thespokedesignlabs

Web & mobile Design | Digital product Strategy | Front-end development

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How to choose the right Product Design agency?

In recent years, the demand for product design agencies has seen a tremendous increase. It’s actually not a surprise as building competitive products today seems a little difficult because of the amount of competition in the market.

With thousands of design agencies in the market now, it may be tricky to identify the right agency for your product design needs. To select the right product design agency for your business, you have to take into account a number of variables like their portfolio, client ratings, personnel strength, design methodology, and more.

To make your selection process a smooth one, we provide for you in this blog what a product design firm really does, how they contribute to product design, and what exactly to look for when hiring one.

We shall be exploring extensively,

A Product Design Agency and what they offer?

When do you need a Product Design Agency?

How to choose the right Product Design Agency: (What to consider)?

(To know more: How to choose the right Product Design agency | SpokeDesignLabs)

A good product design agency works in sync with your business objectives and the overall product's scope, market acceptance, usability, and aesthetics. It's important to do your research from the ground up to find the right one for your product. Hopefully, you'll find the right match for your product.

‍Are you having issues navigating this process or your product design?

‍Feel free to get in touch with us, we’ll be glad to guide you through it all.

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The Complete Guide to an Effective UX Research in UX Design.

If the peak of a mountain represents ultimate success in UX design, getting to the top can only be made possible by employing various UX research methods.

It’s quite strange, but yet a fact that UX design's most critical and frequently undervalued step is a user experience research and user testing. And it’s funny because normally, every design choice should be informed by UX research and user testing.

UX research today is the key to grounding ideas in reality and improving the odds of success in UX design. It can be intimidating, may appear to be a financial burden, time-consuming, and difficult to attain, but it's by far the best approach to UX design success.

Delving deep, let’s explore,

What UX Research really is?

How important is UX research?

What are the steps for conducting UX research?

What results can I expect from UX research?

(To know more: The complete guide to an effective UX research in UX Design | SpokeDesignLabs)

To wrap things up,

An excellent user experience is dependent on user research. User experience (UX) is subjective because it describes the experience that individuals have while using a product.

To create products that suit both customers and businesses, designers must research customers' needs, goals, contexts, and unique tasks. A product's design can be shaped through the application of appropriate UX research methods.

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The Complete Route Guide to Omnichannel UX Design.

The need for omnichannel UX has greatly increased because users these days are relating with businesses in evermore diverse ways, most times shuffling between channels throughout their relationship with a brand’s product or service.

When it comes to how a brand is perceived across different channels, a user expects to see it as a single entity. For example, a website and social media channels belonging to a particular brand should not give a user different experiences. When experiences across various communication channels differ or become inconsistent, users develop confusion and most times leave for another brand.

Omni-channel UX means creating one cohesive, consistent customer experience across all channels.

Delving deep, Let’s explore:

What Omnichannel UX really entails and its 5 elements.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel experience.

3 tips to ensure a seamless Omnichannel User Experience Design.

(To know more: The Complete Route Guide to Omnichannel UX Design | SpokeDesignLabs)

Omni-channel experiences should aim to provide 360-degree engagement between brands and their customers across all channels and touchpoints.

While many stand-alone websites, social media pages, and apps are strong by themselves, it’s important to remember that a true omnichannel experience needs to be designed around people and their needs.

‍It’s often both expensive and challenging to create a backend platform and APIs to facilitate a true omnichannel experience across multiple channels but it’s entirely worth the investment, ensuring satisfaction, returning customers, and even creating the potential to transform customers into brand ambassadors.

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UX Consultancy: How It Can Help Your Business.

The field of UX has seen huge advancements in recent years. Well, that can be justified since UX is one area that needs consistent learning and improvement. UX designers, UX researchers, UX writers, UX managers, and UX strategists are roles you may have been familiar with, but UX consultancy? It’s one term turning up often lately.

A lot of startups or even established businesses are getting great product ideas launched but are experiencing very low or average user acceptance or customer retention, it’s no surprise UX Consultancy is getting the look in these days.

Are you also experiencing these pain points as a business owner?

Professional Consultants are there to relieve you. In this blog, we’ll give you a complete overview of the UX consultancy field and guide you toward finding just the right partner.

UX Consultancy and Why!

Difference Between a UX Designer and UX Consultant.

How exactly can a UX Consultant Help Your Business?

Things to Look for When Hiring a User Experience Consultant.

Finding a good UX Consultant?

(To know more: UX Consultancy: How It Can Help Your Business | SpokeDesignLabs)

You can also find a good UX consulting firm through referrals from friends or other businesses that have used their expertise. Some UI/UX Design agencies provide effective UX consultancy as part of their services, they are also great options for a good service.

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The Ultimate Guide to Building a Website Redesign Strategy.

Do you know It takes less than a second for users to decide whether they like your website or not?

In fact, 88% of your website visitors won’t come back after having a poor experience with your website.

That’s probably the reason why you’re not getting that much traffic, conversion, or users are maybe even coming on board but bouncing off your website at a high rate. Are these your pain points? Then, you should consider some drastic measures like a website redesign, etc.

‍A website redesign can take a long time to implement, give results, and convert customers. But still, it is an essential process to get the attention of your ideal customers.

Delving deep, let’s talk about:

What website redesign really is?

Why you might need to redesign your website (signs), and

The end-to-end website redesign process.

(To know more: The Ultimate Guide to Building a Website Redesign Strategy | SpokeDesignLabs)

A website redesign project might be a long process with a need for consent optimization and improvement, but it sure does pay off. Now that you know how the comprehensive process works and got the tips, it is time to get to work.

Hope you nail it!

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5 B2B UX Design practices to ensure an enthralling User Experience.

Creating an enthralling B2B website or mobile app requires far more than making it look good and explaining what you do. You want to develop a buyer persona to ensure you’re writing content with the right audience in mind. You want to conduct keyword research to ensure said audience finds you.

And yes, you most definitely want to make it look appealing so that people want to navigate through your web pages and eventually become a client. As, the key to this entire process is an engaging user experience. Once you get that right, you’ve won half the battle.

Best practices are like your starting points, they are not what you should end up with, but often where optimization begins.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through 5 best practices to ensure an engaging user experience on your B2B products.

Making your product status highly visible

Matching your system to the real world

Allowing user control and freedom

Using consistency and standards

Offer help and documentation

(To know more: 5 B2B UX Design practices to ensure an enthralling User Experience | SpokeDesignLabs)

Whether you’re designing your B2B Product or going through an optimization journey, following these practices is simply an act of sanity. Even though these practices aren’t ironclad laws of product design, they’re the perfect place to start.

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Object-Oriented UX: The easiest method for complex products.

Here's a little introduction for you to understand what Object-oriented UX Design means,

Object-oriented UX (OOUX) is a method for structuring a space that emphasizes the objects – that is the things users interact with. It is a design procedure that places importance on how users are presented with information while using a product. It helps the Information presented to be organized in a manner that will match up with the user’s mental model.

Object-oriented UX Design is basically an ‘objects-first’ approach to product design. With Object-oriented UX Design, you are presenting users with the main objects (elements) immediately they come on board, so they can get a clear direction with the product and not leave confused.

Let’s delve quite deeper and we shall consider this in the remainder of this blog:

What is Object-oriented UX Design?

Why should one consider the OOUX process?

How does OOUX work

(To know more: Object-Oriented UX: The easiest method for complex products | SpokeDesginLabs)

OOUX isn't just a process; it teaches you a new, more practical, comprehensive approach to product, design, and development work and improves your overall skills. It can help keep the Information Architecture lean and simple while scaling your application.

Looking to design complex products?

You can make use of this approach or get across to us for effective consultation or help.

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5 Tips for Building UX Maturity: Elevating Product Experience.

UX maturity refers to the level of sophistication of UX practices applied by an organization.

While businesses have started acknowledging just how important UX design is, they still have a misconception that getting design personnel on board is all that UX maturity entails. Well, it sadly isn’t that simple and direct. Organizational maturity goes beyond personnel UI/UX skills and roles, it requires a fusion of the quality of the UX process, principles, and values across an organization.

Let’s delve deep into UX maturity and consider:

The stages of UX maturity.

Why is UX maturity so important?

The Tips for building UX maturity.

(To know more: 5 Tips for Building UX Maturity: Elevating Product Experience | SpokeDesignLabs)

To successfully evolve your organization’s UX Design capabilities, you must understand your current starting point, determine precisely where you plan to arrive, and chart the path to take along the way. UX Maturity is the concept and method which will help provide clarity and track your progress on this journey.

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The Complete Guide to User flows in UX Design.

When you have to get a grasp of how exactly a user will navigate your product or its features during UX design, you should always look to get into high-level user flows. User flows give a description of the whole user path through the product via digital visualization. It helps to determine how many screen layouts are needed, what order they should appear, and what components need to be present.

This eventually ensures your final product design is highly qualified, convenient, and absolutely usable.

1. What exactly is User flow though?

2. Is User Flows necessary?

3. What’s the difference between user flows and user journeys?

4. How do we actually use user flows in the design stage?

(To know more: The Complete Guide to User flows in UX Design | SpokeDesignLabs)

User flows are part of your final deliverables and help stakeholders understand the value of the idea and understand how they affect the users through processes and actions. Keep in mind that user flows are often revisited and edited so you will always be updating them and keeping them current.

Once you have good user research and understand your pain points and business objectives you can begin to map out user flows. Start with a high-level one and then progress into a detailed user flow (task flow) that should eventually lead to a low-fidelity wireframe and wire flows.

Have a go at making one and let us know how it goes!

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Top 5 UI/UX Design Principles for today's website success.

Are perfect designs even possible? Can one Product design actually satisfy everyone?

It’s quite interesting when you see some designers dream of achieving perfection with their product design, one that will satisfy everyone and at the end of the day ends up with one that barely 50% of their users approve of.

Well, you can’t blame them sometimes, satisfying everyone can be one heck of a task.

As much as in reality, it seems largely impossible to have a 100% perfect product design, one that satisfies every single user, there are some principles that if strictly adhered to, will guarantee you near-perfect UI/UX designs. These UX design principles were developed by thorough study, experimenting, and design experiences over the years. It is the cream of designing fraternity.

Follow closely as we explore these principles to ensure your website is alluring to a large chunk of your users.

‍1. Principle 1: Make it Easy (Clear and minimalist website UX)

2. Principle 2: Have a great, clear, and prioritized page design

3. Principle 3: Minimize input and commitment from the user

4. Principle 4: Instructions and Error tolerant forms

5. Principle 5: Optimize for diverse mobile users. (The Golden Ratio)

(To know more: Top 5 UI/UX Design Principles for today's website success | SpokeDesignLabs)

UX design is all about creating things that people can truly enjoy and rely on. It’s about understanding who you’re designing for and listening to what users tell you, while still innovating and using plenty of creativity.

Hopefully, you’re now well suited to embark on your own adventure in the world of UX design! If you are in need of an external team of professionals to be your guide or help with some other aspects of UX design, we would be just around the corner.

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Top 5 UI/UX Design Agencies to work with in 2022.

When it comes to the digital space, user experience takes excessive precedence and is an important component in determining just how successful a product will be. To gain a competitive edge today, businesses are swiftly making investments in User Interface/User Experience Design, and whilst considering a stat like: “90% of users won’t return to a site solely due to bad UX.”, one can absolutely see why.

Great UI/UX requires dimensions of product design that not only look great but are flawless and invoke an emotional connection with users. While Some big businesses already have a department dedicated to UI/UX designs, a lot of other businesses consult and hire professional user interface/user experience (UI/UX) agencies who are equipped with researchers, consultants, UI/UX designers, and interaction designers to ensure success all around with their product.

‍

To help you find the right design partner for each step of your web design journey, we rank the top 5 UI/UX Design agencies around today. We’ll also touch on hiring the best UI/UX Agencies (The “How to” FAQs), so follow closely as we explore.

1. The Best 5 UI/UX Agency around today to work with,

Spoke Design Labs

NEURON (UX/UI Design and Digital Strategy)

Lighthouse

Clay

Huge

2. How to hire the best UI & UX Design Company in the World (FAQ)

(To know more: Top 5 UI/UX Design Agencies to work with in 2022 | SpokeDesignLabs)

In many cases, UX design is not created once but necessitates long-term attention and development. It is usually better to work with a professional UI/UX Design company for these reasons.

Top-class firms like Spoke Design Lab are reputable, reliable, and focused daily on perfecting their work of UX design. One benefit of hiring agencies like this is that you have the chance to get across to their previous clients and see portfolios of their work.

This presents you the chance to pick an agency that reflects the overall style and essence that aligns with your organization’s needs. Because UX agencies focus on user experience design, agencies like Spoke Design Lab bring lots of experience and knowledge that is difficult to cultivate with an in-house UX design team.

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Branding in web interfaces: How customer experience can make you stand out.

Every time you hear the word “Think differently”, What’s the first picture that comes to mind, Apple right? Or whenever you come across the Swoosh logo (the one that “marks correctly”), you think Nike, right? That’s the power of branding.

When it comes to consistent branding, however, it takes an average of 5 to 7 brand impressions for a customer to remember your brand. A catchy name and a tagline aren’t enough.

‍Branding is all-encompassing, it’s not just the logo you design, the font you use, or the products you sell. It’s all these things and much more. It’s the customer experience you provide. It’s the philosophy you embrace and the culture you adhere to. A brand is a feeling that a business evokes in customers—it’s what makes your business unique.

‍In this blog, we’ll define the importance of branding in web interfaces, and how you can promote awareness and make your products and services more recognizable on the market thanks to a well-thought-out user interface (UI).

Establishing a recognizable brand identity through branding in UI.

The right UI approach can make your brand stand.

Establishing your Voice, Personality, and Action.

Hire business-oriented product designers.

(To know more: Branding in web interfaces: How customer experience can make you stand out | SpokeDesignLabs)

To wrap it all up,

Adobe claims that 38% of users stop interacting with an app or website if it’s not engaging or has an unattractive layout.

As, UI/UX Design and Branding work hand in hand. This is your chance to offer a great design that will help you resonate in the user’s mind. Companies that are known for their brand persona will stand the test of time, and their recognizable image won’t be mistaken for another. Once remembered for excellent user experience and a pleasant user interface, your brand will attract users time after time.

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Effective Product Designing: Thinking Big and Releasing Small.

If designers want to work agilely and still design great, user-centered products, they need to stop designing faster and learn how to start designing less. You need to shift from a mindset where we design everything all at once and move toward a mindset of designing the smallest possible thing that can deliver value to our users.

By releasing smaller things more frequently, we have more chances to get feedback on our ideas and execution.

If something is going to be a massive failure, sometimes you can find out very early by shipping or releasing a small version of it. Imagine all the features you wouldn’t have created at all if you’d known how they would perform!

Imagine all the value you could deliver to users if you weren’t busy building enormous versions of things that nobody wants. Delivering small features early gives you information that can help your team make a decision about whether the rest of the feature is worthwhile.

By breaking things down into shippable chunks, you can deliver value early and often and get feedback on our ideas before sinking tons of resources into them. It’s hard and time-consuming, we know, but that’s actually the best approach to effective product design.

How do you design small?

Understand the Goal

Experiment with One

Start without Code

Don’t Deliver to Everybody at Once

Accept Some Imperfection

Commit to Iterating

(To know more: Effective Product Design: Thinking Big and Releasing Small | SpokeDesignLabs)

It’s one thing to have a big product vision, it’s another to follow an effective process to ensure reality is a success. Releasing in bits is basically about compounding value and continuously improving your product along the design process by releasing fragments of the product for testing. This is to ensure the final big product vision resonates perfectly with users.

If you want to get more agile, your designer should definitely be one that will release your product in bits, get feedback, iterate more if needed, and then make improvements, all to ensure the end product is nothing but perfect.

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The Ultimate UX Strategy Guide.

As more and more companies begin to recognize the value of thoughtful UX design, the role of UX strategy is becoming more unavoidable. A well-defined UX strategy is as important as your organization’s mission statement. It serves as a liaison between the business and the user, helping the design team create user-focused products that fit the company strategy and brand identity.

When we talk about digital product UX strategy, we mean a detailed and flexible plan aimed to:

- Match your users’ needs to create user value,

- Deliver this value to users, and

- Provide a seamless experience while using your product.

Taking a deep dive, we’ll take a closer look at the four tenets of UX strategy, how to create a successful one, and some crucial tips you’ll need to create a result-inclined strategy.

The four tenets of UX Strategy.

Creating a successful UX Strategy.

5 important tips for creating a result-oriented UX Strategy.‍

(To know more: The Ultimate UX Strategy Guide | SpokeDesignLabs)

It’s obvious that for enterprise UX strategy is a must in the new phase of product development, as it will help in a shared vision at all development levels, broadcast it to the entire cross-functional product team, etc., which will increase efficiency.

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How great Product Design decisions are made at each stage.

Quite a several people out there still have a notion that designing a product is a process of creating something that showcases beauty or art, which isn't absolutely accurate.

Aesthetics or art is actually part of the job, but it definitely isn’t the job.

Every Product design always comes with its own purpose, and it’s not about making something look good. It’s basically about solving a problem. Product Design that attains success, in the end, entails everything from research, definition, iteration, wire-framing, prototyping, small group testing, and real-world testing. It’s not one easy or straightforward process.

To help you get a deeper understanding of the decision-making process, we’ll explore in this blog the considerations or factors that influence design decisions at each stage of the product design process.

How great Product Design Decisions Are Made at each stage of the process:

1. Affinity Mapping: At the user research/ analysis stage.

2. Problem statement definition: At the definition stage.

3. User Journey Mapping & Sketching: At the ideation stage.

4. Clickable Prototype using a design system in Figma: At the prototyping stage.

5. Usability testing.

(To know more: How great Product Design decisions are made at each stage | SpokeDesignLabs)

Crowning it all up,

The most important thing to remember when designing products is that you are ultimately designing a product for people to use. It's not about beauty, it's basically about the problem and how best to tackle it.

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The full guide to building a brand strategy that resonates to your goals.

Whether you’re a fresh start-up on the tech scene or an established multinational corporation, effective branding is important to the continued growth and success of your company. But a brand isn’t anything if you don’t have a concrete strategy behind it.

Your brand may be recognized by your name, logo, colors, ads, and product designs, but what your brand is, goes much deeper. Your brand is your reputation. It is the perceptions and emotional associations that live in the minds of your customers. It is what makes you identifiable and distinctive from the competition.

Customer perceptions shouldn’t happen by accident. The identity of your brand needs to be intentional, crafted, and carefully tended. That’s where brand strategy comes in.

A brand strategy aligns with your marketing efforts.

It aligns all your marketing efforts across channels. It ensures your campaigns, imagery, and social media marketing share a consistent voice and vision. Consistency of message and identifiable branding are important for your marketing efforts to succeed.

A brand strategy supports collaboration across teams.

A brand strategy provides a set of goals and a shared vision for your employees across teams. Your teams can see how their efforts contribute to the bigger-picture project and ensure that every decision helps achieve the larger branding goal.

A brand strategy gives you metrics to measure success.

It is important to have clear metrics for success for any large project. Your brand strategy will set benchmarks for your teams and give them a shared set of metrics to measure the success of their efforts.

Today, We’ll be guiding you through a full guide on how to develop a branding strategy for your business.

Steps to develop a brand strategy:

1. First Audit your current branding and marketing strategy

2. Establish your brand purpose (business’s mission and vision, The “Why” etc.)

3. Develop your buyer persona

4. Identify and analyze your competitors

5. Develop your brand identity

6. Establish your visual identity (Logo, website, App, etc.)

(To know more: The full guide to building a brand strategy that resonates to your goals | Spokedesignlabs)

A great brand strategy is all it takes,

Having a concrete, well-researched, and adequately managed brand strategy can bring your company more customers and ensure your company’s growth. The strategy serves as a blueprint of your company’s success, and investing in your brand strategy will pay off once your company gets closer and closer to achieving its vision.

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Data Analytics and Product Design: A match you must make to succeed.

Trusting only your gut and not tapping into data analytics for real-life feedback can be a dangerous approach.

Effective use of data gives a nuance of how real people use various products and drives your business towards a product design that resonates with target users all around.

Data is good, but can yet be a calamity when you get your priorities wrong.

Mark Twain said:

“Data is like garbage. You’d better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it.”

It’s one thing to collect data in mass, It’s another to use it effectively towards a clear purpose or a business goal.

We’ll walk you through the best approach to data analytics, how to leverage it to be on-point with user needs, and ultimately design products that are relevant and timely.

Starting with,

‍1. How is data used to enhance user experience today?

2. The effective Process of data analytic usage.

(To know more: Analytics and Product Design: A match you must make to succeed | Spokedesignlabs)

‍All in all,

Data analysis may not provide all the answers, but it’s a critical piece of the puzzle. It’ll help you and your team take the data-inclined approach which will in the long run shed more light on what’s happening with your product and give you the confidence to iterate intentionally, conduct user research strategically, speak with stakeholders, track your progress, and create better designs that align with your user's mental models.