries allow designers to drag and drop the components they need to design interfaces quickly. 

Let’s explore 7 reasons why you would want to use the MUI component library.

1. Faster Time-to-Market

In today’s highly competitive tech landscape, time-to-market is a metric that organizations always seek to optimize. A component library gives designers and developers a massive headstart with thoroughly tested UI elements ready to go.

Designers can drag and drop elements to build user interfaces and customize components to meet product and branding requirements. Design teams can spend more time designing great customer experiences rather than getting bogged down building and testing UI components from scratch–a process that increases time-to-market significantly!

Usability testing is much faster because designers can prototype, test, and iterate quickly. If a user interface isn’t working during testing, they can make changes on the fly, drawing from a massive library, to get instant feedback from participants and stakeholders.

When it comes to the design handoff, engineers can install the component library and copy/paste changes from prototypes and style guides to develop the product without starting from scratch.

2. A Single Source of Truth

One of the biggest design system governance challenges is maintaining a single source of truth. It’s not uncommon for product teams, UX designers, and developers to have out-of-sync design systems–resulting in errors, rework, and massive headaches and challenges for DesignOps.

Using MUI’s component library can significantly reduce these challenges while creating a single source of truth between design and development. Designers and engineers will still have separate design systems (image-based for designers and code for engineers), but MUI gives them the same starting blocks.

When using Merge with UXPin’s code-based editor, designers and engineers use the same design system components synced via a single repository. Any updates to the repo sync back to UXPin, notifying designers of the changes. You can connect Merge using Git for React component libraries or Storybook for other popular technologies.

3. Design Consistency

Consistency is vital for user experience, building trust, and brand loyalty. Using the same UI components allows designers to increase consistency while minimizing errors and rework.

4. Scalability

Scalability is another vital product design factor. If you’re building a design system from scratch, designers must design, prototype, and test new components before scaling the product.

With MUI’s comprehensive UI library, designers can search for the components they need to prototype and scale right away. Engineers can copy/paste the identical React components from MUI and customize them to the designer’s specifications.

MUI X includes a library of advanced React components teams can use to scale complex products even faster, including data grids, date pickers, charts, pagination, filtering, and more.

5. Easy Maintenance

A component library like MUI comes with detailed documentation for installing, using, updating, and customizing components. Designers and engineers can use this framework to maintain the organization’s design system, making it easier to establish governance systems and protocols.

MUI also provides how-to guides for migrating from one version to the next. So, organizations can take advantage of the latest UI styles, technologies, and trends whenever MUI releases an update.

6. Accessibility

Those experienced with setting up a design system will know the time and money it takes to ensure every component passes accessibility standards. MUI’s designers have taken great care in designing components to meet WCAD 2.0 accessibility guidelines – reducing the work for researchers and designers.

It’s important to note that even when you design interfaces using accessible components, you must still test navigation and user flows to ensure the product as a whole meets accessibility standards.

7. Skills Empowerment

MUI’s open-source component UI library empowers startups and young entrepreneurs to build new products–especially in developing nations where they don’t have the same access to education, mentoring, and skills transfer.

The library is also incredibly beneficial for charities, non-profits, NGOs, and similar organizations who want to develop products and tools but don’t have the budget to invest in a design system. 

Anyone can leverage the skills of MUI’s talented designers and developers using the same component library used by Fortune 500 companies to develop sophisticated digital products and compete in a global market.

What Makes MUI Stand Apart From Other Component Libraries?

Google’s Material Design UI is arguably one of the best and most comprehensive design libraries in the world. By building on top of Material Design, MUI delivers a React component library to match.

The ability to easily customize MUI using its Theming feature and the libraries’ excellent documentation make it accessible to build products for multinational corporations or a single developer with a product idea.

Because MUI is so widely used, there is a massive global community of designers, researchers, and developers to reach out to for guidance and support. Added to the fact that React is one of the most popular front-end frameworks, makes MUI an attractive component library.

MUI – Interesting Facts and Figures

Here are some interesting MUI facts and figures:

Note: MUI’s stats continue to climb. These facts were accurate as of Jan 2022.

• MUI started in 2014 as Material UI but decided to change its name to differentiate itself from Google. Many people assumed Material UI was a Google product.
• MUI has over 2,200 open-source contributors.
• There are over 2,3 million NPM downloads of MUI per week.
• Over 73,700 stars on GitHub.
• Of the 1,488 respondents to MUI’s 2020 survey, 35% of developers worked in an organization with less than five people.
• In the survey, 27% of developers use MUI for enterprise applications, while 20% use the library for admin dashboards.

UXPin’s MUI 5 Kit

Using UXPin Merge’s MUI integration, you can leverage the power of prototyping with UI React components.

MUI helps you create designs with fully functioning code components. With a single source of truth, designers, developers, product teams, and others can collaborate more effectively with fewer errors and friction.

Higher fidelity means better usability testing with meaningful feedback from participants and stakeholders. The result? A better overall user experience and increased business value.

Find out more about UXPin’s MUI kit and how you can sign up to request access to this revolutionary code-based design technology: MUI library in UXPin: Design Faster.

Syncing a Component Library With UXPin Merge

With UXPin Merge, you can build fully functioning high-fidelity prototypes with an open-source component library. With complex UI components like menus, forms, tabs, data tables, date pickers, accordions, and more, you can build beautiful and functional layouts in minutes. Check out Merge.

The post What Is MUI and What Do You Need to Know About It? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Are you creating a React app or website? If you are, you can use real React components in prototyping. How to that? You will find an answer in this article.

Key tools:

• UXPin Merge
• Framer
• Storybook
• React-Proto

Build React prototypes with your dev’s components coming from Git, Storybook, or npm. Try UXPin Merge and assemble stunning, production-ready layouts 10x faster. Discover UXPin Merge.

Create beautiful layouts without designers

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UXPin Merge

UXPin’s Merge technology allows you to import code components from a repository into the design process. You can import your product’s design system or an open-source library to build high-fidelity, fully functioning React prototypes.

With Merge, you can prototype cross-platform applications from wearables to native apps, web applications, and even TVs. You can test prototypes in the browser or via UXPin Mirror for iOS and Android applications.

There are three ways to import code components into UXPin using Merge:

• The Git Integration enables you to import React components directly from a Git repository giving you full access to Merge’s features.
• Merge’s Storybook Integration allows you to connect any Storybook, providing access to more front-end technologies, including React, Vue, Angular, and more.
• The npm Integration uses the Merge Component Manager to import individual UI elements from open-source design systems on the npm registry.

Key features

• Version Control (Git Integration only): any changes to the design system’s repository automatically sync to UXPin and notify designers of the latest release.
• Patterns (Git Integration only): grow your library by creating new patterns using design system components or incorporating elements from other design systems.
• Drag-and-drop workflow: drag components from UXPin’s Design Libraries onto the canvas to create user interfaces. Adjust pre-defined properties via the Properties Panel to change styling, interactions, etc.
• Collaborative: product teams can collaborate with stakeholders via UXPin’s Comments–even if they don’t have a paid UXPin account.
• Spec Mode & Documentation: design handoffs are smoother with Merge because developers already have access to the same repository. They can use Spec Mode to inspect properties, measure distances, copy production-ready component CSS and JSX (Git Integration only), and view the product’s Style Guide and Documentation.

Pricing

Starts from $119 per month when paid annually.

Pros and cons

Pros:

• Single source of truth: With UXPin Merge, you can import and use the same React components in the design process as devs use for the final product, effectively bridging the gap between designers and developers.
• Real data: designers can incorporate actual product data using JSON, Google Sheets, or CSV. They can also capture user inputs using Variables and use that data to populate a profile account or provide a dynamic, personalized user experience.
• Interactive prototyping: using React components for prototypes means designers can create interactive replicas indistinguishable from the final product.

Cons:

• Limited to Javascript: UXPin Merge only works with Javascript libraries and frameworks. 
• Technical setup: product teams will need technical assistance to make their component library’s repository compatible with Merge; however, UXPin has a boilerplate and offers technical support to make this easier. Designers can use the built-in libraries, including MUI, Material UI, Ant Design, and Fluent UI, which don’t need any configuration.

Storybook

StorybookJS is a UI development environment allowing devs to build components in isolation. Developers, designers, and other stakeholders can visualize different states of every UI element, creating a component-driven development environment. It supports various frameworks, including React.

While Storybook is excellent for internal prototyping and component-driven development, it lacks tools and features for user testing. A great workaround is using Merge’s Storybook Integration to import your organization’s Storybook projects for prototyping in UXPin.

Storybook and UXPin Merge combined effectively bridge the gap between designers and developers while creating a single source of truth across the organization.

Key features

• Component Stories: Write Stories to display different states of your components.
• Addon ecosystem: Extend Storybook’s capabilities with a robust ecosystem of plugins.
• Component-driven development: Develop one UI element at a time, viewing all its properties, interactions, and variants.
• Documentation: Auto-generate documentation based on your stories and components.
• Automated testing: Run multiple tests before release to ensure components meet code syntax, design principles, accessibility, and other custom requirements.

Pricing

StorybookJS is open-source and free to use. However, some addons or integrations might have associated costs.

Pros and cons

Pros:

• Framework agnostic: While prominent in the React community, it supports various Javascript frameworks.
• Rich ecosystem: A wide variety of addons and integrations allow you to tailor Storybook to your needs.
• Collaborative: Designers, developers, and stakeholders can collaborate, ensuring consistent UI/UX.

Cons:

• Technical expertise: Storybook is a developer tool, meaning you must have programming and Javascript skills to use it.
• Configuration: Depending on your project’s complexity, it may take time to set everything up correctly.
• Learning curve: Requires understanding of component structure and the framework you’re working with.

Framer

Framer is a no-code design tool for React websites and web apps. The platform’s latest AI feature lets you create responsive starter templates with a few keywords.

Key features

• Code-backed design: Design with React components, streamlining the transition from prototype to development.
• Figma plugin: convert Figma designs to HTML for use in Framer–you must still convert this HTML to React.
• Code-like animations: add Javascript-like animations and effects without writing any code.
• Production-ready code: developers can export code from Framer to build React websites and web applications.

Pricing

Starts from $5 per month per site (project) when paid annually.

Pros and cons

Pros:

• Interactive design: Design with code components for realistic interactions.
• No-code development: Create production-ready websites without writing any code.
• Starter templates: Framer offers a vast library of website and landing page templates to get you started–some of these are third-party paid templates averaging $29-$99.

Cons: 

• Cost: Framer is cost-effective for small projects, but its per-site pricing model gets expensive when running multiple sites. If you purchase starter templates, your costs increase.
• Web-only: Framer is a no-code website design tool, limiting prototyping scope–i.e., unable to design cross-platform applications.
• Can’t import components: Unlike UXPin Merge, you can’t import design systems or UI libraries.

React-Proto

React-proto is a prototyping tool designed specifically for React developers. It provides a visual interface for creating React components and their relationships. Developers can drag and drop UI elements to establish parent-child relationships between components, designating state location and prop relationships without writing any code.

Key features

• Component tree visualization: Visualize your entire application’s structure and components’ relationships.
• Interactivity: Interact with your prototype and see changes reflected in the visual tree.
• State management: Designate locations for your state and understand the flow of data.
• Code Export: Translate your visual design into functional React code to begin front-end development.

Pricing

React-proto is open-source and free to use.

Pros and cons

Pros:

• Faster prototyping: React-proto’s drag-and-drop interface lets developers edit components and prototypes faster than writing code.
• Cost-Effective: Being open-source, it’s a cost-friendly option for all developers and designers.
• Code Generation: Translating design to code is straightforward, reducing the barrier between design and development.

Cons:

• Requires technical skills: React-proto is not a designer-friendly tool. It requires technical skills, including in-depth React experience, to operate effectively.
• Limited features: React-proto offers few features as an open-source tool and is unsuitable for user testing.
• No support: React-proto does not offer support or onboarding outside of its Github community.

Prototype React Websites and Applications in UXPin Merge

While there are several great React prototyping tools, UXPin is the only platform offering a designer-friendly, familiar work environment. UXPin looks and feels like any other design tool but increases prototyping scope by enabling designers to prototype using code components, including React, Vue, Angular, and more.

Build production-ready layout with React components from Git repo, Storybook, or imported npm package. Assemble UI and increase your productivity. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post Best Prototyping Tools that Use React appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

A functional prototype is a working model of a product that demonstrates its core functionalities. Through UXPin’s Merge technology, designers can seamlessly convey their designs to developers. 

Key Takeaways:

• A functional prototype is a practical representation of a product, showcasing its main functions.
• UXPin’s Merge technology integrates interactive React components into design editors, allowing designers to communicate seamlessly with developers, test prototypes, and transition designs to development.
• Functional prototypes offer insights into user behavior, validate designs, and drive improvements.
• Crafting a functional prototype involves designing with interactions, conducting tests, and embracing a learning process.
• By leveraging Merge technology, designers bridge the gap between prototype creation and development through shared, interactive React components.

Merge technology integrates React components into a design editor, allowing designers to create prototypes. These interactive React components are utilized by developers in the final product. After designers construct and test prototypes with users, the design is prepared for development. Discover how UXPin Merge works.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

What is a functional prototype?

A functional prototype is a dynamic representation of how a product design works. It lets you interact with the product to understand its features and flaws, helping you refine your design for a better user experience.

While traditional prototypes might simulate the appearance or layout of a product, they often fall short in depicting its actual behavior. Functional prototypes, on the other hand, introduce the invaluable element of interactivity. Every click, swipe, or scroll is more than a predefined animation—it’s a glimpse into the user’s journey, offering insights into the product’s usability and efficiency.

Functional vs non-functional prototype?

Functional and non-functional prototypes primarily differ in the depth of interactivity they offer. Functional prototypes go beyond appearances, letting you experience a product’s behavior, while non-functional prototypes offer a visual preview without being able to interact with the prototype.

Functional Prototype:

A functional prototype thrives on its ability to mimic the actual functionality of a product design. It’s not just about appearances—it’s about actions, interactions, and user experiences. When you interact with a functional prototype, you’re navigating through a scenario that closely mirrors what a user will do in the product. The features work, the buttons click, and the user flow replicates the real product.

Functional Prototype Example:

Imagine you’re designing a mobile app for a fitness tracker. A functional prototype would allow users to navigate through the interface, tap on buttons to simulate exercise tracking, and even experience the app’s real-time feedback as if they were logging an actual workout. This prototype showcases not only the design but also the real-world usability of the app.

Non-Functional Prototype:

A non-functional prototype predominantly emphasizes the visual aspect of a product. It may look like the final product, sporting its design system components and layout, but it’s devoid of the dynamic interplay that defines user interactions. A non-functional prototype is like a static snapshot—a mere preview of how the product might appear, rather than how it truly functions.

Non-Functional Prototype Example:

Continuing with the fitness tracker app, a non-functional prototype would capture the visual essence of the app—the layout of screens, the arrangement of buttons, and the overall aesthetic. However, it would lack the ability to simulate interactions. Users wouldn’t be able to tap on buttons or simulate workout tracking; they would merely be able view the app’s static visual representation.

What are the benefits of functional prototyping?

Performing functional prototyping offers several advantages:

• Understand how users will interact with your product, avoiding UX design mistakes.
• Validate user experience design concepts through user testing and feedback.
• Refine UX designs iteratively, improving user experience and functionality.
• Enhance collaboration by presenting interactive prototypes to stakeholders.
• Efficiently iterate and innovate, saving time and resources in the design process.

How do you create a functional prototype?

For this process, we will create a functional prototype of a signup form to check if the email and password inputs are filled out and validate the email format as well as the password length for a truly real user experience. This is how your hypothetical functional prototype of a signup form will look like:

1. Set up your canvas

After selecting the blank document from the dashboard, the artboard will open up, and there you can create your signup form.

Identify the screen size of the platform on which your sign-up form will work on:

• Scroll to Canvas size
• Select your canvas size

2. Begin by designing your layout with UXPin Libraries

Once the blank document is open, you’ll see the canvas:

1. Go to Design System Libraries
2. Select UXPin Libraries

1. Select a library to add components to your canvas. You can create your own library of components to easily drag and drop elements into your canvas, in this scenario, let’s use the iOS library.

Design the layout of your sign-up form by adding elements like email and password inputs, along with labels and buttons.

3. Make the email and password input an interactive element

1. Select the email input field
2. Go to Interactions

1. Go to Trigger
2. Set the trigger to Focus

1. Scroll to Action and select Set State
2. Go to Element and select Email input

Next, we will set the state and add the interaction:

1. Go to Set State and select Base
2. Click on ‘Add’ 

Repeat this prototyping process for the password input field.

3. Add a validation logic

Set up logic to check if the email and password fields are filled out. Display error messages if not. Add a new interaction:

1. Select the email input
2. Go to Interactions
3. Go to New Interaction

Next, set up the condition to detect if the email input field is empty:

1. Change the trigger to Focus Lost
2. Go to Conditions and select Content of element in the first field
3. Select Email input (it should be auto selected)
4. Select the condition is empty
5. Click on Add condition to finish

Next, we will confirm the new interaction:

1. Under Action, select Set state
2. Change the Element to ‘Email input’
3. Set state to ‘Empty’
4. Go to Add 

Repeat this prototyping process for the password input field.

4. Set up an Email Format Validation

Next, we will add a condition to ensure the email input follows a valid email format. Follow the steps above to create a new interaction on the email input field.

1. Set the trigger to Focus Lost
2. Select Content of element as ‘email input’
3. Set the condition to matches regex
4. Select Email
5. Click on Add condition

Next, we will confirm the new interaction:

1. Under Action, select Set state
2. Change the Element to ‘Email input’
3. Set state to ‘Incorrect’
4. Go to Add 

5. Set up a Password Length Validation

Add logic to verify the length of the password input meets the required criteria.

Follow the steps above to create a new interaction on the password input field.

1. Set the Trigger to Focus Lost
2. Select Content of element as ‘password input’
3. Set the condition to doesn’t match regex
4. Select Custom and enter criteria for the password input
5. Click on Add condition

Next, we will confirm the new interaction:

1. Under Action, select Set state
2. Change the Element to ‘Password input’
3. Set state to ‘Incorrect’
4. Go to Add 

7. Test the Prototype

Interact with the prototype to experience the flow and test the validations. Ensure it provides an accurate representation of the final product’s behavior.

By following these steps, you’ll create a functional prototype of a sign-up form that showcases the validation of email and password inputs using UXPin.

Design Functional Prototypes with UXPin Merge

Functional prototypes are a vital link between design and development, as demonstrated by our exploration of UXPin’s Merge technology. Merge seamlessly combines design and development by integrating dynamic React components. 

This real-time collaboration lets designers test interactive models and streamlines the design-to-production process. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post Functional Prototype – A Short Guide for Digital Product Designers appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Figma, AdobeXD, and UXPin are three leading user experience design tools for designing digital products. We compared these three platforms and how they stack up regarding UI design, mockups, prototyping, and collaboration. Read on to discover which design tool is best for your project demands and team needs.

Key takeaways:

• By integrating seamlessly with the Creative Cloud suite, AdobeXD facilitates a smooth design workflow with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator.
• Figma is a platform best for real-time collaboration, enabling simultaneous design by multiple users.
• UXPin stands out as a code-based design tool, allowing for complex prototypes and bridging the gap between design and coding with its Merge technology.
• Choosing the right design tool hinges on project complexity, collaboration needs, integration preferences, and prototyping capabilities.

Solve hidden usability issues and identify more business opportunities during the design process with the world’s most advanced user experience design tool. Create a single source of truth across design and development. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

What is AdobeXD?

• Price: $82.49 for Creative Cloud (includes 20+ creative desktop and mobile apps including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, and Acrobat)
• Best for: Adobe users, UI design
• Feature overview:
  • Seamless integration with Creative Cloud, including Photoshop and Illustrator.
  • Auto-Animate enables smooth micro-interactions and transitions, enriching prototype realism.
  • Voice prototype integration helps designers test voice user interfaces.
  • Repeat Grid facilitates rapid duplication of design elements, optimizing repetitive tasks and ensuring design consistency.

AdobeXD is a user experience and user interface design tool from Adobe’s extensive Creative Cloud suite. AdobeXD is a platform for designing, prototyping and sharing interactive designs. Its integration within the Adobe ecosystem allows designers to effortlessly transition between tools like Photoshop or Illustrator, streamlining their design process.

What is Figma?

• Price: $12 – $75
• Best for: UI design, collaboration
• Feature overview:
  • Real-time collaboration enables multiple users to design simultaneously, fostering teamwork and instant feedback.
  • Integration capabilities offer many plugins and third-party apps, enhancing the platform’s functionality.
  • Browser and desktop applications.
  • Dev mode makes it easy for engineers to analyze designs and convert them to code with starter CSS.
  • With Variables, designers can change component properties based on user interactions.

Figma is a vector-based design platform built for real-time collaboration. As a browser-based tool, it eliminates barriers to access, ensuring teams can work synchronously regardless of location or device. Figma’s intuitive interface and powerful prototyping capabilities make it a favored choice for UX professionals. 

The tool’s emphasis on collaboration, with features allowing multiple designers to edit a project simultaneously, has redefined teamwork in the design space, cementing Figma’s position among top-tier design tools.

Does Adobe own Figma?

Adobe announced its planned acquisition of Figma in September 2022. However, the deal still hasn’t gone through and must pass regulatory scrutiny, including an August 2023 European Commission investigation. The regulator’s primary concern is Adobe’s acquisition, which “may reduce competition in the global markets for the supply of interactive product design software and for digital asset creation tools.”

If this deal goes through, it’s rumored that Adobe will discontinue AdobeXD and bundle Figma into Creative Cloud as its user experience design tool.

What is UXPin?

• Price: $39-$149
• Best for: UI design, interaction design, design systems
• Feature overview:
  • Browser and desktop applications.
  • Advanced interactive prototyping allows designers to solve more usability issues and identify better business opportunities during the design process.
  • Real-time collaboration and communication using UXPin’s Comments.
  • States allow designers to create multiple states for a single UI element and design complex interactive components like dropdown menus, tab menus, navigational drawers, and more.
  • Variables capture data from user inputs and create personalized, dynamic user experiences–like their name and profile image in the app bar.
  • Expressions Javascript-like functions to create complex components and advanced functionality–no code required!
  • Conditional Interactions create if-then and if-else conditions based on user interactions to create dynamic prototypes with multiple outcomes to accurately replicate the final product experience.
  • Design with code components (React, Vue, Angular, etc.) using UXPin’s Merge technology.
  • Connect APIs and other digital products using UXPin’s IFTTT integration.
  • Create and share a component library with UXPin’s Design Systems, including assets, documentation, UI elements, colors, and typography.
  • Cross-platform prototype testing with UXPin Mirror for native applications (iOS and Android).

UXPin is a code-based design tool enabling designers to create realistic prototypes effortlessly. The tools Forms and built-in design libraries allow designers to build mockups and prototypes, test, and iterate faster than traditional image-based design tools like Figma and AdobeXD. 

UXPin’s USP is its ability to render code rather than vector graphics. This code-based approach increases prototyping scope and enhances testing for better feedback from stakeholders and users.

Take digital product design to the next level with UXPin’s Merge technology. Designers can import UI components from a repository and build fully functioning prototypes that look and feel like the final product.

What is the Difference Between UXPin and Figma?

At first glance, UXPin and Figma appear similar. Designers will find component libraries and layers to the left and properties and interactions to the right with the design canvas center for both tools. This familiarity makes switching tools easy, especially for UX designers who like to design in Figma and prototype in UXPin.

Here are some of the key differences between UXPin and Figma:

• UXPin is code-based, while Figma is image-based. UXPin’s code-based approach means designers can create code-like functionality and interactions that are impossible to replicate in Figma or AdobeXD.
• UXPin has functioning form fields, including text inputs. Conversely, Figma’s input fields are unusable, non-interactive graphical representations.
• Code-to-design vs. design-to-code. Figma is a design-to-code tool, meaning developers must convert static designs into code. While UXPin offers a design-to-code workflow, it also provides a code-to-design solution, allowing designers to import code components into the design process using Merge.
• Figma uses artboards and frames, while UXPin separates screens into Pages.

Which Design Tool is Best for Prototyping?

Image-based design tools like Figma and AdobeXD are great for wireframing, mockups, and basic low-fidelity prototyping but cannot compete with UXPin’s interactive prototyping capabilities.

For example, you can create aesthetically pleasing forms and user flows in Figma and AdobeXD, but the inputs aren’t interactive, so designers can’t get meaningful insights during testing. They must use external tools or work with engineers to build working prototypes. 

Conversely, with UXPin’s interactive features, including States, Interactions, Variables, and Expressions, designers can design interactions, user flows, and functionality that mirrors a code-based prototype. These advanced features significantly increase prototyping scope, eliminating the need to include developers–even for complex prototype functionality and API integrations.

How to Choose a Design Tool?

Below are pivotal decision-making criteria to help steer you toward Figma, AdobeXD, or UXPin:

1. Project scope and complexity: Any three tools offer comparable experiences and outcomes for straightforward designs. However, if you want to build interactive prototypes or sync design and development, then UXPin is the best option.
2. Collaboration needs: Figma’s simultaneous multi-user functionality becomes indispensable if real-time collaboration sits high on your list. UXPin offers a similar solution via its Comments feature, which integrates with Slack.
3. Platform accessibility: Figma and UXPin’s browser-based applications are essential for prioritizing access anywhere. Conversely, if you’re an Adobe Suite loyalist, AdobeXD better fits your ecosystem.
4. Integration and extensions: Figma’s rich integration ecosystem stands out if your workflow thrives on third-party plugins. However, seamless sync with tools like Photoshop would point you to AdobeXD. UXPin and Merge technology is best if you prioritize syncing design and development.
5. Feedback loop: A streamlined feedback process can be pivotal for modern asynchronous product development. UXPin’s Comments on Preview allows stakeholders and other teams–even if they don’t have a UXPin account–to annotate feedback on prototypes, including assigning comments to specific team members.
6. Advanced prototyping: UXPin offers the most sophisticated prototyping capabilities, but AdobeXD’s voice prototyping is a unique and helpful feature for VUI designers.
7. Single source of truth: UXPin is the only one of these three tools to offer a code-to-design solution via Merge technology. Merge bridges the gap between designers and engineers with a single UI library for design and development, creating a seamless product development workflow and frictionless handoffs.
8. Learning curve: While AdobeXD, Figma, and UXPin offer comparable learning curves, UXPin’s advanced features will take slightly more time to master. The payoff? Rapid design iterations and a faster time to market.

“I liked Figma a lot. It’s a huge improvement over my previous go-to design tool, Balsamiq. But now that I’ve learned how to leverage the powerful scripting capabilities of UXPin and design interactive UIs with the same live HTML UI controls that my engineering colleagues will use in the finished product, there’s no way I could go back.” Anthony Hand, Senior UX Designer.

Why UXPin’s Code-to-Design Outshines Figma and AdobeXD

While Figma and AdobeXD deliver on visual design, UXPin’s code-to-design approach sets it apart by bridging the gap between design and development. By rendering actual code instead of vector graphics, UXPin ensures a prototype’s authenticity, sidestepping the common pitfalls of misinterpreted vector-based prototypes and interactivity.

UXPin’s Merge technology integrates UI components from repositories, enabling fully-functional high-fidelity prototypes that accurately reflect the end product. Figma and AdobeXD rely more on visual representations, often requiring additional tools or developers to bring designs to life. This streamlined efficiency positions UXPin at the forefront of a seamless, accurate, and rapid design-to-development process.

Join the code-to-design revolution to create better designs, improve designer/developer collaboration, and deliver better user experiences for your customers with UXPin and Merge technology. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

The post What’s the Difference Between Figma vs AdobeXD vs UXPin? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Date pickers are some of the most familiar UI patterns in digital product design. UX designers use date pickers on websites, applications, games, enterprise software, operating systems, and more.

Designers must understand how these date pickers will work across screen sizes, operating systems, devices, etc., to test the impact on the product’s aesthetics, functionality, and overall user experience.

UX designers can’t build date pickers using traditional image-based design tools…but they can with UXPin Merge! This technology allows you to import a fully functional date picker from Git repository or npm package, as well as bring one from Storybook.

The date picker that you will sync to UXPin will behave like a date picker in the end product. No need to link static artboards to create interactions! Request access to Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

What is a Date Picker?

Date pickers are UI patterns that allow users to choose a specific date, time, or combination of both–for example, selecting a date of birth. The purpose of these date pickers is to streamline date capture while ensuring format consistency.

Why are Date Pickers Necessary?

People worldwide use different date formats. For example, the United States places the month before the day (mm/dd/yyyy), whereas the UK uses the day, month, year format. 

Although these differences seem subtle, a database cannot distinguish whether the user uses the US or UK format. It can only decipher a date correctly in one or the other format. Let’s look at October 1, 2022, numerically:

• US: 10/01/2022 (10 January 2022 in the UK)
• UK: 01/10/2022 (January 10, 2022, in the US)

In this example, the database would interpret each entry as January rather than October.

Users can also enter this same date multiple ways and use different separators. Here are a few examples:

• Oct 1, 2022 
• Oct 1, 22
• 1 Oct 2022
• 1 Oct 22
• 10-01-22 / 01.01.2022 / 10/01/22 
• 22/10/01 / 2022/10/01

Date pickers eliminate ambiguity and ensure systems receive a consistent, accurate format by users selecting the day, month, and year individually.

Date Picker UI Design for Mobile vs. Desktop

Mobile Date Picker

It’s important for designers to recognize how mobile operating systems like iOS and Android display date pickers to users. The native iOS picker uses an infinite scroll UI, while Android applications use a calendar view displaying the entire month.

A mobile date picker aims to make it accessible to a user’s thumb reach. iOS allows users to scroll using their thumb, while Android’s UI is optimized for thumb taps.

While you can use a custom date picker from your design system, using the native options creates familiarity and reduces the product’s learning curve. If you decide to use native date pickers for mobile apps, make sure you’re not creating usability issues, as we pointed out with iOS.

Desktop Date Picker

Most desktop websites and applications use calendar date pickers. The extra space and mouse make it easy for users to choose a date with just a few clicks. Many products also provide an input field for users to enter a date manually.

Numerical date input fields work well on desktops too. UX designers must include a placeholder and helpful error messages to guide users toward the correct format.

5 Types of Date Picker UI Design

Numerical Input Field

The most basic date picker is a numerical input or text input field. These fields might include a modal popup with a date picker, or users must type out the date with separators.

Some products offer users the option to type the date or use a modal, like this example from US Web Design Systems.

Placeholders must show users how to format the date, i.e., MM/DD/YYYY. UX designers can take this further by applying an auto-format for the date where separators appear as users complete the month and day. Designers can also add helper text below, so users know how to complete the form. See the example.

Dropdown Date Selector

Designers commonly use dropdown date-selectors for websites and desktop applications. These date pickers work well with a mouse, but with little space between options, they might be challenging for mobile device users, especially those with large fingers and thumbs.

Dropdown selectors take up more space than a single input field with a calendar modal. And they’re more time-consuming to complete because users have to select the day, month, and year individually.

Dropdown selectors are best for desktop applications and websites but might create bottlenecks for onboarding forms.

Scrolling Date Pickers

Scrolling date pickers work similarly to dropdowns as users choose a day, month, and year separately. These scrollers are most useful on mobile devices where users can use their thumbs to scroll to a day, month, and year.

Many users complain that scrolling date pickers are not suitable for dates far in the future or past. Scrolling through decades takes time and can be challenging for users, especially those with hand or finger disabilities.

The iOS default date picker is the most common example of a scrolling date picker; however, Apple often uses a calendar picker for dates far in the past or future.

Calendar Date Picker

Calendar UIs are the most commonly used date pickers. These calendar date pickers work well across operating systems, devices, and screen sizes.

As people are used to seeing calendars in physical and digital formats, these date pickers create familiarity for users, reducing cognitive load and the product’s learning curve.

Calendar UIs are especially helpful for date range pickers, allowing users to visualize their choice and make quick adjustments.

Timeline Pickers

Timeline pickers work well for selecting a short date range (up to a week) or timeframe (a few hours). Timeline UIs are especially useful on mobile devices because users can drag indicators to choose a start and end date. 

While you can use timeline pickers for dates, they’re best suited for selecting a time window.

Date Picker UI and UX Best Practices

Date Picker Accessibility

Poorly designed date pickers can be frustrating for users with disabilities and screen readers. Keeping things simple is crucial to ensure date selection is accessible to all users.

Here are some recommendations for making date pickers accessible:

• Use explicit labels for your date fields. For example, if someone is booking an appointment, label the field Appointment Date or Choose an Appointment Date so screen readers and users with cognitive disabilities know what date you need.
• Include format hints in the placeholder and above or below the input field. This validation makes date pickets more accessible while benefiting all users with clear instructions.
• Users must be able to use a date picker using touch, a mouse, screen readers, and a keyboard. UX designers must test date pickers to ensure all users and devices can interact with the UI and choose a date effortlessly.
• Separating day, month, and year fields make it easy for screen readers and keyboard users to enter dates. UX designers can also include a button or calendar icon for users to complete their selection using a calendar, a win-win for all users. (See this date picker example from USWDS).

Date picker accessibility resources:

• Collecting dates in an accessible way by Hassell Inclusion
• Date picker by US Web Design System
• General accessibility guidance for forms by US Web Design System

Show Current Date

It is important to show users the current date and their selection on calendar pickers. Highlighting the current date gives users a reference for their choice, which is especially important for booking travel and appointments.

Differentiating between the current date and the user’s selection is crucial to avoid confusion. Material UI clarifies this distinction with an outline for the current date and a shaded background for the selected date.

Block Unavailable Dates

Choosing a date only to find it’s unavailable is one of the most frustrating user experiences. Users have to start their selection over and try until they find availability. Blocking out unavailable dates allows users to choose without returning to the calendar.

Provide Additional Critical Decision-Making Data

Many travel booking apps, including Booking.com and Airbnb, show the price per night below each date so users can find the best rates. This information creates a positive user experience because the product helps users save money.

Reduce Unnecessary Data

Calendar user interfaces can be busy and overwhelming. Designers must reduce as many UI elements, lines, and other content to make the calendar easier to read and complete tasks. For example, users don’t need to see the days of the week when choosing their date of birth.

UX designers must also use solid backgrounds for modal overlays to block out content behind the calendar, which may confuse users.

How to design a date picker in UXPin

UXPin is an advanced prototyping tool used to create interactive, dynamic, high-fidelity prototypes. Where most prototyping tools require designers to create multiple artboards to prototype just one interaction, UXPin enables designers to use States, Variables, and Conditions to create fully-functioning pages.

To insert a date picker in UXPin, start by clicking on the “Search All Assets” search icon (command + F / Ctrl + F) in the vertical toolbar.

Next, search for “date” or “calendar” using the input field.

Several options will be available under the “Components” heading, some of which are best for touch users and others for keyboard users. “Input calendar”, however, provides a calendar for touch users and an input field for keyboard users, offering the best of both worlds and is perhaps the simplest solution overall.

Styling the date picker Component

UXPin Components are already designed to offer great user experiences, but you’ll probably want to style them to match your brand’s visual identity and app/website’s aesthetic. To do this, use the Properties panel on the right.

If you’re using UXPin Design System Libraries (especially Text Styles and Color Styles), you can utilize the Styles that you’ve already established to help maintain some degree of visual consistency between the date picker Component and the rest of your design.

To customize your component, select the Layer that you’d like to style, navigate to your UXPin Design System Library after clicking on the “Design System Libraries” icon (⌥ + 2 / alt + 2), and then select the Style that you’d like to apply to the Layer.

Using real Components instead

Rather than reinventing the wheel by inserting and styling the same Component over and over again, designers can use production-ready Components that’ve already been built by developers. You can pull them from Git, Storybook, or NPM (no coding required) and they’ll look and work just like the real thing (because they are). Learn about UXPin’s technology that makes this happen. Request access today.

The post How to Design a Date Picker that Makes Your UI Shine appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Figma prototypes are great for visualization of what the end-product can look like, explaining design decisions, and planning user flow. They fall short when it comes to testing your prototype. This is where UXPin prototypes shine. UXPin helps designers create interactive prototypes that bring quality test results. Let’s analyze both tools.

Key takeaways:

• Figma offers real-time collaboration in a vector-based design environment, while UXPin provides advanced interactive prototyping through a code-based approach.
• Due to advanced features like Merge, complex interfaces can be built significantly faster in UXPin than Figma.
• A comparison test revealed that prototyping in UXPin was 8X quicker and more interactive than in Figma.
• While Figma excels at creating static UI mockups, low-fidelity prototypes, and collaborative design, it lacks interactive prototyping capabilities.

UXPin’s Merge technology allows design teams to build code-based prototypes streamlining the design-to-development transition, offering cost and time savings.

Bridge the gap between design and development and build advanced interactive prototypes using UXPin’s Merge technology. Visit our Merge page to learn more and how to request access.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

What is Figma?

Figma is a vector-based design tool that enables real-time collaboration. Designers can use Figma to create various design assets, from wireframes to mockups to prototypes and information architecture.

Figma was founded in 2016 as a browser-based vector graphics editing tool, making it an interesting alternative to Adobe products which dominated the market at that time. Many UX/UI design teams fell in love with the simplicity of Figma and started to use the tool in their job – designing user interfaces.

Figma prototypes are great for explaining to other teams what design should look like. The tool is amazing at making creative prototypes, design explorations, and powerful drawings. Figma prototypes lack advanced interactivity that stays within dev’s environment constraints. It’s what UXPin is great at.

What is UXPin?

UXPin is a code-based full-stack design tool for cross-functional collaboration. UXPin’s biggest benefit is its interactive prototyping capabilities. Designers can build fully functional prototypes that look and feel like the final product. The platform also makes creating wireframes, mockups, map user flows, and information architecture effortless with built-in libraries and forms.

UXPin prototypes can behave like a real product, because designers can put real interactions in their prototypes, store user input while testing, and use real data.

The design tool incorporates all the benefits of an easy-to-use interface with powerful code-backed features allowing designers to:

• Build robust interactive prototypes.
• Get high-quality, meaningful feedback from users and stakeholders.
• Streamline design handoffs.

What is the Difference Between Prototyping in Figma vs UXPin?

While Figma offers a reliable solution for prototyping with its collaborative capabilities and component-based approach, UXPin goes further with advanced interactions and a seamless transition from design to development with its Merge technology.

“With UXPin Merge, you can build complex interfaces in half an hour to one hour. In Figma, those interactions would take a week.” Larry Page, UX Lead Designer at Optum.

Figma falls into the “legacy design tool” category. While it’s easy to use, and designers can achieve beautiful Figma designs, the platform hasn’t evolved to meet modern UX design standards.

Here is a quick comparison of UXPin and Figma’s prototyping capabilities.

Figma:

• Basic interactions and transitions: Figma allows designers to add basic clickable transitions, making the mockups more engaging.
• Component creation and design systems: Designers can create shareable, reusable components to maintain UI consistency. 
• Collaborative design capabilities: Multiple designers can simultaneously work on the same design, streamlining the design process and promoting collective creativity.

UXPin:

• Advanced interactive prototyping: UXPin goes a step further with its sophisticated prototyping abilities. Features such as States, Interactions, Variables, and Expressions facilitate a more realistic prototype closer to the final product.
• Code-to-design with Merge: Designers can import React components into the design process, allowing them to build prototypes indistinguishable from the final product. Merge helps bridge the gap between design and development, aligning both processes for seamless product delivery.
• Real-time collaboration and user feedback: UXPin’s Comments facilitate cross-functional collaboration with team members and stakeholders. Yet, its edge lies in capturing user feedback directly on the prototype, enabling iterative design refinements based on tangible user insights and stakeholder feedback.

How Figma and UXPin Compare–a Real-World Case Study

Senior UX Designer, Anthony Hand, wrote a Medium article comparing UXPin and Figma’s prototyping capabilities. The team created a custom Microsoft Fluent web library, including relevant brand colors and third-party icons.

Anthony used a Fluent UI kit in Figma and imported a React UI library GitHub repository into UXPin using Merge technology. The React components included styling and interactive properties defined in the repo and necessary controls and APIs.

Conversely, the Figma UI kit was a static version of the Fluent Design System, requiring designers to set up relevant variants and interactions–albeit with significantly less fidelity and functionality than the React components in UXPin.

The experiment

Anthony created the same single-page reporting prototype on both platforms to compare UXPin and Figma’s prototyping efficiency. It took him an hour to design the page in Figma and just eight minutes in UXPin.

“The UXPin prototype had live dropdowns, calendar buttons, a sortable data table, and even an interactive Highcharts pie chart!” Anthony Hand, Senior UX Designer.

The prototype Anthony created with UXPin was better quality, had fewer errors, and featured interactive elements thanks to its use of live Microsoft Fluent controls. Conversely, the Figma prototype lacked these interactive qualities, relying on rasterized images that reduce real-time interaction–even though it took more than 8X as long to create.

Anthony’s conclusion

While Figma serves as a web-based evolution of familiar graphic design platforms and is an advancement over older tools, it still has limitations. UXPin stands out with its focus on “interactive prototypes” through a code-based design approach, allowing designers to create designs that feature live code elements, enhancing the interactivity and realism of the prototypes. Additionally, UXPin offers capabilities for complex interactions on a single page with minimal learning requirements.

“I liked Figma a lot. It’s a huge improvement over my previous go-to design tool, Balsamiq. But now that I’ve learned how to leverage the powerful scripting capabilities of UXPin and design interactive UIs with the same live HTML UI controls that my engineering colleagues will use in the finished product, there’s no way I could go back.” Anthony Hand, Senior UX Designer.

Is Figma Good for Prototyping?

Figma is undoubtedly a fantastic UI design tool but lacks the features necessary to create realistic interactive prototypes. Designers can still do some prototyping in Figma. Here are some examples of where the platform is most useful during the design process:

• Static UI mockups: Figma’s intuitive user interface and features make designing mockups effortless.
• Low-fidelity prototypes: Figma is great for low-fidelity wireframe prototypes since these only require basic transitions between screens.
• Information architecture: Designers can organize screens on a single artboard to map and visualize a product’s architecture and user flows.
• Collaborative design: Figma makes real-time collaboration easy, allowing teams to leave comments, run design critiques, access version history, and more.

What are Figma prototyping limitations?

Here’s where you might want to consider UXPin instead:

• Interactive prototyping: Figma offers simple click/tap interactions. Capturing user data and creating complex components like dropdown menus, carousels, accordions, and date pickers aren’t possible in Figma–limiting what designers can test.
• Live data and APIs: Unlike UXPin, you can’t import live data with Figma. These complex integrations require engineering input, increasing time and resources, making them unfeasible for most projects.
• Code-to-design: Figma works on a design-to-code approach, meaning developers must convert designs into code–a time-consuming and complex task. With the help of Merge, UXPin’s code-to-design workflow means designers can build code-based prototypes with the same building blocks developers use, significantly reducing development time while creating a seamless product development workflow.

Why is it Better to Prototype in UXPin?

The common theme throughout this article is interactivity. Modern digital products require designers to test ideas using interactive prototypes. Why?

• Development is time-consuming and expensive. Solving issues during the design process can save organizations countless time and resources, reducing wasteful expenditure.
• User experience is crucial for product adoption, engagement, and retention. Interactive prototyping allows designers to solve usability issues during the design process and enhance the product’s user experience.

When designers use image-based tools for prototyping and user testing, they miss usability issues and business opportunities during the design process. They must add these changes to the product’s UX and technical backlog, increasing debt and avoidable costs.

How interactive prototyping reduces UX debt

Merge reduces wasteful and avoidable UX and technical debt with better testing and smoother design handoffs. The design team can import interactive components from a design system repository for prototyping. This fully interactive component library increases prototyping scope, allowing designers to build exact replicas of the final product–impossible to do with image-based tools like Figma.

Users and stakeholders can interact with Merge prototypes like they would the final product, giving design teams accurate, meaningful insights to iterate and improve. 

Design handoffs require less documentation and explanation because designers and engineers use exactly the same components. Devs can import the same UI library from the same repository, apply JSX changes from UXPin, and deliver the end product.

“UXPin Merge reduced our engineering time by around 50%. Imagine how much money that saves across an enterprise-level organization with dozens of designers and hundreds of engineers.” Larry Page, UX Lead Designer.

Faster prototyping and iterations

Merge effectively creates a no-code, drag-and-drop prototyping environment for designers. As we learned from Anthony’s case study, switching to Merge allowed him to build a prototype 8X faster in UXPin than Figma using the same UI library.

Making changes to components and prototypes is quick and efficient using UXPin’s Properties Panel. Still, designers can increase efficiency by creating multiple variations and states for a single UI element and saving these in UXPin’s Patterns. Instead of making adjustments in the Properties Panel, designers simply swap components to get instant feedback during testing.

“It’s been so helpful for us to have these high-fidelity prototypes built with UXPin. We build high-fidelity prototypes much quicker and get immediate feedback after the session. If there’s something we can fix immediately, we make that change before the next participant and get feedback much faster than before.” Erica Rider, Product, UX, and DesignOps thought leader.

Take your prototyping to the next level with interactive components using UXPin’s Merge technology. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

The post Prototyping in Figma vs UXPin – Possibilities & Limitations appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Review card is a design element that appears on websites and applications to highlight feedback about a product, service or experience.

Solve more usability issues during the design process and deliver incredible user experiences for your customers with UXPin’s interactive prototypes. Sign up for a free trial to explore UXPin’s advanced features.

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Design better products with States, Variables, Auto Layout and more.

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What is a Review Card?

A review card displays user feedback in a compact, visual format on digital platforms. It’s a familiar UI pattern that presents a user’s evaluation—often accompanied by a rating, comments, and sometimes user-related information. 

Review cards display social proof and insights from previous customers, enhancing brand trust, transparency, and credibility to facilitate a conversion–signup, purchase, download, etc.

Core Components of a Review Card

Profile information

Allowing reviewers to customize their identity enhances the authenticity of feedback, including:

• Making the reviewer to post their name offers a personalized touch to the review.
• Allowing reviewers to upload their profile picture makes them more relatable.
• Adding the option to share a reviewer’s location upon consent can also help users understand someone’s view–for example, someone from the UK might find a dish “too spicy,” while someone from India thinks it has “excellent flavor!”

User-generated content

A review card displays the reviewer’s feedback, including:

• The review text provides context and meaning behind the rating, emphasizing a specific experience or narrative.

• The review date helps users understand the relevance and timeliness of the feedback. For example, a product received unfavorable reviews two years ago, but more recent feedback is positive about the same experience–showing the brand’s willingness to improve.

• The reviewer’s images and videos help create more credibility and transparency. For example, Google My Business allows users to upload photo and video content which helps prove the reviewer was at the location and that real people are leaving feedback.

Interactivity features

Making review patterns interactive helps with community-driven moderation while increasing shares and engagement. Some interactivity designers might consider includes:

• Including rating system (stars, points, etc.) to quickly determine the reviewer’s experience.
• Adding helpful/unhelpful voting buttons lets others validate the review’s accuracy.
• Allowing brands to reply to customer reviews enables them to address concerns and thank reviewers.
• Adding social share buttons, as people like to share online reviews with friends or across different platforms, amplifying the brand’s reach.

Examples of Review Card UI Patterns

Adidas reviews

Adidas is a great review card UI example for eCommerce. It encourages reviewers to rate its shoes on overall star rating, size, width, comfort, and quality. This five-point rating system gives shoppers a snapshot of the product’s performance while providing Adidas with valuable data to pinpoint issues and improvements.

Amazon reviews

Like Adidas, Amazon is another good example of an eCommerce review card design. It customizes reviews to meet the product’s features and user needs. For example, this Kindle review interface lets customers rate its built-in light, touch screen, and “easy-to-hold” characteristics.

Yelp reviews

Yelp is a review site and it makes a great job of focusing on text feedback. The review pattern prioritizes the star rating, text, and media content. 

The review form also prioritizes long-form text with prompts like food, service, and ambiance to prompt reviewers on what to mention.

Trustpilot reviews

Like Yelp, Trustpilot’s review card prioritizes text content and its signature green-star review component. The footer allows users to like, share, or report the review and also displays the brand’s reply.

Apple App Store

The app stores for Apple and Android prioritize a mobile-friendly experience, meaning their review cards must be minimal, only displaying the most crucial information.

This example from the Apple App Store displays the review’s headline, star rating, date, and reviewer’s username. Above, users can see the product’s rating out of five, rating distribution across the five stars, and total ratings. There are also CTAs above and below the review card for users to submit feedback.

Shopify App Store

Many platforms have app stores for third-party applications and integrations. Shopify’s review card appears below each app description so store owners can read peer feedback. 

The minimalist design uses a 2-column layout for desktop so users can see the app’s review breakdown and text reviews. They can also filter reviews by star rating.

Review Card Design Tips & Best Practices

Simplicity and clarity

Avoid clutter. Make it scannable.

The examples above from top platforms and brands demonstrate that a review card should allow users to grasp the main points at a glance by eliminating unnecessary elements and focusing on the essentials like ratings, reviewer names, and the review text.

Consistency in design

Ensure all review cards follow a uniform pattern.

UI and brand consistency are essential for building trust. Review cards must be consistent with the product’s design principles and integrate seamlessly with the surrounding user interface and patterns. This uniformity lets users predict where to find specific information, making their browsing experience smoother and more intuitive.

Use whitespace and hierarchy

Make content easier to read.

Whitespace creates separation between components and patterns to enhance readability and scalability while reducing visual fatigue. Designers must apply whitespace and visual hierarchy techniques to review cards so users can read and absorb content with minimal mental effort.

Design interactive elements

Clearly distinguishable buttons or links.

Designers must make buttons and text links obvious using different colors, underlining, icons, etc. These immediately identifiable interactive elements enable users to complete relevant actions, like sorting, filtering, liking, etc., creating immersive, enjoyable review card experiences.

Minimize friction

Minimizing friction through an intuitive and fast review process ensures more users provide feedback. People are more motivated to leave negative reviews, so if you want to encourage more positive ones, you must make every step effortless.

For example, Amazon sends customers a follow-up email or app notification post-purchase to prompt immediate, spontaneous feedback. Amazon’s review UI is simple and intuitive, and they can share images and videos about their product experience effortlessly.

Add filtering and sorting options

Filtering and sorting enable users to choose how to consume reviews to find the people or content that resonate with their experience or expectations. 

For example, Yelp allows users to filter reviews based on rating, time, or relevance and even look for specific keywords for efficient, tailored brand research.

Adapt review cards for different platforms

Designing consistent cross-platform experiences.

The cross-platform experience is crucial for modern digital products and review card design. For example, users can access Netflix on TVs, mobile devices, PCs, and tablets. Designers must design review cards for each platform while maintaining the highest standard of consistency.

• Responsive design: Designers must maintain the same user experience when they stack or scale review card elements for different screen sizes. Read more about responsive design.
• Native components vs. web components: Designers can leverage platform-specific UI elements familiar to users, ensuring a cohesive native experience (iOS, Windows, Android, etc.). Conversely, web components offer broader compatibility, ensuring review cards look and function consistently across browsers and devices.

High-Quality Interactive Prototyping With UXPin

Testing interactive elements is challenging with traditional image-based design tools. For example, creating a dynamic, fully interactive user flow for writing a review isn’t possible using Figma or Sketch.

UXPin is powered by code, giving designers the same fidelity and functionality capabilities as devs for building interactive prototypes. Design teams can create a review user flow prototype, including:

• Interactions and States for interactive elements like links and buttons.
• Capture a participant’s text review, name, date, and star rating using Variables from a form and display it on a review card.
• Use UXPin’s IFTTT integration to send users a thank you email for sharing their feedback.

Better feedback

With UXPin, designers can increase prototyping scope to solve more problems and identify business opportunities during the design process. Designers get better feedback from stakeholders and usability participants to iterate and improve designs using accurate, meaningful data.

Smoother handoffs

UXPin’s prototypes also facilitate a smoother design handoff process with less friction between designers and engineers. Designers don’t need supporting documentation or videos recreating interactivity because they have the tools to build these experiences, interactions, and animations with UXPin.

Streamline your design process, increase prototyping scope, and get better feedback from stakeholders and users with UXPin. Sign up for a free trial to create your first interactive prototype with UXPin.

The post Review Card — How to Design it appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Prototyping is one of the most critical steps in the design process, yet prototypes still confuse some designers and project teams.

A common misconception is that some designers refer to mockups as prototypes—which can confuse those who know otherwise! Prototypes are also not a series of sketches or a functional replica of the end-product.

Key takeaways:

• A prototype is a representation of the end-product that is used in order to see if the product teams are building the right solution for their desired users.
• There are several types of prototypes: a paper prototype that’s basically a sketch of a product, digital wireframe, functional prototype, and more.
• Prototypes differ in terms of their fidelity to the final product. Low fidelity means prototype doesn’t include many details while high-fidelity prototype can be fully functional and behave like a real product.
• There are a couple of ways of creating a prototype depending on the level of fidelity you want to achieve. You can start with a paper or build a prototype in code. Let’s discuss what that means.

Build a living example of your product with components that come from your design library stored in Git, Storybook or as an npm package. Simplify design handoff and make sure that teams are sharing a single source of truth between design and code. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

What is a Prototype?

A prototype is a simulation of a final product which product teams use for testing before committing resources to building the actual thing.

The goal of a prototype is to test and validate ideas before sharing them with stakeholders and eventually passing the final designs to engineering teams for the development process.

Prototypes are essential for identifying and solving user pain points with participants during usability testing. Testing prototypes with end-users enables UX teams to visualize and optimize the user experience during the design process.

Engineering is expensive, and making changes to a final product is often not as straightforward as teams anticipate. So, finding and fixing errors during the design process is critical.

Prototypes have four main qualities:

• Representation — The prototype itself, i.e., paper and mobile, or HTML and desktop.
• Precision — The fidelity of the prototype, meaning its level of detail—low-fidelity or high-fidelity.
• Interactivity — The functionality available to the user during the testing phase, e.g., fully functional, partially functional, or view-only.
• Evolution — The lifecycle of the prototype. Some are built quickly, tested, thrown away, and then replaced with an improved version (known as “rapid prototyping”). Others may be created and improved upon, ultimately evolving into the final product.

Another common misconception about prototyping is that it only needs to be done once or twice at the end of the design process—not true. 

One of our mottos that we believe at UXPin is “test early and test often.”

According to Elementor’s Director of UX, the website building platform’s designers’ – average four to five prototyping sessions, depending on the complexity of a given design.

You should prototype every possible iteration of your design—even your early basic ideas for solving a user need. Prototyping shouldn’t be reserved only for beta tests of the final version; you should test any and every version of your product!

If testing a prototype produces new insights about how end-users will interact with your product, then it’s worth taking the time to gather user feedback and iterate—whether that’s paper, low-fidelity or high-fidelity.

Types of Prototypes

We’re going to explore prototypes in three types of prototypes: paper, digital, and HTML.

Paper Prototypes

A paper prototype is a prototype that is drawn on a paper or a digital whitebaord. Such a prototype is used during the early design stages, like a design thinking workshop while designers still brainstorm ideas.

Paper prototyping works best during early design stages where design teams collaborate to explore many concepts fast. Team members sketch ideas by hand using simple lines, shapes, and text. The emphasis is on lots of ideas and speed, not aesthetics.

UX Teams lay paper screens on the floor, table, or pinned to a board to simulate user flows. A common practice for testing these prototypes is to have one person play “the product,” switching the sketches according to how the real user behaves.

A low visual/low functional paper prototype.

Advantages of Paper Prototypes

• Fast — You can sketch a prototype in minutes, which is why paper works so well for testing lots of ideas. You can draw a prototype quickly (even during a brainstorming meeting), so you haven’t wasted more than a few minutes if an idea falls flat. 
• Inexpensive — You only need a maker pen and paper to create prototypes, making the process cheap and accessible.
• Team-building — Paper prototyping is a collaborative effort, and often teams have fun coming up with fresh ideas. It’s a fantastic team-building exercise, and these free-thinking sessions often inspire creativity.
• Documentation — Team members can keep physical copies of paper prototypes, notes, and todos for quick reference during future iterations. 

Disadvantages

• Unrealistic — No matter how skilled the art or craftsmanship, paper prototypes will never be more than hand-drawn representations of a digital product. So, while they’re quick to draw, paper prototypes produce little or no results when doing user testing.
• False positives — Sometimes, paper prototypes don’t validate ideas properly. What seems like a good idea on paper might not work effectively in a digital wireframe.
• No gut reactions — Paper prototypes rely on the user’s imagination, adding a break between seeing the stimulus and responding to it. That “gut” reaction is crucial for a successful UX.

Considering these advantages and disadvantages, we recommend paper prototyping only during early-stage design. Once you move from paper to digital, there shouldn’t be any reason to revisit hand-sketched prototypes for the same designs or user flows.

For more information on paper prototyping, check out these helpful resources:

• Paper Prototyping as a Usability Testing Technique by Justin Mifsud
• Better Use of Paper in UX Design by Marcin Treder
• iPhone User Interface Design, Paper Prototype Design (video)
• Printable Paper Prototyping Templates courtesy of Tripwire Magazine

Digital Prototyping

Digital prototyping is an exciting part of the design process. Prototypes start to resemble the final product allowing teams to test and validate ideas.

There are two types of digital prototypes:

• Low-fidelity prototypes: a user flow using wireframes
• High-fidelity prototypes: a user flow using mockups

Low-fidelity prototypes allow research teams to outline basic user flows and information architecture. High-fidelity prototypes go into more detail, testing user interfaces, interactions, and how usability participants interact with a product.

Designers build prototypes using design tools like Figma, Adobe XD, and others. Sometimes non-designers, from product teams use Powerpoint or Google Slides to simulate user flows.

UXPin is unique because it allows designers to create prototypes that look and function exactly like the final product—something you cannot achieve with other popular design tools!

Advantages of Digital Prototyping

• Realistic interactions — Testing with high-fidelity digital prototypes lets UX teams see how users interact with the final product, thus effectively iron out any usability issues.
• Flexibility — Test early and test often! You can start with lo-fi prototypes that become progressively more advanced as the product design process moves forward.
• Speed — While paper prototypes might be the fastest way to test ideas, digital prototypes are the quickest way to test usability issues. Once a product gets to the engineering stage, changes cost significantly more time and money.

Disadvantages

• Learning curve — Before you can build a prototype, you’ll need to learn and understand the software—which is why product teams often use Powerpoint instead of a specialized design tool. The good news is that most design software incorporates the same tools, so it’s relatively easy to switch between them.
• Cost — As you move from low-fidelity to high-fidelity prototyping, time and labor costs increase.

A prototype’s success depends on teams outlining clear objectives and KPIs for each usability study. Without a proper plan, designers can get side-tracked, adding unnecessary features and interactions!

Here are some helpful resources for creating digital prototypes:

• A 10-Minute Rapid Prototyping Lesson by Marek Bowers

HTML & JavaScript Prototyping

On rare occasions, teams might build HTML & JavaScript prototypes to get more accurate results. The downside to this approach is that coding comes with considerable time and technical costs.

But with UXPin Merge, that isn’t the case!

Product designers (and non-designers) can create code-based high-fidelity prototypes that look and function like the final product.

For example, with UXPin’s Merge technology, teams can use React components pulled from a Git repository or Storybook components to create fully functional high-fidelity prototypes. With UXPin Merge, participants never have to “imagine” what a button or dropdown will do because the prototype functions like the final product!

Low Visual/High Functional Prototype built-in HTML. (Image credit: Mike Hill)

Advantages

• Final product functionality — HTML prototypes provide participants with an accurate model of the final product.
• The technical foundation for the final product — Building an HTML prototype provides researchers with a valuable research tool and provides developers with the foundations for building the final product.
• Platform agnostic — You can test your prototype on virtually any operating system or device, and the user won’t need to run outside software.

Disadvantages

• Dependent on designer skill level — Your HTML prototype is only as good as your ability to code. Poorly coded prototypes could introduce usability issues that don’t have anything to do with UX design!
• Inhibits creativity — Coding takes time and focus to build a usable prototype. Designers might not achieve the same level of innovation or creativity as using a familiar design tool.

Here are some helpful resources on HTML prototyping:

• Designing with Code by Andy Fitzgerald
• The Advantage of Rapid Prototyping by ZURB
• UXPin Merge for interactive prototyping by Robert Kirkman

The Prototyping Process

There’s no single best process for prototyping; it all depends on the product and application. Below are the three most effective prototyping processes, each intended for different scenarios.

(Note: We advise that you ALWAYS test the prototype when going from lo-fi to hi-fi.)

Paper => Lo-fi Digital => Hi-fi Digital => Code

Most designers follow the paper => lo-fi digital => hi-fi digital => code process for prototyping—it’s how we designed UXPin :).

Teams collaborate to develop lots of ideas, sketching wireframes on paper and creating user flows before committing to digital. Here, UX teams will use common brainstorming methods like crazy eights or asking “how might we” questions to get into an end-user mindset.

A lo-fi digital prototype (wireframe) tests crucial elements like navigation and information architecture early in the design process. Teams can use feedback to make quick adjustments to wireframes before committing to mockups.

Once teams complete navigation and information architecture, designers build mockups resembling the final product—adding color, content, interactions, and animations.

When researchers have exhausted testing, UX teams hand over designs to engineers to develop the final product.

Paper => Lo-fi Digital => Code

Going from Lo-fi prototyping to code is an old approach that few teams ever use these days. While lo-fi prototyping is cheap, it doesn’t catch many of the usability issues high-fidelity prototypes expose.

Product developers without design skills might use the paper => lo-fi digital => code method because it’s quicker for them to code than learn how to use a design tool.

The process is exactly like the example above, except that teams will skip the hi-fi digital step.

Low fidelity prototype created during a Yelp redesign exercise. 

High fidelity prototype created during a Yelp redesign exercise.

HTML Prototyping => Code

Solo developers might skip any early prototyping methods and go straight to code. With no one to bounce ideas with, it can make sense for a developer to jump straight in.

Essentially, the prototype creates a foundation and evolves into the final product. This prototyping method is only effective for skilled product developers with efficient workflows.

Even designers with excellent design skills might want to avoid this method of prototyping. Low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototyping are significantly faster than building and editing code.

Paper =>UXPin Merge – Hi-fi Prototyping => Code

With UXPin Merge, you can accelerate the UX process through rapid prototyping. Create fully-functioning high-fidelity prototypes using UI code components to provide participants with a life-like model of the final product.

UX teams follow the standard paper prototyping processes as outlined above. Next, designers build high-fidelity prototypes using UXPin Merge just by dragging and dropping ready interactive UI blocks on the canvas.

The outcome: no more “imagining!” Your prototype will work just as the final product. Prototyping in a code-based design tool like UXPin Merge means engineers can build the final product significantly quicker than working with vector-based designs. Discover UXPin Merge.

The post What is a Prototype? A Guide to Functional UX appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Rapid prototyping accelerates the prototype phase, so design teams can push final designs to engineering teams faster. As Facebook Mark Zuckerberg once said, “Move fast and break things!”

Striving for perfection can cost precious time, putting product teams a step behind the competition. Rapid prototyping ensures that design teams only focus on a design’s key features and flows to get the project to market quickly.

Key takeaways:

• Rapid prototyping is a methodology of creating a workable prototype of a product fast, considering key features and screens that are absolutely necessary for the next stages of product development
• The process of rapid prototyping involves creating a prototype, testing it with users, and iterating it as fast as possible, so the design is ready for development as fast as possible.
• A rapid prototype allows stakeholders to quickly see how the product will look like and what its user experience will be like before committing resources to building it.
• Rapid prototyping is efficient, fast, accessible and focused on making a product that users will enjoy.

UXPin’s advanced prototyping features enable design teams to build products faster. Use React components in prototyping and build production-ready prototypes 10x faster. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

What is Rapid Prototyping?

Rapid prototyping is the process of creating high-fidelity prototypes to test user flows and validate ideas fast. The goal of rapid prototyping is speed. Designers focus solely on optimizing the user experience to prevent getting sidetracked by “nice-to-have” features and aesthetics.

The quicker teams get a product to market, the faster it can generate revenue to fund growth and product improvements.

Rapid Prototyping vs Traditional Prototyping

In comparison to rapid prototyping, the traditional prototyping process follows five well-defined stages:

1. Sketching – Brainstorm by drawing quick and rough sketches on paper.
2. Wireframing – Start laying out the skeletal framework with boxes and rough shapes.
3. Mockups – Inject detail into wireframes with colors, typographies, photos, and other visual design elements.
4. Prototyping – Add interactivity to mockups by stitching screens together for basic prototypes or adding animations/interactions for advanced prototypes.
5. Development handoff – The engineering team receive a prototype in order to turn it into the final product.

But with the popularization of new ideas such as Lean UX and rapid prototyping, plus the school of thought that wants to get into coding as quickly as possible, this traditional sequential method is becoming outdated.

Benefits of Rapid Prototyping

To recap, let’s look at the four primary benefits of rapid prototyping:

1. Saves money – getting products to market faster through rapid prototyping reduces labor costs while enabling products to generate revenue quicker.
2. Saves time – rapid prototyping catches user pain points during testing eliminating the chance of errors reaching development where changes cost significantly more time and money.
3. User-focused – with limited time, teams must focus on optimizing the user experience and not get distracted by nice-to-have features.
4. Accessible – rapid prototyping creates an environment where non-designers can build and test prototypes. This process saves time by eliminating the necessity for product teams to explain ideas to UX designers, who then present designs back to product teams—often over several iterations.

The Rapid Prototyping Process

Rapid prototyping is less of a separate process and more a filter for efficiency. In rapid prototyping, you revise quickly based on feedback and shift swiftly to high-fidelity prototyping to get as quality feedback as you can.

The key to rapid prototyping is setting clear objectives and KPIs, so teams only focus on the tasks required to meet those goals.

The following steps apply to rapid prototyping and testing phases—assuming that you have already completed the early stages of the design process.

Step 0 – Interactive Wireframes

Where rapid prototyping focuses on the final stages of the design process, interactive wireframes bring speed and efficiency to early-stage design.

With interactive wireframes, UX teams have a massive head start as they move into designing mockups and high-fidelity prototypes.

Download our free e-book on interactive wireframes and learn how this early-stage design strategy can help optimize the rapid prototyping process.

Step 1 – Create a Design System

A design system helps designers maintain speed and consistency—essential elements for effective rapid prototyping. Design systems also streamline onboarding new designers or even allow non-designers to build products (like PayPal does with our Merge technology). 

UXPin lets you create a design system from scratch or use popular systems like Google’s Material Design, Bootstrap, or iOS. Additionally, you can use ready-to-use interactive UI patterns to build reusable components fast!

Step 2 – Create Your Mockups

Once your design system is complete, creating mockups is as easy as drag-and-drop.

If you prefer to design in Sketch, UXPin’s Sketch import makes it easy for designers to upload mockups to begin prototyping and testing.

Step 3 – Creating Interactions – The UXPin Way

With your mockups complete, it’s time to connect user flows and add interactions. 

Keep your interactions simple to start. You can even create guidelines for interactions in your design system, so team members just copy and paste. Not only will simple interactions save time, but they also maintain uniformity, keeping the final product clean and consistent. Designers can always come back to refining interactions at a later stage.

Remember, the goal is to only focus on the interactions that matter for users to complete a flow! UX designers must build prototypes that look and feel like the final product to get accurate feedback from testing.

With UXPin, you can create components, variables, add states, and use real data to make your high-fidelity prototypes look and behave exactly like the final product.

• Components save you time by allowing you to create reusable elements—for example, a button, icon, or card. The Master Component defines the component’s properties, while the Instance Component mirrors the content from its master. Any changes to the Master copies to all Instance Components, allowing designers to make changes to an entire flow by editing a single element.
• Variables allow you to store user inputs and take actions based on the provided data inside the prototype. UX teams can provide a personalized experience during usability testing and demonstrations to stakeholders—a powerful UXPin feature to enhance rapid prototyping.
• Another powerful UXPin feature is the ability to create element and component states—for example, default, hover, active, and disabled. Additionally, you can set up triggers to activate or switch between states, like a drop-down or navigation menu.
• UXPin Merge lets designers take high-fidelity prototypes to a level no other design tool can! As you design with components that were coded, UXPin Merge enables prototypes to look and function exactly like the final product—more on UXPin Merge later in this article!

Step 3 – Test, Tweak, Repeat

Once high-fidelity prototypes are complete, it’s time for testing. With UXPin, you can test prototypes in the browser or download UXPin Mirror (iOS & Android) for testing on mobile devices—you can even lock prototypes in UXPin with password protection to prevent unauthorized access.

UX teams can collect feedback from stakeholders and usability studies to tweak designs before returning to the testing phase to validate the changes.

UX designers might make minor changes during testing to get instant feedback and accelerate the rapid prototyping process.

How UXPin Merge Accelerates Rapid Prototyping

Traditional design tools render vector or raster graphics. While these graphics might look like the final product, they have limited functionality which doesn’t provide meaningful feedback from testing and stakeholders.

Prototypes created this way require the user to “imagine” that they have entered data or activated an element’s state—like adding a product to their cart or playing a video.

UXPin is a code-based design tool. When a designer draws something on the canvas, UXPin renders HTML/CSS/JS code. As UXPin is code-based, we went one step further and introduced Merge technology that integrates with Git or Storybook, and brings all the components your devs coded for the design system into UXPin library so that you can reuse them!  The result? You can prototype with ready and fully interactive UI elements without designing from scratch. 

Test participants and stakeholders no longer have to “imagine” what will happen when they interact with a UXPin prototype because it looks and functions like the final product! Using actual data from JSON, Google Sheets, or CSV, designers can also simulate an authentic product experience and make quick changes to test multiple scenarios.

Not only does UXPin Merge accelerate rapid prototyping with an authentic user experience and meaningful feedback, but it also makes the transition from designing to engineering and on to the final product significantly quicker.

PayPal’s DesignOps 2.0 – A UXPin Merge Success Story

UXPin Merge forms the core of PayPal’s DesignOps 2.0—where product team members (not designers) use rapid prototyping to build interfaces for PayPal’s internal tools.

Essentially, UXPin Merge provides PayPal’s product team with a no-code drag-and-drop tool to build user interfaces and test high-fidelity prototypes with React components. Additionally, PayPal’s product managers import real information from JSON, Google Sheets, or CSV—giving prototypes final product functionality.

Instead of taking part in the prototyping and testing process, PayPal’s UX designers (of which there are only three to 3,000 developers!) act as mentors to product teams, providing guidance and support when necessary.

With code components, PayPal’s engineers can develop the product team’s prototypes significantly faster than using a vector or raster-based design tool.

If PayPal can achieve efficient rapid prototyping with just three UX designers, imagine what UXPin Merge could do for your design process. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

The post Rapid Prototyping Process and Fidelity – A 5-Minute Guide appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

When diving into the world of product design and development, there are a lot of terms being thrown around. Today we will focus on the three of them:

• Prototype is a representation of an end-product for testing design ideas, getting feedback from users, and showing stakeholders and developers what the final product will be like.
• MVP is a product that stakeholders use to find first users that would be willing to use the product. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, because it has all that’s needed to find first users.
• Proof of Concept is anything that helps you measure the feasibility, viability, and desirability of a product to secure funding, gather resources, and make sure you want to invest in the right thing.

Key takeaways:

• Prototype’s purpose is to test product’s UI and UX design with its intended users, get feedback, and achieve the best solution possible. MVP’s purpose is to find early adopters and Proof of Concept is there so you can check if it’s worth to build the product in the first place.
• Prototype needs to be as functional as it’s needed to test the product before comitting the resources to making it. MVP needs to be fully functional and Proof of Concept (PoC) doesn’t need to be functional at all.
• Prototype, MVP, and Proof of Concepts need to be developed with the focus on the user, they go through a series of iterations that are based on feedback and design validation.

Build fully interactive prototypes to test your concepts using UXPin’s powerful Merge technology. Get accurate feedback during the product design process to validate ideas and iterate faster at higher fidelity than traditional image-based design tools. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

Discover UXPin Merge

What is a Prototype?

A prototype represents or simulates a product idea, allowing designers, stakeholders, and users to visualize and interact with its key features and functionalities. Prototypes help validate design concepts, gather feedback, and test usability during the early stages before investing significant time and resources into development.

There are various types of prototypes, ranging from low-fidelity sketches or wireframes to high-fidelity interactive replicas that closely resemble the final product. Designers can quickly iterate, refine, and improve their designs based on user insights, ensuring that the final product meets user needs and business goals.

How to build a prototype

UX designers or product designers are typically responsible for the prototyping process. They collaborate with other team members, such as UX researchers, developers, and stakeholders, to gather requirements, define the scope, and translate ideas into tangible prototypes.

Designers use various tools and methodologies to create interactive visual representations of their ideas and simulate user interactions.

What is an MVP?

An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a simplified version of a product that includes only its core features and functionalities aimed at addressing the primary needs of early users. An MVP aims to test and validate the product idea in the market with minimal resources and investment.

An MVP is a functional product, allowing the product team to gather feedback, measure user engagement, and collect valuable data to inform future iterations and enhancements.

An MVP aims to balance delivering value to users and validating the product’s viability while minimizing development costs and time-to-market.

How to build an MVP

Developers typically use a combination of tools and technologies to build an MVP, including programming languages, frameworks, and development platforms specific to the chosen tech stack. They may use foundational programming languages like HTML, CSS, and Javascript or frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue.

Engineering teams collaborate with designers, stakeholders, and other team members to define the MVP’s features, functionalities, and priorities. The development process involves:

• Implementing core features
• Integrating with necessary APIs or databases
• Deploying the product to a testable environment

What is a Proof of Concept?

A proof of concept (PoC) is a small-scale demonstration or experiment that aims to verify the feasibility and potential of an idea. Companies typically use PoCs to test a product’s or technology’s technical or functional aspects before investing significant resources in software development.

A proof of concept focuses on validating key hypotheses or showcasing specific features or capabilities of an idea to stakeholders or investors. It serves as evidence that the concept is possible and has the potential to solve a problem or meet a need.

Unlike a fully functional product, a proof of concept may not be production-ready or designed to be deployed to target users. Instead, its purpose is to demonstrate the viability and value of the idea, paving the way for further development and investment.

How to build a proof of concept

The responsibility for building a PoC lies with a cross-functional team consisting of developers, engineers, designers, and subject matter experts. They collaborate to design and implement a simplified solution, focusing on the core features and functionalities that will validate the concept’s viability.

The tools and techniques organizations use to build a PoC vary due to the diverse nature of digital innovation. For example, an organization may use Python, Java, or C++ combined with various development frameworks. The organization may also incorporate data analysis tools, visualization software, or simulation platforms to run and analyze the PoC.

Comparing a PoC vs. Prototype vs. MVP

Key differences

Purpose and scope:

• Prototype: Used to visualize and test design concepts, interactions, and user experience.
• MVP: Developed to find product-market fit and refine the idea in a real-world context.
• PoC: Created to demonstrate the feasibility and potential value of a product.

Level of functionality:

• Prototype: Limited functionality that allows to test usability of a product.
• MVP: Full functionality of features with avoiding scope creep.
• PoC: No functionality necessary; the goal is to showcase the core concept.

Audience and timing:

• Prototype: Targets internal teams, stakeholders, and potential users in the early design and development stages.
• MVP: Intended for early adopters, potential customers, and investors to validate the product-market fit.
• PoC: Aimed at stakeholders, investors, and potential partners to showcase the viability and potential of a concept.

Similarities and overlaps

Iterative approach:

• Prototypes, MVPs, and PoCs embrace an iterative product development process.
• All involve a cycle of testing, gathering feedback, and refining the product.
• Insights and feedback from users or stakeholders drive iterations.

User-centered design:

• Teams use user-centered design principles to design prototypes, MVPs, and PoCs.
• User feedback and insights play a crucial role in shaping the product design process.
• Teams make iterations to improve the user experience and meet user needs and market demand.

Learning and validation:

• Companies use prototypes, MVPs and PoCs to learn and validate a business idea or product concept.
• They provide opportunities to gather feedback, test assumptions, and make informed decisions.
• Organizations build prototypes to gain insights through user testing and validation to refine the product and make necessary improvements.

Example Case Study for Using a Prototype vs. MVP vs. PoC

Scenario: FinTech startup FinPin is working on a digital product for managing personal finances. The app aims to provide users with a seamless and intuitive experience for budgeting, expense tracking, and financial goal setting.

Prototype

FinPin creates a prototype to validate the user interface and gather feedback from potential users and stakeholders during the concept and design phase. The team builds several variations during this process, including low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes.

The low-fidelity prototypes allow design teams to test and iterate quickly–first, with paper before moving onto digital wireframes using a design tool. FinPin’s design team uses these low-fidelity prototypes to create the structure, navigation, and information architecture.

Next, the team converts its low-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity interactive prototypes. FinPin’s designers use Material UI to build interactive prototypes to save time by leveraging the design system’s vast component library and well-defined design language.

They use UXPin’s Merge technology to prototype and test using React components. This interactive prototyping approach allows the team to gather accurate data and insights to validate ideas and solve usability issues.

These prototypes include color, typography, UI components, and real content, allowing the team to test the designs with end-users and iterate on feedback. Designers optimize the user experience during this iterative process while enhancing the user interface’s business value.

Minimum viable product

After receiving positive feedback on the prototype, FinPin develops a minimum viable product for the mobile app. Instead of creating a mobile app, which is a costly process and time-consuming process, FinPin develops a mobile-friendly web app with the product’s core features.

The MVP includes essential features, including account linking, expense tracking, and basic budgeting capabilities. The goal is to create a functional web application to find first users and see what they appreciate about the app.

The web app also allows them to use tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar to track and analyze user behavior for future improvements. This data enables the team to gather valuable user insights, validate assumptions, and determine the product-market fit before investing further resources in additional features.

Proof of concept

FinPin aims to introduce innovative financial forecasting technology into the app. They build a proof of concept to demonstrate the technology’s feasibility and pitch their idea to investors to secure funding.

The PoC focuses on developing a small-scale, functional version of the forecasting algorithm and integrating it into the MVP. This integration with the MVP allows FinPin to test the accuracy and performance of the technology, evaluate any technical challenges or limitations, and showcase its potential value to potential investors or partners.

The outcomes of the PoC inform decisions on the scalability and viability of integrating the forecasting technology into the final product.

The example above demonstrates the three distinct scenarios where companies and startups use prototypes, MVPs, and PoCs. We can summarize this example as follows:

• Prototype: design testing
• MVP: beta testing
• PoC: concept testing

Advanced Prototyping With UXPin Merge

Whether you’re building a minimum viable product or proof of concept, prototyping is essential to test and validate ideas before committing to the development process.

UXPin’s Merge technology allows designers to bring code components into the design process to enhance prototyping scope and gather meaningful feedback from user testing and stakeholders. These interactive prototypes allow users and stakeholders to interact with user interfaces like they would the final product, providing accurate insights to iterate and improve before the development process.

Create prototypes that drive data-driven decisions for better product outcomes and user experiences. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

The post Prototype vs MVP vs Proof of Concept— Differences and Similarities appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

As an industry, product design has become more interactive than ever before. Whether you’re creating apps, websites, or software, there’s an endless stream of new tools and workflows to help make your design decisions as comprehensive as possible. However, when there are design team members, project managers, and stakeholders who all want to be involved in the project at the same time, things can get messy pretty quickly.

Managing effective feedback process at all stages of the design workflow has become a bit of pain, to say the least.

Fortunately, there are a ton of design feedback tools that can help you gather, organize, and utilize constructive feedback and help keep everyone on the same page. That’s why we’ve compiled a collection of the best design feedback tools to help you find the right one for your specific needs.

Build interactive prototypes that can be easily shared with your team in UXPin. Keep your teammates in the loop and test your designs with users. Sign up for a free trial.

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How to Pick the Best Design Feedback Tool? 

First off, how do you even know whether a design feedback tool is right for you?

Of course, you need an application that makes collaboration easy and doesn’t do more harm than good. The software and feedback features need to actually benefit your creative efforts, so bear these considerations in mind. This also means that – when choosing the right design collaboration tool – you should check whether it lets you comment on the design when making iterations, or leave feedback on actual, published apps and websites.

Here are a few criteria to search for:

1. interactivity
2. satisfying feature set
3. real-time user
4. collaborative

Your tool is interactive

Professional design feedback tools must be as interactive as possible. 

In the past, feedback would have been as simple as drawing lines and writing comments on a screenshot, or supplying a designer with a list of things to change, but this just isn’t good enough today.

It wastes so much time having to shift through messy lists of feedback, find what feature a client is referring to, or identify what the bug in question is. 

An interactive tool removes these issues and instead displays actionable feedback in the right places in an organized manner. Everything is clean, easy to follow, and intuitive.

There’s no point in getting a feedback tool that ends up causing more problems than improving productivity.

Offers increased functionality

Despite being a feedback tool, your chosen solution should always be far more capable than this baseline feature. 

The best tools grant access to other functions, such as being able to generate specs and documentation or even manage the entire design process.

For example, connecting with the prototyping process is essential yet often overlooked. 

If colleagues, project leaders, or UX testers provide great design feedback on a certain aspect of the project, you can incorporate it into your prototype, test again, gather more feedback, and then repeat the cycle.

This is a far more effective way to work and will speed up your design process as a whole. Productive design review should be an iterative process that helps to improve the quality of your designs, rather than something that just bogs you down.

Functions in real time

Nowadays, especially with the rise of remote and hybrid ways of working, your collaboration tools need to operate in real-time. This includes displaying design previews, adding comments and annotations, and even video and audio notes for highly-detailed responses.

Allows effortless communication

Communication is everything at all stages of the design process, including when it comes to organizing feedback.

Your design review tool should enable users to add all kinds of comments in any format (text, video, image, GIFs, etc) as well as @mention-specific team members. In order to avoid any confusion, it’s also important that everyone’s on the same page in terms of which tool you’re using and that everyone understands how to use it.

6 tools for collecting design feedback

Let’s now take a look at the design feedback tools that will make the design review more effective and interactive. 

1. Proofhub

Proofhub markets itself as a project management application orientated to the needs of designers. Clients or project managers can check in and provide feedback throughout the entire design workflow, annotating the project within the app using a clean overlay approach.

This means designers can eliminate previous issues, like having to search and find feedback in a massive email or Slack threads, access the feedback at any time, and work on a project in real-time.

While fast, effective, and easy to get set up and running, the interface can feel a little clunky and lacks customizability. However, if you can overlook this, it does get the job done.

Features

• Review all files in any kind of design project with a click
• Collaborate with all team members, clients, and managers in real-time
• All past file versions remain accessible simultaneously

2. Atarim

Atarim is used by over 5,000+ agencies worldwide, including companies like GoDaddy, Elementor, and WPEngine. If you’re looking for a design feedback tool specifically for website building, then it’s worth considering it.

It’s essentially a WordPress plugin that digital development and design teams can use to track changes across the websites they’re building. Atarim lets you add internal comments, collect feedback from clients, and then use the findings to improve the UX and UI. 

This design review app supports screenshots and comments, and can turn any text into a task that can be assigned to a relevant team member.

Atarim can be integrated into other collaboration tools like Trello and Asana, as well as other Kanban boards. While clearly feature-rich, this software can be a little confusing to newcomers, and the learning curve may take some time to climb.

Features

• Supports internal messages that keep conversations away from clients
• Give feedback on non-WordPress sites with a few clicks
• Turn comments on screenshots into assignable tasks

3. UXPin

UXPin allows you to catch positive and negative feedback before it becomes costly, that is during the prototyping phase. Non-designers as well as fellow designers can give approvals or leave their not-so-positive feedback before the prototype gets passed on to engineers.

It’s costly for any business to create entire apps, websites, and features, only to have them redesigned from the ground up once clients, stakeholders or product managers want changes made.

Instead, you can use UXPin to generate robust prototypes of individual design elements, acquire feedback, and then implement the changes until your design is given the green light. Next, prototypes can be shared with developers who will polish it off into the final app, making it effortless to bring the best of collaboration and teamwork to your design projects.

Features

• Create, run, and tweak prototypes in real-time
• Import Sketch or Figma designs in just a few clicks
• Create and share preview links to ensure your prototypes are accessible to everyone who needs access
• Animate between states to create one of the most advanced user testing experiences possible
• Use ground-breaking variable data storage to create the most life-like prototyping experience
• Hand over your designs to the engineering team with autogenerated specs and ready-made code.

4. BugHerd

Whatever you’re designing, you’re going to come across bugs and problems that need addressing. Keeping track of everything and being organized can be a challenge, to say the least. BugHerd addresses this pain point with its visual-heavy feedback tool.

The app is simple. Using a visual interface to display code, screenshots, websites, or whatever visuals you want, clients, stakeholders, and team members can place sticky-note-like comments to provide any kind of feedback, highlight issues, and more.

Features

• The entire service is hosted in the cloud
• All comments and feedback are easily accessible and searchable
• Mark annotations on images provide concise feedback

5. Nimbus Capture

Sometimes, you’re not going to want a high-end service but rather something simple, quick, and easy, and that’s where Nimbus Capture comes in. It’s a great tool for startups that provides a range of collaboration tools designed for improving feedback and collaboration efforts, the most notable of which is Nimbus Note.

While quick and easy, it’s important to realize that this design review tool can feel a little restrictive when compared to other tools that offer a more integrated service. The UI is a little dated (especially when using the free Chrome extension), and you don’t actually integrate your work into the app.

This means designers are going to be constantly switching back and forth between windows to make changes and review feedback, rather than just working with everything within a self-contained and accessible place.

Features

• A free Chrome browser extension
• Users can annotate screenshots using a variety of methods
• Automatically organize notes using a table of contents

6. Userback

Reviewing feedback takes time, and it’s time wasted if not handled properly. Userback aims to make things easy with its visual feedback tool. Used by companies like Couchbase, Udacity, and more, Userback works within any kind of project, be it web design, app design, and more, and it allows users, clients, and designers to annotate on the fly.

You can specifically mark areas of the screen with interactive comments, mention specific engineers, highlight bugs and potential issues in the code, and even provide client support in real-time.

The app can fully integrate into an extensive range of major services, including Slack, Trello, Asana, WordPress, ZenDesk, GitHub, and so on, and even supports video feedback.

While this is surely a feature-rich solution, Userback is designed for users to provide their feedback once the product has already been launched. It’s not the best choice if you want to do a design critique of wireframes or prototypes. This means that bugs and glitches are possibly already influencing the usability of your product, and the damage could have already been done to the overall user experience.

Features

• You can draw directly on the design
• Use video feedback to gather feedback from customers faster
• A feature request dashboard lets you look at all of the comments and track their status

Use UXPin to Collect Feedback on Prototypes

Great design feedback is an important part of the design process, no matter if it’s a positive feedback or negative, and there are a variety of tools available to help make it as smooth as possible. While some software is more comprehensive than other, each has its own unique set of features that can be tailored to fit your specific needs.

That being said, don’t forget that there’s no stage of feedback more important than prototyping. For this reason, make sure you’re using a tool that allows you to collect feedback early and often, so you can make revisions and create a better design, just like UXPin does. 

It can help make a more quality designs for apps and websites. At the end of the day, your apps will make or break depending on your UX design, and designers have the most important role in creating an experience that users will love.

UXPin is designed at its core with this goal in mind. Try it for free, and you’ll see that design work will never be the same again.

The post Best Design Feedback Tools – A List of 6 Tools appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

User reviews and feedback are essential for product evolution and growth. Organizations can use this feedback to fix product issues and improve the user experience. Teams may also identify new opportunities for growth and revenue.

This article reveals how design teams can use customer feedback to solve problems and improve products. We also provide an example of how a business went from no customers to a billion-dollar unicorn in less than a decade simply by talking to users.

Enhance your product’s user experience and get meaningful feedback with advanced prototyping from UXPin. Sign up for a free trial to start designing amazing experiences customers want to share!

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Why are User Reviews Important?

Product analytics are essential for identifying design issues and successes, but they don’t tell you why. This quantitative data is crucial in analyzing users but doesn’t tell you what they think or feel.

You might generate lots of leads or enjoy high conversion rates, but if your customers are unhappy with the user experience, it’ll be hard to retain them–jumping ship to the first competitor with a better offer!

User reviews and feedback help design teams understand customer sentiment and identify issues (or successes) that analytics can’t tell you.

Case Study – Coinbase’s User Review Success Story

In a podcast aired in July 2022, Coinbase Founder and CEO Brian Armstrong talked about how he used customer feedback to change the then startup’s business model and add functionality to buy Bitcoin through the app.

“In Y-Combinator, they often tell you, ‘talk to your customers, prove your product,’ try to find product/market fit.” On a call with one customer who signed up but never used Coinbase, Brain learned that people who didn’t have Bitcoin had no use for the product. At the time, buying Bitcoin was a challenge, so people didn’t know how to add crypto to their Coinbase Wallet.

Brain asked his customer, “If I put a buy Bitcoin button in there [the app], would you have used it?” The customer answered, “Yeah, maybe.”

After adding a buy Bitcoin button to the Wallet, Coinbase experienced tremendous growth and is now a multi-billion dollar company employing 5,000+ employees globally. The catalyst for this success?–Brain talking to his customers to understand their needs and feelings about the product.

Before chatting to his users, Brain had no paying customers, and Coinbase generated no income. He doubted his product and whether he should continue. Had he relied on analytics to tell him his product didn’t work, Coinbase would not exist!

Engaging with customers and taking action on user reviews and feedback is essential for delivering products and features people want.

Where Can You Find User Reviews?

There are many ways product teams can collect customer feedback. Here are some of the most popular methods:

1. Product or website widgets
2. Support tickets and chats
3. Asking customers questions
4. Questionnaires
5. Social media (reviews, hashtags, etc.)
6. App Stores and Review Websites
7. Forums & Communities

1. Product or Website Widgets

Several tools allow you to place widgets on your website or application to collect customer feedback. A great example is Hotjar’s Feedback widget which lets users rate their experience and comment on specific UI elements or content.

These feedback tools offer widgets to gather feedback for multiple UX metrics, including:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely are people to recommend your product on a scale of 1-10.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Yes or no questions that indicate whether customers are happy with a product or feature.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): Asking customers how difficult it is to complete tasks–typically on a scale of 1-10.
• System Usability Scale (SUS): A 10-question questionnaire that provides UX designers with a digital product’s overall usability score.

2. Support Tickets and Chats

Tracking support tickets and chats are excellent feedback sources for identifying trends–for example, customers can’t find a specific feature or don’t know how to complete a task.

UX designers can use this feedback to test further and pinpoint the issue for fixing. UX benchmarking is crucial for these fixes because it tells the organization if the redesign solves the problem–i.e., reducing support tickets.

3. Asking Customers Questions

As we saw in the Coinbase example, asking customers questions is essential for user experience and growth. Asking customers why can help understand what needs or expectations your product doesn’t fulfill.

For example, asking customers why they’re closing their account or downgrading their plan could help improve the product. You can add these customers to a mailing list and try to win them back when you release features they were missing.

4. Questionnaires

Questionnaires are excellent resources for learning what customers like or dislike. UX designers must look beyond UX research and gather insights from other departments, like sales, marketing, customer support, etc., to understand the customer experience at every touchpoint.

5. Social Media

Social media is a fantastic place to find user reviews, understand brand sentiment, and engage with customers. Beyond user ratings, social media managers can use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to search for branded-related keywords, hashtags, and posts and find out what customers say about the product.

Social media is also an excellent resource for researching customers’ opinions about competitors to identify opportunities and avoid failures.

6. App Stores and Online Reviews

Your product’s app store and review sites (Trustpilot, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.) provide feedback from real end-users. You to filter by star-rating and keywords to drill into specific problems or customer sentiment.

Team members can also provide a customer support email address in replies to engage with users and get more details about their experience.

7. Forums & Communities

Industry or product forums and communities are excellent for identifying problems and opportunities. Users often visit these platforms to ask questions or seek help.

Creating a community forum for your brand will allow you to engage with customers and prioritize feature releases through upvoting. Customers can also use the platform to report bugs or request new features.

How User Reviews Help You Become Better?

User reviews are only helpful if your team uses them to take action. These are some ways customer reviews can guide UX:

• User-centered design: Reviews help UX designers see products from a user’s perspective and help them empathize better.
• Analyze performance: Organizations can monitor reviews to gauge performance. For example, if negative reviews stop after a feature release, it’s a good sign the new design fixed the problem.
• Optimize user experience: Feedback and reviews help designers make tweaks and adjustments to optimize a product’s user experience–thus retaining customers and attracting new ones.
• UX benchmarking: Organizations can use product and competitor reviews to set UX benchmarks and product goals.
• Reduce churn: Monitoring user reviews and feedback enables design teams to identify and respond to issues before they result in lost business.
• Increase referrals: Customer referrals are excellent, low-cost leads. Improving NPS and CSAT scores increases the likelihood of customers sharing your product.

Negative vs. Positive Reviews What to Use?

Teams must pay equal attention to negative and positive reviews, here’s why:

• Negative reviews: Tell you why customers are unhappy and how to fix it
• Positive reviews: Tell you why customers love your product and brand

Analyzing these reviews can also help prioritize features and fixes. For example, if you have overwhelming negative reviews for a specific feature, it’s probably best to focus on fixing that before releasing something new!

Teams can also analyze competitors’ negative and positive reviews to improve features and avoid making similar mistakes.

Top 8 User Review Tools

Here are several popular user review and feedback tools:

1. Hotjar: Feedback and surveys
2. Lucky Orange: Live chat, form analytics, surveys
3. Crazy Egg: Website/product optimization, including surveys and error tracking
4. FullStory: UX optimization with “frustration signals” and journey mapping
5. VWO: Advanced user tracking and A/B testing templates
6. Survicate: Customer surveys with multiple integrations
7. CustomerGauge: User and account level enterprise feedback tool
8. SurveySparrow: Enterprise omnichannel experience management with surveys, NPS software, chatbots, and assessments

User Experience Optimization With UXPin

Once you identify issues or opportunities, testing ideas and hypotheses are essential for finding the right solution. With UXPin, design teams can build advanced prototypes that accurately replicate a final product experience.

They can use these prototypes to improve user testing and get meaningful feedback from stakeholders. People can use and engage with UXPin prototypes as they would with a code prototype, eliminating the need to “imagine” what a feature is supposed to do.

Designers then can create dynamic experiences with functioning user signup flows, eCommerce checkouts, password validation, and other experiences impossible to replicate with traditional image-based design tools.

Designers can build prototypes based on user feedback to test UIs and pinpoint issues. They can also create prototypes of competitor products to understand how they compare and identify opportunities for improvement.

Optimize UX workflows and enhance your product’s user experience with a code-based design solution from UXPin. Sign up for a free trial to improve prototyping and testing with UXPin–the world’s most advanced design tool.

The post Can User Reviews Help You Design Better UI? appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

I decided to share my impressions on UXPin Merge Storybook integration and write about how it influenced the designer-developer collaboration in our team. 

Merge is a part of UXPin – that’s technology providing two main integrations with developers’ tools (Git and Storybook). It allows you to quickly prototype using ready UI code components that are React-based for Git integration, or any framework-based for Storybook integration. I tested the Merge integration with Storybook. 

The review was written by Roy S. Kim, the CEO, and Jacobo Moreno Quiroga – Front end engineer & Digital Content Designer from Fixel Inc., the Japanese UX/UI design consulting company specializing in Design Systems.

Design with interactive Storybook components in UXPin. Build products 10x faster and bridge the gap between designers and developers. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

Design with interactive components coming from your team’s design system.

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UXPin Merge and Storybook integration 

I have both an engineering and design background, and I work on a daily basis on finding solutions to processes inside an application and then writing them in code. The designer part comes in handy when I need to consider and improve the user’s perspective.

This involves more than defining visual aesthetics, it requires considering how the application interface can be subtle enough for someone to not notice it so that they can focus on what they are trying to achieve in the app. 

I usually struggle with the back and forths between iterations of coding that aim to improve user experience. 

Those kinds of improvements are not the same as fixing the product because something doesn’t work. It’s more of intuitive work when a user reports that something feels off. Even if you apply all the design and UX good practices, the user could still complain, and they would be 100% right. This is where a coded Design System or an organized UI component library can help. If you have tested and polished the components approved for your Design System, then you can treat them as ready building blocks for new applications without spending too much time thinking or adjusting them. 

UXPin with Merge technology allows you to import all your Design System components stored in Git or Storybook to the design editor so that you can prototype with them right away. Thanks to this designers can use actual coded elements to speed up the prototyping. UXPin Merge’s motto is “The single source of truth” because what you see in the prototype is combining design with actual working code that developers use as well. 

UXPin – designing to coding 

Let’s start with just UXPin. Essentially, UXPin is a UI/UX design tool similar to Sketch, AdobeXD, or Figma. It’s similar to other competitors so you can get used to it very quickly. You can start with wireframing and end with advanced prototyping in this single tool. 

In most of the similar tools, there is a big difference between what the designer creates in the design tool and what happens in the dev environment, where the real working product is coded. Features like the inspect tab in Figma enable you to see roughly what the CSS behind a certain object would look like. However, this is not always an accurate depiction between what is designed and what is coded. 

Designers and developers essentially come from two different worlds when it comes to the tools used in their daily work. Trying to find a common language between them can lead to way too many meetings and back-and-forths. This might be the very issue that UXPin Merge aims to solve, by having “The single source of truth” which the whole team can treat as the ultimate place of the right components and documentation. 

The UXPin Merge approach 

Merge is UXPin’s technology. Essentially, what Merge does is that it brings coded Design Systems stored in Git repositories or Storybooks to UXPin. Hence, a designer can use real components in their mock-ups and prototypes.

These components are already coded in the repository, and the designer can access its different versions inside UXPin as needed. This way, the integrity of each component is never compromised. It minimizes possibilities for a designer to make mistakes and use elements that aren’t in line with the company’s standards. 

Once you have a Design System and repositories ready to go, you won’t be really modifying them often as their purpose is to store and unify all the versions of the possible elements to speed up the product development process and create governance.

Using UXPin Merge and the imported components, controls the design process as elements are predefined. The changes can be made without a problem but it must be done by developers, so that the chances for casual mistakes are pretty low. 

These limitations actually simplify the work of a designer. They can use fully interactive and prepared elements to focus on the most crucial part – user experience. Sure; color, padding, fonts, and other visual elements are important parts of the experience, but choosing every single little detail can slow down the process.

If all of that is already sorted out in the Design System and repositories, building prototypes with real code components gets easier and faster. Also, it helps keep the consistency even if the components get updated in code as the imported UI is in sync with the components stored in devs’ libraries. No need to worry that elements will be outdated and designers will have to redesign the projects. 

Connecting Storybook 

One of the UXPin Merge integrations I got to see was Storybook. Storybook serves as a sort of developers’ Design Systems to store all the coded UI. It is used by many companies, and it’s very flexible framework-wise as it provides support for around 15 of them.

Now, for teams that are not supported by developers,  setting up a Storybook project and placing all the components there may be a struggle. However, once it’s ready, it neatly holds and displays all the components that are in the Design System. 

UXPin Merge aims to bring what is stored and defined in Storybook to UXPin so that components made in whichever framework can be used for prototyping. The integration part is very simple; grab the URL of a published Storybook project to import the components to the UXPin library for designing. I tested it and it seemed to work perfectly with React components – all the elements behaved in the design editor just as they should. 

Thoughts for the future 

The design process including UXPin Merge in it can be visualized like this: 

UXPin Merge plays a big part in Step B since it provides production-ready UI-coded components that you can use to iterate faster when creating prototypes. With a defined Design System or a component repository, you really shouldn’t worry about Step A because you most probably already have the organized components. Still, there is a possibility that you need to adjust something within the coded components, especially if you are in the middle of creating your own Design System. 

With Step C, which is the build-up step of the application, the developers look at the Merge prototype to see how code components are put together, as well as what code corresponds to which part of the design. However, they won’t just copy and paste the whole code to build the product instantly – they will still need to adjust it so that the prototype becomes a product.  

UXPin Merge seems to be a great solution for rapid prototyping and keeping the consistency thanks to making the most of Design Systems. However, it appears that certain steps are still to be covered. 

To some extent, the work of designers is limited as they mostly can use pre-prepared components, however, it saves time and prototyping with code components brings the world of design and development together. 

Want to try out the integration? Sign up for a 14-day trial!

The post Storybook-UXPin: Review of Merge Integration appeared first on Studio by UXPin.

Designers create different types of prototypes depending on the project and its requirements. One of a commonly used type of prototypes is a working prototype or a workable prototype. We will go over the definition of a workable prototype, learn when this type is useful, and what the steps of designing a working prototype are.

Key takeaways:

• A workable prototype is an interactive model of the final product. Designers build such a prototype to test their solutions with real users. A workable prototype is a high-fidelity design which means that it closely resembles the end-product’s experience.
• Component-driven prototyping is the best methodology for creating working prototypes. It saves you time on adding interactions and keep your design consistent from the start.
• Building workable prototype allows designers to test their design choices, user flow, and see if they create a smooth user experience. To get the most insight, include real images and copy when designing a workable prototype.
• One of the best technology for working prototypes is UXPin Merge, because it helps you use your app’s building blocks – React components – in the prototyping process.

Create interactive working prototypes to get better feedback and insights with UXPin’s revolutionary Merge technology. Discover UXPin Merge.

Reach a new level of prototyping

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What is a Workable Prototype?

A workable prototype is an interactive representation of an end-product. It’s called “workable” because it allows people to engage with and the prototype, experiencing its features and functionalities.

Unlike a static or image-based prototype, a workable prototype enables users to navigate to different screens, interact with various elements, and perform actions that simulate user flows.

When to Build a Workable Prototype

Design teams typically build a workable prototype in the later stages of UX design process after validating the design concept and major features through earlier iterations.

This prototype serves as a functional representation of the final product that helps assess its usability, gather user feedback, and verify key interactions and user flows.

Types of Prototypes

• Low-fidelity prototypes: Basic representations with minimal details, often created using paper sketches or digital wireframes. Designers use low-fidelity prototypes in the early stages of the design process to quickly explore and validate design concepts before investing significant time and resources in more complex designs.
• High-fidelity prototypes: Advanced and visually polished prototypes resembling the finished product, including realistic visuals, clickable elements, animations, and simulated user flows. Designers use high-fidelity prototypes in later stages of the design process to gather detailed feedback on usability and interactivity.
• Paper prototypes: Prototypes created using paper materials, such as hand-drawn sketches or cutouts, are cost-effective for brainstorming and testing design concepts. Designers use paper prototypes in the early stages of the design process to iterate quickly, gather initial feedback, and make rapid design decisions before moving to more detailed digital prototypes.
• Functional prototype: Prototypes focusing on demonstrating core functionalities, enabling users to perform key tasks and actions. Product teams might use functional prototypes to test specific functionalities and workflows of the product, ensuring they meet user needs and expectations.
• Interactive prototypes: allow users to interact with the interface and experience product functionality, often created using design software or prototyping tools. Designers use interactive prototypes throughout the design process, especially during late-stage user testing and validation, to provide users with a realistic and interactive experience.

What Makes a Prototype Workable?

A prototype should effectively communicate the product’s concept and demonstrate its viability to be “workable.” It must have the features and interactivity to elicit meaningful feedback from users and stakeholders to inform further design iterations and decision-making.

A workable prototype must possess specific features and characteristics to be effective for user testing. Here are key aspects that contribute to making a prototype workable:

• Functionality: A workable prototype should demonstrate the core functionality of the final product, showcasing the main features and interactions that users will experience.
• Interactivity: It should allow users to interact with the prototype, providing a hands-on, realistic experience of the final product. 
• Navigation: The prototype should include a clear and intuitive navigation system that enables users to move between screens or sections seamlessly.
• Visual design: The working prototype must reflect the final product’s UI design, including branding and aesthetics, to provide a realistic user experience.
• User flow: The prototype should capture the essential user flows and key interactions, allowing users to complete tasks and achieve goals within the prototype.
• Real content: Designers must use real content and data, giving users a true sense of the user interface’s layout and media elements to determine whether these contribute to or hinder the user experience.

We have emphasized “providing a hands-on, realistic experience of the final product” because many image-based design tools lack the features to create real-world prototype experiences. Organizations must combine several tools and platforms to increase fidelity and functionality.

How a Component-Driven Workflow to Improve Working Prototypes

Component-driven prototyping is a design methodology inspired by component-driven development where devs reuse UI elements for front-end development. Designers mimic this engineering workflow in UXPin by importing code components using Merge technology. Instead of code, designers work with visual elements like in any other design tool.

Ultimate consistency

Merge components include properties and interactivity defined by the design system. For example, a button’s colors, sizes, variants, content, and states are available for designers to adjust using UXPin’s Properties Panel.

These baked-in properties offer many benefits for design teams:

• No designing from scratch
• Eliminates errors or changing properties which result in drift
• Organization-wide consistency
• More time spent focused on product and user goals

Realistic working prototypes

Component-driven prototyping significantly improves prototyping fidelity and functionality because design teams can build exact replicas of the final product, giving user testing participants and stakeholders realistic user experiences without writing a single line of code–and significantly faster than image-based tools.

Design a Workable Prototype in 5 Steps

Following these steps will enable you to build a working prototype that effectively communicates the product concept, aligns with user needs, and provides a solid foundation for further development and refinement.

1. Define the objectives and scope to ensure that it aligns with the desired outcomes and provides a clear direction for the design process.
2. Conduct thorough user research to understand user needs, preferences, and pain points. Gather requirements from stakeholders and users to inform the prototype’s design and functionality.
3. Build the prototype using the right tools, like UXPin with Merge technology, to create an interactive prototype resembling the final product.
4. Conduct usability testing with representative users to evaluate the prototype’s effectiveness and gather feedback on its usability, functionality, and overall user experience.
5. Iterate and refine the prototype based on feedback to address any issues or concerns and improve its overall performance and user satisfaction.

Best Practices for Workable Prototypes

Keep the prototype focused and aligned with user needs

Ensure the prototype addresses the core user needs and goals by focusing on the key features and functionalities essential for user testing and validation.

For example, when designing a mobile banking app, the prototype should prioritize crucial tasks like checking account balances, transferring funds, and making payments rather than including unnecessary features that may distract or confuse users.

Balance realism and usability

The prototype must be realistic enough to provide users with a sense of the final product’s look and feel but also functional and easy to navigate. 

For example, when designing an eCommerce website, the prototype should showcase real product images and descriptions while maintaining a streamlined and intuitive user interface that facilitates smooth browsing and purchasing.

Use real content and data

Incorporate real content and data in the prototype whenever possible to make the user experience more authentic. This realistic experience helps users better understand and evaluate the product’s value and usability. 

For example, when designing a travel booking app, use real destination names, prices, descriptions, and images to give users a realistic and immersive experience, improving their ability to make informed decisions.

Without this accurate data, users may use the prototype differently than the final product, giving you inaccurate insights to make changes during the design process and adversely affecting the project’s success.

Involve stakeholders and users in the prototyping process

Collaborate with stakeholders and involve users in prototyping to gather valuable feedback and ensure the prototype meets their expectations. This collaboration helps validate design decisions, identify potential issues, and incorporate diverse perspectives.

For example, including feedback from business stakeholders, doctors, nurses, and patients when developing a medical app ensures the prototype addresses different types of user groups’ requirements, enhances usability for everyone, and meets industry standards.

Building Working Prototypes With UXPin Merge

One of the biggest challenges for prototyping during the product design process is designers lack the tools and skills to build working prototypes. They’re limited by the tool’s vector-based constraints, which causes issues in testing prototypes with users and stakeholders.

UXPin’s Merge technology removes those constraints by bridging the gap between design and development. Designers use the exact same UI library during the design process as engineers developing the final product. Not only does this mean better collaboration, but it vastly improves prototype quality for users and stakeholders.

“The C-suite people and the directors are able to give us stronger feedback about the ultimate direction because they experience the features and goals of these prototypes rather than just commenting about how these boxes don’t look like a text field.” – Erica Rider, former UX Lead EPX at PayPal.

Smoother design handoffs

With design and engineering teams using the same component library, handoffs are seamless, almost non-existent, because developers already have the code to start the development process. UXPin renders production-ready JSX, so devs simply copy/paste to develop the final product according to the design team’s prototype and mockups.

Stop wasting time and resources using multiple design platforms and workarounds to build realistic prototypes. UXPin is a full-stack design tool that enables designers to create prototype experiences indistinguishable from the final product–all the power of code without writing a single line.

Level up your prototyping capability with the power of UXPin’s Merge technology. Visit our Merge page for more details and how to request access.

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