70% of online business failures is due to poor website usability. A good user experience contributes to high user retention and conversion rate which is good for the business. User Experience (UX) is a key pillar in website design. For the last 10 years, promoting the value of UX has become a priority not only for revenue but also for brand building. In our past article, we discussed the shift of businesses to being more customer-centric HERE.
According to McKinsey’s 2018 “The business value of design” report, there is an improvement in revenue and a 21% increase to shareholders for companies that are strong in UX practice vs. companies that are not. A 2021 survey for Top Design Firms says 31% of consumers think that user experience should be a top priority for every website. These are just some of the data that show why businesses are investing in UX.
UX refers to the entire interaction you have with a product, including how you feel about the interaction. It is often confused with user interface (UI) which is the screens, buttons, toggles, icons, and other visual elements that you see in a website or app. UX designers focus more on the overall experience of the user if it is functional, accessible, and enjoyable to use. Although not strictly for websites or apps it can also be applied to physical products.
With the rise of the no-code industry, UX designers should see opportunity rather than a threat. No-code development has been growing in the past years as pioneer platforms continue to provide more components and features that enable a website, software, and app development easily. This empowers not only citizen developers but UX designers lets them design and make it functional at the same time. We now explore how no-code contributes to the UX design process and what advantages can come from using it.
The design thinking or the UX process is a guide to creating a great experience for the customers. It varies on what product you are building but the idea still remains. The 5 steps to UX design is
In product development, it may look like this
This is where you understand the business, interview stakeholders, create a concept sketch, define user persona and talk about value proposition mapping
This is the phase where you gather data to understand the industry and the target market that can influence design decisions, investing in research early in the process can save a lot of time and money down the road.
Are your customers IT guys who can smell a lag away or a regular mom who prefers images of babies in a garden? By doing analysis, you can build a picture of who will be using your product and what makes them stay or go.
The fun part of creation. At this step, the process of creating information architecture (IA) and even the actual UI design. An effective design phase is both highly collaborative and iterative. This is where wireframing and prototyping can begin.
Also called as Usability Testing. Basically, it’s the part where you get to understand if the data matches what your customer needs. This is a post-campaign activity where surveys and testing sessions are done to understand what worked and didn't work.
Doing the user interface and user experience by professional UI UX designers would greatly save time and it is not recommended to skip this part. No-code’s capability for visual programming makes it easier to preview the design over function. It helps streamline the UX design process by allowing anyone to easily build a prototype with complex interactions. Since UX design isn’t a perfect science, designers must test application iterations to validate ideas multiple times to minimize risk before launching a feature. With a code-based platform, prototyping and user testing can be labor-intensive and time-consuming. It allows remote usability sessions with a working app versus the limited interactions with coding. The prototyping phase in no-code can quickly make fully functional versions of your application or website to use for user testing that will yield accurate feedback. No-code tools are great prototyping tools UX designers can learn easily to develop digital products.
Designers often invest their time designing something out of a playbook following tools, Agile and Scrum frameworks. This tends to overlook the most important element - the customers.
Even if you are working with pre-made components, remember t your core design system. Make sure your design follows the brand guide and check the icons and typography so it is aligned with what the client needs.
The main thing about no-code is its ability to promote seamless collaboration between technical and non-technical people. This should be the case with UX as well.
Experiment and iterate.
Using a no-code platform means you can iterate at a faster pace than coding. Play, learn and discover fascinating new routes to iterate to improve the end product.
There are pre-made templates in the market that accounts for the attractiveness of no-code platforms. It is harder to tweak a ready-made design than designing something from scratch
No-code is just at the infancy stage of a software lifecycle. There are a number of visual design limitations that may prevent you from doing a more creative design There can also be restrictions for customizing elements within the platform.
Design tools might not be compatible yet with new platforms in the market. This is something that can hopefully be resolved as design tool companies recognize the growth of no-code platforms.
As companies see the value of UX in a highly digitized world, we also understand how it can be fused with no-code. There are still limitations, but we see it improve as new features and updates come in place. It is important to prepare a great UX design before it is translated as a no-code tool. Some stakeholders want to skip this part whereas in reality it is harder to execute a tool without proper UX. Right now, we see the benefits of no-code even for UX designers in terms of testing and designing. Adding no-code development as a skill opens possibilities like never before, delivering a memorable user experience.
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