Nowadays, user experience (UX) is of paramount importance for web development. If you lay emphasis on UX, you can easily augment customer loyalty, market share, and general performance of the company. Being subjective and dynamic in nature, the user experience is a broad notion which encompasses a wide array of customer’s emotions and feelings about utilizing a certain service or product. It also refers to the user’s perception of such aspects of the web app as functionality, usability, and effectiveness.
User experience (UX) is a bidirectional process of user training and interaction with the business layer of the application. The faster and easier this process takes place, the better your app is made and the more business goals it achieves.
Modern trends that can help improve the user experience
In the previous days, desktop usage was mainstream, and everything was simple and clear about user experience. But nowadays there is a wide range of different devices and platforms such as:
- Desktop (Windows, Linux, MacOS);
- Mobile (Android, iOS, WebOS);
- Touchscreens (tablets, smartphones);
- Smart TV and media consoles;
The problem is that they all have different screens, pixel density (DPI), and the logic of interaction with users (touchscreens, mouse pointers, air mouses, voice control, gesture control). The appearance of different UX concepts such as Human Interface Design, Material Design, and mobile-first approach is a response to these challenges.
Material design
Material Design is a popular design system that Google developed in 2014. Since that time, it has been implemented in most of the Google products and now is used by many other websites and companies. In fact, this design practice has become one of the main principles of mobile and desktop interface development.
Material Design is based on such properties of a material as shadow, light, depth, movement, texture. This design system makes use of responsive animations, grid-based layouts, padding.
Mobile-first approach
Another strategy which helps to improve user experience is the mobile-first approach. It presupposes creating a website design beginning with its mobile version, which is afterward adapted to bigger screens.
Mobile-first approach is one of the modern tendencies within the development and UX design communities. In general terms, it signifies developing your website or web app with your mobile users in mind. The appearance of this approach was inevitable as the use of mobile internet left desktop usage behind in 2016. So ‘mobile first’ significantly improves user experience facilitating access to online content, social networks, and apps on handy gadgets.
The above-mentioned strategies are quite similar but are aimed to solve different problems. The main thing is that in the end users have about the same UX on any application using any device. You don’t need to learn, get used to, and explore new apps every time.
Such concepts as Material Design, mobile-first approach and Human Interface Design are good not only in theory but also in practice. They can be used to create a variety of solutions for your business:
- An e-commerce site (usually based on some CMS like Magento);
- A customer portal;
- A corporate portal for employees and business services;
- A mobile application (which can sometimes be effectively replaced with a responsive website);
- A support ticketing system.
You can turn to web, mobile, and other software development services to create different information resources. In general, it’s a good idea, but in this case, the differences will be quite visible. The problem resides in the fact that each of the stated above software development providers is good at making only a certain back-end solution which leads to a lack of uniformity among different information resources. Even such large and successful e-commerce platforms as eBay, Amazon, Aliexpress are inconsistent in this regard.
If you want to have a seamless UX design of all your business solutions, just as you acquired a business layer, you can buy a unified solution for UX creation. Particularly, you can take advantage of javascript ui frameworks that provide out-of-the-box attractive UX design. They are reliable, verified, repeatedly tested and can save about 30% of the time spent on your web application development. Nowadays the majority of JS libraries and frameworks are designed in accordance with the principles of material design which is their essential benefit.
Bottom line
One of the ways to improve user experience is to follow the latest UX tendencies. There are also other reliable options such as turning to JS libraries and frameworks for web development. JavaScript frameworks contain ready-made UI elements that can help unify all your business solutions and enhance user experience significantly.
