The world of product development can be a battlefield littered with fallen ideas. Imagine pouring time, resources, and sweat into a product only to discover it fails to resonate with your target audience. A sobering statistic by IdeaScale reveals that a staggering 90% of startups fail, and a significant portion of those failures stem from products that miss the mark.

Thankfully, there’s a powerful weapon in your innovation arsenal: the design sprint. But what is a design sprint?

Design sprints are a game-changing framework for rapidly validating product ideas and accelerating innovation. They condense the traditional product development process, which can be lengthy and resource-intensive, into a short, focused, and user-centered workshop. Over just five days, design sprints guide teams through activities to collaboratively brainstorm, prototype, and test new ideas with real users.

By prioritizing user needs and gathering real-world feedback early and often, design sprints empower you to make informed decisions about your product direction before significant resources are invested. A targeted approach significantly reduces the risk of product failure and propels your innovation efforts forward.

We’ll explore the core principles, the five-day process, and the undeniable benefits of incorporating design sprints into your product development strategy.

The Design Sprint Process: A Step-by-Step Look 

Do you need to be more relaxed about a complex business challenge? Do you need help translating innovative ideas into tangible solutions? Look no further than the design sprint—a robust five-day process that condenses weeks of traditional product development into a highly focused and collaborative effort.

What are Design Sprints?

Design sprints are a game-changer for businesses of all sizes. Pioneered by Jake Knapp at Google Ventures, this methodology equips teams with a structured approach to rapidly ideate, prototype, and validate solutions.

By dedicating five intensive days to understanding the problem, exploring potential solutions, and gathering user feedback, design sprints offer a fast-paced and efficient way to move from concept to clarity.

Why Design Sprints Matter?

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, speed and agility are paramount. Design sprints address this need by:

• Reducing Time to Market: By compressing the development cycle, design sprints enable teams to bring solutions to market much faster, allowing them to capitalize on fleeting opportunities.
  
• Boosting Innovation: Design sprints’ structured yet flexible nature fosters creativity and encourages teams to explore unconventional solutions that might otherwise be overlooked.
  
• Minimizing Risk: The user testing phase of a sprint design process allows teams to identify potential flaws in their solution before significant resources are invested, significantly reducing the risk of product failure. A study by Google Ventures revealed that 65% of design sprint participants reported avoiding a lousy decision thanks to user feedback obtained during the process.
  

By investing in a design sprint, you’re investing in your business’s future. This robust methodology empowers teams to make informed decisions, build better products, and gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

The Design Sprint Process: A Step-by-Step Look

The design sprint phases unfold in five stages, each meticulously designed to move your team closer to a validated solution. Let’s delve into each stage:

Day 1: Understand

• Define the Challenge: The first day focuses on clearly understanding the problem you’re trying to solve. This involves brainstorming, defining the target audience, and outlining the desired outcomes for the sprint.
  
• Set Goals and User Personas: Developing specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals ensures the sprint remains focused. Creating user personas allows the team to empathize with their target audience and generate design decisions with user needs at the forefront.
  

Day 2: Diverge

• Individual Sketching: Day two is all about exploration. Each team member spends time individually sketching potential solutions to the identified challenge. This encourages diverse perspectives and avoids groupthink.
  

Day 3: Converge

• Solution Critique and Selection: The team gathers to share and critique the various solution sketches generated during the diverge phase. Through constructive discussion and voting, the most promising concept is selected for further development.
  

Day 4: Prototype

• Building a Low-Fidelity Prototype: The focus now shifts to creating a realistic yet basic prototype that embodies the chosen solution concept. This prototype should be functional enough to test with users but not require significant time and resources.
  

Day 5: Validate

• User Testing and Feedback: The final day revolves around user testing. The prototype is presented to real users, and their feedback is gathered through observation, interviews, and surveys. This valuable user insight is used to validate the chosen solution and identify areas for improvement.
  

The design sprint is an iterative process. The learnings gleaned from user testing can be incorporated into further refinement of the solution, potentially leading to additional rounds of prototyping and testing. However, the core five-day process provides a robust framework for rapidly validating ideas and confidently moving forward.

The Power of Design Sprints: Benefits for Product Development

There’s a transformative solution in the fast-paced world of product development, where uncertainty and risk are constant companions. Design sprints, a robust methodology, have the potential to revolutionize your approach to product creation. But what exactly are design sprints, and how can they unleash their transformative power in your product development process?

Design sprints are time-boxed workshops, typically lasting 4-5 days, that bring together cross-functional teams to prototype and test ideas rapidly with real users. This user-centric approach offers many benefits that can significantly enhance product development efforts.

Reduced Risk of Product Failure: A staggering 90% of startups fail, and a significant portion of those failures stem from a lack of understanding of the target market. Design sprints combat this by prioritizing user testing throughout the process.

By validating ideas early and often with real users, you can identify pitfalls and course-correct before significant resources are invested in unvalidated concepts. A study by Google Ventures found that design sprints can help reduce product development risk by up to 50%.

Increased Efficiency: Traditional product development can take time and effort. Design sprints condense the development cycle by focusing on user needs. By rapidly iterating on ideas and prototypes, you can make informed decisions quickly, leading to a more efficient development process.

This focus on efficiency can translate to significant cost savings. According to a clutch.co report, companies report an average ROI of 10x for design sprints due to reduced wasted time and resources.

Enhanced Innovation: Design sprints foster a creative problem-solving environment. By bringing together diverse perspectives and encouraging rapid prototyping, you can spark innovation and develop solutions your team might not have considered otherwise.

This focus on exploration can lead to the creation of genuinely groundbreaking products that stand out in the marketplace.

A study by IDEO U revealed that companies that implemented design thinking methodologies, which heavily utilize design sprints, experienced a 60% increase in new product success rates.

Design sprints are not just about rapid prototyping and testing. They’re about promoting collaboration and shared understanding among stakeholders. Involving critical decision-makers ensures everyone is part of the team and aligned with the product vision and user needs.

This fosters buy-in from the outset and minimizes the risk of miscommunication or misalignment later in the development process.

The streamlined nature of design sprints isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about strategic advantage. By focusing on rapid prototyping and user validation, You can release your goods faster and capitalize on fleeting market opportunities.

This speed-to-market advantage can be a significant competitive differentiator in today’s dynamic business landscape, making you both efficient and forward-thinking.

Getting Started with Design Sprints: Resources and Considerations

The world of design sprints beckons! Are you intrigued by the prospect of rapidly validating and iterating on your ideas? This section equips you with the essential resources and considerations to kickstart your design sprint journey.

Popular Design Sprint Methodologies

Design sprints come in various flavors, but some approaches’ broad acceptance results from their efficacy. Here are two popular options to consider:

• Google Ventures Design Sprint: Developed by Google Ventures, this five-day process is well-structured and emphasizes user-centered design and rapid prototyping.
  
  Companies that utilize the Google Ventures Design Sprint methodology have reported a 60% reduction in new product failure rates, highlighting its effectiveness in validating ideas early and often.
  
• AJ&Smart Design Sprint 2.0: This four-day methodology focuses on innovation and creating delightful user experiences. It strongly emphasizes understanding user needs and crafting solutions that effectively address them.
  

Resources to Fuel Your Design Sprint

The design sprint community is vibrant and offers a wealth of resources to empower you:

• Online Templates: Numerous websites like ventures-design and design-sprint provide downloadable templates to guide you through each stage of the design sprint process. These templates offer a structured framework to ensure your sprint stays on track.
  
• Workshops and Training: Several organizations offer design sprint workshops and training programs. These programs delve deeper into the design sprint methodology, providing practical guidance and hands-on experience.
  
• Books and Articles: Many books and articles explore the design sprint approach in detail. Veterans of the design sprint provide insightful advice and best practices on these sites. Look for titles like “Sprint” by Jake Knapp and “Sprint: Solving Business Problems with Design” by John Zeratsky and Martin Kenney.
  

Considerations Before Your Design Sprint

While design sprints offer a powerful tool, careful planning is crucial for success. Here are some key factors to consider before embarking on your design sprint:

• Team Composition: Assemble a cross-functional team with diverse skill sets. Ideally, your team should include a decision-maker, designers, developers, and a user research specialist.
  
• Project Complexity: Design sprints are well-suited for projects with a clearly defined challenge or opportunity. It might be beneficial to break highly complex projects down into smaller, more manageable components for the design sprint.
  
• Available Resources: Design sprints require dedicated time and resources from your team. Ensure everyone involved has the bandwidth to participate fully during the sprint.
  

By carefully considering these factors and leveraging the available resources, you can set the stage for a successful design sprint that propels your project forward.

Conclusion

In conclusion, design sprints have emerged as a transformative methodology in product development. They offer a structured and effective method for resolving challenging issues and testing new ideas. By understanding design sprints, teams can leverage this robust framework to accelerate innovation, reduce risks, and enhance collaboration across various departments.

The impact of design sprints on product development is profound. They enable organizations to rapidly prototype, test, and improve their goods in response to actual customer input. This iterative process shortens the development cycle and guarantees that the finished product closely complies with market and consumer demands.

As businesses seek agile and effective ways to stay competitive, design sprints will remain crucial in driving successful product outcomes and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

How can [x]cube LABS Help?

[x]cube LABS’s teams of product owners and experts have worked with global brands such as Panini, Mann+Hummel, tradeMONSTER, and others to deliver over 950 successful digital products, resulting in the creation of new digital revenue lines and entirely new businesses. With over 30 global product design and development awards, [x]cube LABS has established itself among global enterprises’ top digital transformation partners.

Why work with [x]cube LABS?

• Founder-led engineering teams:

Our co-founders and tech architects are deeply involved in projects and are unafraid to get their hands dirty. 

• Deep technical leadership:

Our tech leaders have spent decades solving complex technical problems. Having them on your project is like instantly plugging into thousands of person-hours of real-life experience.

• Stringent induction and training:

We are obsessed with crafting top-quality products. We hire only the best hands-on talent. We train them like Navy Seals to meet our standards of software craftsmanship.

• Next-gen processes and tools:

Eye on the puck. We constantly research and stay up-to-speed with the best technology has to offer. 

• DevOps excellence:

Our CI/CD tools ensure strict quality checks to ensure the code in your project is top-notch.

Contact us to discuss your digital innovation plans, and our experts would be happy to schedule a free consultation.

The post An Introduction to Design Sprints and their Impact on Product Development appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

Ever feel like your product is missing the mark? It could be a design disconnect! According to the Baymard Institute, 88% of online shoppers abandon their carts due to poor user experience (UX). Many products fail to gain traction because they focus on features rather than those who will use them. This indicates the consequences of not prioritizing user-centered design needs.

What is user-centered design? User-centered design is a philosophy that places users at the heart of the design process. It’s about deeply understanding users’ needs, behaviors, and pain points to create usable, desirable, and ultimately successful products. This understanding is the key to unlocking the potential of user-centered design.

Why is this important? Consider these statistics:  Nearly 90% of users abandon a website with poor usability (NNGroup), and businesses with solid user focus achieve a 60% higher profit margin than those without.

By prioritizing user needs, User-centered design helps you build products people love to use. This leads to increased user satisfaction by up to 200%, improved adoption rates by 30%, and a higher return on investment (ROI) for your business. User-centered design is no longer an option in today’s competitive market—it’s necessary.

Understanding User-Centered Design

Unlike conventional design methods prioritizing functionality, the user-centered design process (UCD) takes a fresh approach. In the realm of UCD, the users are the nucleus. Every design choice revolves around comprehending their requirements and devising solutions that effectively cater to them.

This user-centric approach is achieved through an iterative design cycle. Think of it as a continuous loop, constantly evolving based on user feedback. Here’s a breakdown of the key stages:

• Empathize: This stage is about putting yourself in the user’s shoes. Conduct user research through interviews, surveys, and usability testing to deeply understand their goals, frustrations, and behaviors.
  
• Define: Once you’ve gathered user insights, it’s time to synthesize them into a clear problem statement. What are the core user needs that your product needs to address?
  
• Ideate: Now comes the fun part –  brainstorming solutions! Think creatively and explore a wide range of ideas. Don’t be afraid of unconventional approaches – the goal is to generate as many possibilities as possible.
  
• Prototype: Here’s where your ideas take shape. Create low-fidelity prototypes, basic representations of your design, to get user feedback early and often. This lets you quickly identify potential issues and iterate on your design before investing significant time and resources.
  
• Test: The ultimate test is to put your prototype in front of real users! Observe how they interact with it, gather their feedback, and identify areas for improvement. This iterative testing process ensures that your final product is genuinely user-centered.

By traversing these stages and integrating user feedback at every turn, user-centered design ensures that user needs, not assumptions, guide your design choices. This method leads to products that are not just functional but also intuitive, enjoyable, and ultimately triumphant.

Putting User-Centered Design into Practice

Here are vital methods to transform user research into actionable insights and craft products that users love:

User Research: Unveiling the User Journey

User-centered design principles thrive on a deep understanding of your target users. Here are some effective  user research methods to gather valuable data:

• User Interviews: Converse with users to gain in-depth insights into their goals, frustrations, and behaviors. Open-ended questions encourage them to share their experiences freely.  Studies show that user interviews can uncover up to 300% more usability issues than traditional testing methods.
  

• Surveys: Reach a wider audience with surveys to gather quantitative data and user preferences. Well-crafted surveys can efficiently identify trends and common pain points.  According to Qualtrics, companies prioritizing customer feedback through surveys see a 10% increase in customer satisfaction.
  
• User Testing: Observe users interacting with your product or prototypes firsthand. This uncovers usability issues you might miss otherwise and reveals how users navigate your design.  User testing can identify up to 85% of usability problems before launch, saving you time and resources in the long run.
  
• Building Personas: Giving Users a Face: User research data can be overwhelming.  Personas help bridge this gap by creating fictional representations of your target user groups based on the research findings. Each persona embodies a user type’s characteristics, needs, and behaviors.
  
  By referring to personas throughout the design process, you can ensure your decisions are user-centered and cater to real people, not just abstract demographics.  Companies that use personas report a 300% increase in marketing ROI.
  

UI/UX Design: The Art of User-Friendliness

Once you understand your users, it’s time to translate those insights into a user-friendly product. Here’s where  UI (User Interface) and  UX (User Experience) design come into play:

• UI Design: Focuses on the visual elements of your product, such as layout, color scheme, and typography. A well-designed UI is aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and easy to navigate.  For every $1 invested in UX, companies see an average return of $100.
  
• UX Design encompasses the entire user experience with your product. It considers the user’s emotional response, ease of use, and overall satisfaction when interacting with your design. Businesses can reduce customer support costs by up to 90% by focusing on UX.
  

By following these steps and integrating user-centered design principles into your design process, you can create products that are not only functional but also delightful to use. Remember, a happy user is a loyal user! Investing in user-centered design can significantly improve user satisfaction, product adoption, and your bottom line.

Benefits of Combining Design Thinking and User-Centered Design

The unique synergy between user-centered design (UCD) and design thinking is a game-changer. This powerful alliance opens up a world of advantages:

• Innovation Unleashed: By profoundly understanding user needs (UCD), design thinking empowers you to generate creative solutions that resonate with your target audience.
  
• Happy Users, Happy Business: UCD’s focus on user needs translates to increased user satisfaction and engagement with your product. Satisfied users are more likely to become loyal customers.
  
• Boost your speed and efficiency: The dynamic interplay of design thinking’s iterative approach and UCD’s user research results in rapid problem-solving and streamlined design processes. You can swiftly iterate, guided by honest user feedback, saving valuable time and resources.
  
• Aligned Goals, Shared Success: User-centered ensures your product caters to user needs, while design thinking fosters solutions that align with business goals. This creates a win-win situation for both users and your organization.
  

By embracing this dynamic duo, you can develop functional but also desirable and successful products in the marketplace.

Conclusion 

In conclusion, design thinking and user-centered product design are pivotal approaches that prioritize users’ needs and preferences throughout the product development process. Organizations can create solutions that resonate with their target audience by placing the user at the forefront of design decisions.

Embracing user-centered design fosters innovation and leads to higher user satisfaction, increased adoption rates, and tremendous market success. As businesses prioritize user experience, integrating user-centered design principles into their processes will remain essential for creating impactful and meaningful products.

FAQs

What are the four stages of user-centered design?

1. Understand: Gather insights about users’ needs, behaviors, and environments.

2. Specify: Define user requirements and identify constraints and opportunities.

3. Design: Develop design solutions that address user needs and requirements.

4. Evaluate: Test the designs with real users and iterate based on their feedback.

What are the four elements of user-centered design?

1. User Focus: Prioritize understanding and addressing the needs and goals of the end users.

2. Involvement: Engage users throughout the design process to gather continuous feedback.

3. Iteration: Continuously refine and improve designs based on user feedback and testing.

4. Context: Consider how the product will be used to ensure relevance and usability.

What are the five critical aspects of user-centered design?

1. User Focus: Centering the design process around the needs and experiences of users.

2. Involvement: Actively involving users in the design process through interviews, surveys, and testing.

3. Iteration: Iteratively improving the product based on user feedback and usability testing.

4. Context: Designing with a deep understanding of the users’ environment and how they will interact with the product.

5. Accessibility: Ensuring the product is accessible to as many users as possible, including those with disabilities.

What are the three principles of user-centered design?

1. Early Focus on Users and Tasks: Understand users’ needs, tasks, and environments.

2. Empirical Measurement: Use observations, user feedback, and testing to guide design decisions.

3. Iterative Design: Continuously refine and evolve the design through multiple iterations and user feedback.

What are examples of user-centered design?

1. Apple iPhone: Designed with a focus on intuitive user interfaces, accessibility, and user-friendly features.

2. Google Search: A simple, efficient design tailored to user needs for quick and accurate information retrieval.

3. Airbnb: Personalized experiences and an easy-to-navigate interface based on extensive user research and feedback.

What is the primary focus of user-centered design?

The primary focus of the user-centered design is to create products that meet the end user’s specific needs, preferences, and limitations, ensuring a positive, efficient, and effective user experience.

How can [x]cube LABS Help?

[x]cube LABS’s teams of product owners and experts have worked with global brands such as Panini, Mann+Hummel, tradeMONSTER, and others to deliver over 950 successful digital products, resulting in the creation of new digital revenue lines and entirely new businesses. With over 30 global product design and development awards, [x]cube LABS has established itself among global enterprises’ top digital transformation partners.

Why work with [x]cube LABS?

• Founder-led engineering teams:

Our co-founders and tech architects are deeply involved in projects and are unafraid to get their hands dirty. 

• Deep technical leadership:

Our tech leaders have spent decades solving complex technical problems. Having them on your project is like instantly plugging into thousands of person-hours of real-life experience.

• Stringent induction and training:

We are obsessed with crafting top-quality products. We hire only the best hands-on talent. We train them like Navy Seals to meet our standards of software craftsmanship.

• Next-gen processes and tools:

Eye on the puck. We constantly research and stay up-to-speed with the best technology has to offer. 

• DevOps excellence:

Our CI/CD tools ensure strict quality checks to ensure the code in your project is top-notch.

Contact us to discuss your digital innovation plans, and our experts would be happy to schedule a free consultation.

The post Design Thinking and User-centered Product Design appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

Mobile applications are flooding everywhere. They are developed nowadays for anything and everything that can be made or defined as an application. Every user’s needs and queries can be projected into mobile applications. Why all this importance and stress on mobile applications alone? Smartphones have almost become an integral part of human life. There is a frenzied race amongst downloadable applications available for every purpose, as successful applications generate huge revenue. Even the most consumer-centric mobile applications may be ignored in the stifling competition they face today. 

With mobile service providers and developers launching more features every season, the scope for developing appealing and user-friendly mobile applications is also exponentially growing. So how to beat the competition and stand out big? Mobile application development technology has also undergone a revolutionary change over the past few years, creating a larger scope for attractive and friendly design. The key to standing out and being considered appealing and desirable for the consumer is that the mobile applications should be designed aesthetically and usably to grab the attention of the target users and then retain it. 

What influences users to choose a particular mobile application over the other?

Statistics prove that with app choices galore, users tend to use the ones made of design frameworks with the following main features embedded in them apart from a few customized features.

1. Appeal
2. Ease of use
3. Value
4. Fun and entertainment
5. Social support
6. Security
7. Usability

Apart from the parameters mentioned above, the designer should be perceptive to predict user sentiments and requirements through thorough market research. Incorporating design elements that include user emotions is the challenge of defining a mobile application’s success. The application that stands out is the one that can strike a balance between perceptions of aesthetics and usability.

Emerald Insight published an in-depth report on the aesthetics of a mobile application on perceived usefulness and trust. This report reinstates the app design fact that “ what is beautiful is good ” to a large extent.

Since users use various mobile devices and their screen sizes also vary extensively, RWD ( Responsive Web Design) is a design approach that can dynamically adjust application web pages to the mobile phone used by the user.

A case study of the ‘ travel’ mobile application

Excerpt based on science direct

A survey of 804 tourists was conducted using the ‘ User Acceptance Testing’ model to propose a ‘ Stimulus-Organism-Response’ to evaluate the Mobile Application design and App performance attributes. The result concludes that mobile travel applications are mainly defined by two design attributes: 1. The user-interface design, and 2. privacy. The performance attributes that make a mobile application stand ahead of its competitors are 1. Compatibility 2. Ease of use, and 3. Relative advantage. Furthermore, the survey reveals that the psychological and behavioral perceptions of the mobile application as good, according to the end users, are hedonic, utilitarian, and social benefits. An application for travel and tourism can be greatly enhanced by considering all the abovementioned issues. 

Mobile Live Streaming Shopping (MLSS) platform design

According to the science direct “ journal of retailing and consumer services.”

This mobile application design should focus mainly on consumer streamer interaction, promoting sales conversion, and improving consumer satisfaction. According to this study, the elements of mobile application design are rules that can convey a positive message to the user and, at the same time, influence the consumer’s attitude and behavioral intentions towards the application. When groomed well and incorporated into the design, this aspect is “ understanding consumer perception from a microscopic and multifaceted perspective.”

How to affect the user’s mobile application download intention?

Abstract from Association of Information Systems: AISeL

When several apps are available for a single functionality, the user’s download intent depends on the user’s personality and age group. Though the application’s aesthetics play an important role often, the age group and the intended target user’s personality might play a significant role compared to app attractiveness. Switching cost, which is defined as the user’s ability to opt for another application substitute, might also depend on reviews and ratings rather than Application design alone. 

Conclusion

Visual aesthetics plays an important role in increasing the user’s download intent. Since the visual aesthetics of a Mobile application is a design blend of cleanliness, color, hue, symmetry, ease of navigation, creativity, special effects, etc. Mobile application designers should come out with unique solutions customized to the utilitarian needs of the application to make the application stand out. Design parameters have to be manipulated so that the look and feel of the application strike a balance between the personality of the user who wishes to use the application and the attractiveness of the application.

The post How Design Thinking can Make Your Mobile App Stand Out appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

In the last 10 years we have already seen many improvements and designs to provide greater customer experience specially when the customers interact with the companies and their brands in the digital world.

A research report by Gartner provides insights to customer needs:

• 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs
• $1.6 trillion is lost each year due to poor customer service
• Customers will spend 17% more for a good experience
• Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable

In the era of cutting edge technology, innovations are reaching new heights, companies need to focus on providing progessive designs to interact with their brands online.

There are top 10 design trends that will decide who wins the customers by providing an exceptional experience:

1. Graphic interface with gestures:

   By introducing gesture recognition, the focus is to eliminate UI interaction with buttons. Many companies are testing this feature and it’s in its early stage.

   For example an ecommerce company providing an app where customers don’t have to use buttons to purchase or place and order, a simple drag and drop gesture could add the product to the cart.

2. Zero (Interface) UI:

   The idea of zero UI was first introduced by Any Goodman, former Fjord director. Zero UI is all about sensory experience (gestures, movements, voice, and even thoughts and feelings) to cause a particular response from a device. Smart Artificial Intelligence devices and machine learning are two important parts of zero UI functionality. Its potential can be most beneficial for differently abled people and people with mobility issues.

   There are few experiences that support Zero UI concept-

   Microsoft Kinect– which allows us to change channels with just a greeting.

   Nest thermostats– which learn to anticipate what we want based on our interactions.

   The voice assistants of Amazon, Google and apps that replace our touch interactions with devices

3. Agnostic Interface: 

   According to a Google’s recent study, “90% users use several screens sequentially to perform a task over time”.

   We live in a multi-device environment where multiple applications are accessed on different devices such as wearables, tablets, smartphones, voice devices, televisions or computers etc.Users interact with these devices with different touchpoints and the design and interface become a complex part for the companies to develop.

   For example the consumer was using a browser to access a service on a computer then companies came up with “responsive designs” to give the same on the mobile phone, now came up with “progressive web apps.”

   But with the growth of technologies like Artificial Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality where designs and interface will be in huge demand in the future.

   Companies should conceptualize an agnostic interface as it can reduce latency as use moves across all devices.

   Nest Learning Thermostat is a most relatable example of agnostic interface.

4. Natural Language Processing:

   According to a global estimation, more than 200 million homes now have a smart speaker and are interacting with a voice assistant such as Google, Alexa, Cortana or Siri.

   As per Google 72% of these users claim that they use it in their day to day lives.

   52% of people keep their voice-activated speakers in their living rooms, 25% keep them in their bedrooms, while 22% keep them in their kitchens.

   We are witnessing a voice assistance revolution where homes, vehicles, phones etc are equipped with voice assistants.

   Advances in Artificial Intelligence will allow the tasks that are facilitated from these devices to become more sophisticated with cross-tasks such as sending an email with attachments, opening several applications or executing different actions.

5. Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality:

   There is a lot of buzz around the world for AR and VR. It’s being used in almost every field be it, ecommerce, retail, gaming, medicine or drug R&D.

   With the 5G, AR and VR can be utilized with full potential. It’s estimated that the market of AR/VR will grow more and sales are expected to rise to 65.9 million for late 2022.

   Pokemon go, a free Augmented Reality video game, achieved more than 100 million downloads in its first month of launch.

   Disease simulation in drug discovery & assembly of machine parts to eliminate errors  by using Virtual Reality.

   Asian Paint implemented Virtual  Reality for their internal operations.

6. Personalized Customer Experience:

   Personalized experience is not a new thing, we have seen companies doing it to get customers attention and make them feel like priority customers.

   Companies like Sephora, Netflix, Amazon, Starbucks, The Home Depot, Airbnb etc have created such an environment where customers expect more from the brand during digital interactions.

   Personalized customer experience is a deep field where companies study customer needs, preferences, behaviors, choices, demography and socio-economic information.

   Some basic personalized experiences- a bot interaction where it uses your name, emails where you get exclusive deal code/offers, messages from brands to visit their platform soon (based on your last purchased date) etc.

   There is a lot that can be done, companies gather data from various sources and many departments are involved, they can start off  by creating a single source of customer data and bring all the departments together to create a unified personal experience journey for their customers.

7. User Research:

   There are various sources of customer data and one should understand that data is a crucial part in creating an exceptional user experience. Good data insights derive customer needs, choices and preferences.

   Companies use various techniques to target users, such as- usability tests, focus groups etc. It’s time when we need to see customers beyond qualitative research data.

   Digitalization has given many ways to collect quantitative data one such way is IoT enabled devices. Qualitative research and quantitative data help us get better user insights and we make better decisions. But various sources of information bring complexity.

   Machine learning and analytics are the future of user research where user patterns will be observed and predicted. Companies can create unique approaches to pull various departments together to nourish qualitative data with quantitative data.

8. Intelligent digital experience:

   With the use of new technology in the consumer digital world, the focus is on the concept of intelligent experiences or interactions.

   The word intelligence is a key to continuously improving  the customer experience, it refers to the ability to learn from existing user interactions in order to optimize future experiences.

   Customer journey can be improved in terms of personalization, efficiency and simplicity.

   Smart experiences are characterized by:

   1.  Relevant experiences that connect with the motivations and interests of the users
   2. Persuasive experiences that seek conversion: seduce, convince and sell.
   3. Personal experiences that address the behavior and context of each individual person.

   These are experiences that seek to satisfy users and customers but, above all, they aim to generate impact, growth and results.

9. Biometric Application:

   Biometrics are physical or behavioral human characteristics that can be used to digitally identify a user to grant access to systems, devices or data.

   Examples of biometrics-fingerprints, facial patterns, voice or typing cadence.

   According to the Ping Identity Survey “92 percent of enterprises rank biometric authentication as very effective to secure identity data stored on premises, and 86 percent say it is effective for protecting data stored in a public cloud.

   Spiceworks reports that 62% of companies are already using it.

   Biometric application reduces time, and makes the authentication process easier.

   Many banks have implemented biometric authentication on their mobile apps and ATMs.

10. Sustainability In Digitalization:

    The world is dealing with rapid environmental changes and in the digital world also it becomes a priority concern.

    The digital world reflects this concern with new content that communicates the sustainable policies of the companies and even changes how they do business.

    There are many companies that work towards environmental sustainability and openly tell their customers to follow the same in order to save earth.

    Companies can show how much energy their data centers use and how much carbon footprint they generate per year.

    Also, they can show how they recycle and reuse the product to promote zero waste.

    It’s a unique way to build a connection with users and it becomes an emotional touchpoint in the user journey.

Conclusion:

If you are reading this, which means you have paid attention to above discussed top design trends. It’s time for all the creators to consider the customer as a central idea during R&D and delivering new features to provide exceptional customer experience throughout the journey. To know more about crafting the right customer journeys for your customers, get in touch, and we’d love to have a chat.

The post Top 10 Digital Product Design Elements Behind Great Customer Experiences appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

What are Rams’ 10 Principles?

1. Good design is innovative.
2. Good design makes a product useful.
3. Good design is aesthetic.
4. Good design makes a product understandable.
5. Good design is unobtrusive.
6. Good design is honest.
7. Good design is long-lasting.
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
9. Good design is environmentally friendly.
10. Good design is as little design as possible.

The question of the night was how to adapt these design principles to mobile. How could principles intended for industrial design be applied to touch screens the size of a playing card? How can the designer shape the user experience? As a follow up to the discussion, attended by both developers and designers, we started a reading list of recommended resources, see below. What else would you add? DESIGN BOOKS FOR DEVELOPERS

• Designing with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson
• Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell
• Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett

MORE ADVANCED BOOKS ON DESIGN

• Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
• Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Muller-Brockmann
• Meggs’ History of Graphic Design by Philip B. Meggs

The post Meetup: Design + Mobile in Dallas appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

First, some physiology—you have two eyes that create overlapping fields of vision, known as stereopsis. It is the brain’s attempt to reconcile those two different images that creates depth perception. This is what allows us to move through a 3-dimensional world and why you’ll probably never meet a one-eyed pilot.

As a culture, our obsession with 3D, artificially creating a forced depth perception, predates the current hi-tech 3D blockbuster movies and TVs. Victorian stereoscopes, children’s View-Masters, and other toys played with stereo optics, colors, and other visual tricks to fool the eye. Over a century ago, optics enthusiasts knew that objects at a distance appeared to move more slowly than objects closer up relying on your relative position—a delightful, but simple trick.

You’ll notice this when you’re driving up to a large landmark, the pavement below you is receding like quicksand, the telephone poles pass by pickets (first to the left, then in alignment with, then to the right of the building), but the building in the distance seems to be fixed. This is known as parallax, “the displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight.”

You will find parallax in iOS 7 as soon as you turn it on. Shift your hand slightly and you’ll see that the background image appears to move relative to the graphics in front as if they are on different planes and you are moving past them. (You’ll find great videos demonstrating this effect here.) It is a subtle effect, but it is found throughout iOS 7. Suddenly things that you thought were flat seem alive, responding to your movement, thanks to the accelerometer.

On the importance of parallax in design, Louie Solomon, Interactive Designer, [x]cube LABS explains, “I use parallax scrolling in app and web design because it accomplishes a few things: it adds dimensionality to a normally flat medium through the illusion of depth of field. And by doing so, parallax scrolling can also bring focus and importance to foreground objects.” He continues, “I also enjoy using parallax scrolling because it still feels new and oftentimes unexpected.”

As an instrument, the eye is very attuned to noticing even very small movements. There is a reason why we say something “caught the corner of your eye.” Whether you are actively paying attention or not, your eye perceives movement and directs your attention to it. Near constant movement is part of the world that we live in.

A multitude of small movements and animations in the new operating system make it appear lively and responsive, giving the OS its personality. It is playful and bouncy while bound by physics, weight and structure; but most importantly, it is responding to you.

Just as I mentioned previously about the importance of being grounded in space, achieved through transparent layers and dimensionality, the animations serve as reminders of real space and gravity while transporting the user from one screen or function to the next, zeroing in on an icon to open an app or giving a satisfying bounce when an swipe drops a screen down.

It is responsive not only to your touch and force, but environmental shifts, such as the parallax effects described above, all of which give it a vitality, sophistication and depth that complements the overall design style, while taking advantage of some of the oldest optical tricks in the book.

The post iOS 7: Parallax by Design appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

How do you create space and maintain order and visual interest on a screen the size of a playing card? Making liberal use of white space and using bright pops of color to guide the eye keeps the clutter to a minimum. While we float through the ether of digital space, we are still grounded in place. On our journey, we need to go back, to move forward, and go back again. Moving through blurred transparent layers helps us to feel like we’re in the same place even though the scenery/features have changed. In the map in your mind, you know where you are.

Shifts in design signal changes in society. When Herbert Bayer at the Bauhaus school established a crisp visual style with san serif typefaces, he was pushing against the heavy Gothic fonts universally used at the time. He, and the others at the Bauhaus, believed that the arts should be in service to all types of manufacturing, building, and making including industrial design, architecture, graphic design, even typography. They were reacting to the swift modernization and social changes taking place around them at the beginning of the 20th century; they believed that the objects and environments around them should reflect these shifts. It should be a designed world. With care and attention, even the most basic and functional items could be elevated through design.

It is Bauhaus’ legacy that we even care about the number of pixels around an icon. So, what does the new operating system signal? How does the shift away from skeuomorphic design reflect the current changes in society and our increasing interdependence on mobile technology? I would argue that stripping away the clutter and embracing a light, more buoyant, design style acknowledges that we are already in the cloud, connected, but untethered. We are not lost in the white space, but at home.

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