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This post was written by Ivana Miličić, Designer for Toptal.   Wireframing is a major step in designing any user interface, whether a website, application, or software product. Without distraction in the form of visuals, colors, typography, styles, and effects, you can be more focused on defining content hierarchy and user experience. Doing low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes will help you test and iterate earlier and more often in the process. Low-fidelity wireframes allow designers to work faster and develop products that users will love. There are a lot of different wireframing tools to choose from in the wild. Which one you choose will depend on your personal preferences and workflow style. Just like a lot of designers who have moved to digital design from the print ...

This post was written by Tanya Junell, Designer for Toptal.   Being a seasoned designer means having the frameworks and skills to tackle most design problems with ease. Be it your expert-level UI talent or UX guru status, you’ve likely had great success creating beautiful digital products for your company or clients. But in this age of lean startups and entrepreneurship, designers often find themselves in stretch roles where they are not only in charge of a product’s design but also in charge of coming up with the type of product to build. Whether working in a small product team or taking the leap of building out their own mobile or web app, designers may find it necessary to add the skill of product strategy to ...

This post was written by Tanya Junell, Designer for Toptal.   Being a seasoned designer means having the frameworks and skills to tackle most design problems with ease. Be it your expert-level UI talent or UX guru status, you’ve likely had great success creating beautiful digital products for your company or clients. But in this age of lean startups and entrepreneurship, designers often find themselves in stretch roles where they are not only in charge of a product’s design but also in charge of coming up with the type of product to build. Whether working in a small product team or taking the leap of building out their own mobile or web app, designers may find it necessary to add the skill of product strategy to ...

This post was written by Joel Lopez, Designer for Toptal.   When it comes to designing a product, designers are looking for the best solution to ensure a product meets the needs of the user as well as the needs of the business. Making a conversion is an important business goal when convincing a potential customer to buy a product or use your service. But what role does good user experience design play—including usability testing—in ensuring the highest conversion optimization rate possible (i.e., of leads to sales)? There are a lot of articles out there that claim to hold the ultimate key to conversion. There are always new trends or fads promising that, by changing a button to one particular color, using ...

This post was written by Miklos Philips, Designer for Toptal.   Our daily lives are are saturated with amazing images. Visual design experiments become hot graphic design trends, and suddenly we see them everywhere. Striking visual designs are plastered all over the sides of buses, posters, billboards, TV ads, magazines and of course, digital products. They have many names, including duotone, double exposure, scan lines, glitch, smudge, color channel, photo masking, vibrant-garish colors, and misprint. The graphic design trend “glitch” on a New York City subway advertisement. As with fashion, design trends are often recycled from decades past—we see them coming back again and again: Russian constructivism, Bauhaus, screen printing, 1970’s… etc. Simple, saturated geometric design patterns have been around for ...

User experience design (UX design) is the practice of design that focuses on the user and a product’s usability in order to deliver the most satisfying experience. While some aspects of user-centered design can be intuitive or rely on UX best practices, delivering great user experience requires deep insights into the user’s needs, goals, and pain points. Uncovering these insights requires UX testing. User experience testing is one of the most misunderstood yet crucial steps in UX design. Sometimes treated as an afterthought or an unaffordable luxury, user research and UX testing should inform every design decision. In order for UX testing to be effective, it must involve the most important people—your users/customers. For UX designers, running tests with actual users may seem ...

The blog. It’s the oft-overlooked stepchild of a website; yet, positioned properly, it can generate an almost unlimited number of highly qualified leads. There is a proven, five-step process for transforming your blog into a high performing engine for acquiring qualified prospects. We’ll go through examples of blogs that are doing it right—along with some examples of what not to do. No matter what you’re selling, you’ll learn how to design your blog for maximum conversion success. Every business with an online presence has steps that a person must follow to become a customer. Whether people are buying your product or signing up for some other service, there will always be a certain number of steps they’ll have to take ...

Designing a UI interface with animation and transitions in mind is a great way to plan a better user experience (UX) for your next app. Animated micro-interactions are the perfect way to stimulate user engagement, in a world of short attention spans. This is why Airbnb recently introduced Lottie – its “new open-source tool that makes adding animation to native apps a snap.” Projects like Lottie show the increasing importance of adding motion as a new element for crafting enhanced UX for both apps and websites. In this tutorial, you will learn effective UI animation techniques using Principle for Mac. After you’ve gone through this guide, ’ll be able to turn dull and static mockups into interactive prototype to better ...

This morning the song “This Magic Moment” by The Drifters popped into my head for no apparent reason. Those restless neural networks in our brains do funny things. They make seemingly unrelated, unconnected thoughts and concepts connect. Slapping my forehead I said to myself: “But, of course…” Recently I’ve been thinking about those magic moments in UX that happen when we’re interacting with our digital devices or services. We encounter perfect moments, when everything falls into place, in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time, as if it’s magic. It could be at your bank, in your car, a vending machine, or on your phone. I believe the era of anticipatory design is here, or least within our ...