Have you ever been in a building that’s had several additions to it and the whole layout just seems confusing? Sure, all the types of rooms you need are there, but the flow is way off, and the door labeled “restroom” leads to a closet? It feels wrong and leads you to places you least expect. 

That’s your app with a healthy dose of design debt. The look and feel are off and the provided information doesn’t quite line up with what’s expected. But don’t fret, we’re here to help. 

We’ll take a look at the two major components of the UI and UX of your app—Visual Language and Information Architecture—and then walk through how to best dig out of that nasty debt. Finally, we’ll take a look at some steps to best avoid design debt in the future.

Visual Language and Information Architecture

Visual Language

The very first thing a user notices about your app is the look and feel of it. Now, we can talk all day about User Experience (UX) and how vitally important it is (and, it is!), but the visual identity, or language, is the first impression. 

Visual language describes all the things a user sees when they first open your app. So, not just your color scheme and font choice, but the size of your navbar and how rounded your buttons are. Having a consistent visual language is vital for an app, not just because it looks great, but because it helps the user navigate. If all the buttons to submit information are the same then the expectation for what those buttons do is clear at a glance.   

Often, a lack of visual consistency is the first sign of design debt. Maybe buttons don’t match a style or font sizes are all over the place and vary by 1-2pts. Basically, it looks like a cobbled together app with several styles thrown together. 

But having a clear visual language isn’t always enough. In fact, a strong visual consistency can actually mask some more deep-rooted UX Design Debt issues like poor information architecture. 

Information Architecture

In essence, Information Architecture (IA) is the practice of organizing, structuring, and labeling content in a way that allows your user to know where they’ve been, where they are, and where they are going in your app. So, it’s not just that your buttons are located where they should be, it’s that the text on them is clear and expected as well. 

When IA is done well, your users have a clear sense of the path they should take to achieve their goals. For example, if someone is ordering food through an app, they would rightly expect the menu button to take them to the menu. 

If the menu button instead takes them to the location address, that’s a problem. Poor Information Architecture can unintentionally hide important features, confuse your users, and, ultimately, lead those same users to abandon your app altogether.  

So now that we’ve talked about all the things that can go wrong, how do we fix it all?

Digging Out of Debt

To best work yourself out of debt, you first have to find all the issues you can and then begin solving them. 

Step 1: Design Audit

A design audit looks at both the visual elements of your app and how the information is presented. The end result is an analysis of the overall user experience that identifies visual inconsistencies and pain points while offering suggestions for a way forward. 

In practice, an audit will help you further define your app’s experience so that your users get the most out of their interactions. That means you’ll get guidance for visual style, color, and typography to ensure that the look and feel of your app is consistent throughout. You also get a list of critical usability flaws, the type that can be actual blockers to your app’s success. 

Finally, a design audit will take a hard look at your IA and determine what’s clear and what needs some help. Is all your labeling accurate? When you click a button that says “Contact Us” are you taken to a form or another, random page? 

Now that we’ve got the list, it’s time to start the clean-up. 

Step 2: Reduce, reuse, recycle 

The good news about cleaning up design debt is that we rarely have to start all over. In fact, one of the best ways to pay down design debt is by recycling previously used content, components, and visuals, a concept best illustrated through Cradle-to-Cradle Design. In a nutshell, Cradle-to-Cradle Design is the concept of taking a product that is no longer useful or wanted, breaking it down into its essential parts and using those parts to build something new.  

This is most often seen in physical products, like an electric toothbrush. We can take all the individual parts of the toothbrush—the tiny wires, springs, and motor—and break them down, reconfigure them, and then repurpose them in a new toothbrush. But how do we do that in a digital product? 

For this example, let’s consider an app designed to create and submit forms while also allowing team members to collaborate using that shared information. We’ll start with our main navigation bar—the same navbar that you’ve been iterating on, adding content to, and implementing new features in for the past three years.  Now, your navigation bar is bloated. 

Let’s start by breaking down our navbar into its individual components, both from a visual and content standpoint. It’s an easy lift to get our color scheme set and make sure our fonts are consistent, so let’s move to the content. 

In looking at our ‘reports’ and ‘teams’ tabs, we can take a step back and try to find new connections that allow us to reorganize and restructure. Maybe we now understand that the most important feature to know about our team is how their reports are connected to one another. So let’s merge teams and reports together and see what that looks like. 

Now it’s clear where your users should go to both create and share reports with one another. We’ve eliminated a step and cleared up any possible confusion with our IA. 

How to Avoid Design Debt

Unfortunately, there’s no way to completely avoid acquiring any debt, but there are things you can do that will ensure you and your team avoid the vast majority. Put simply, it comes down to planning. 

Start by making sure your project team is set up for success by creating a single source of truth for all things visual—things like button styles and font usage. It’s important the entire team has access to the style guide and usage documentation so that everyone on the team has the information they need to check where simple styling inconsistencies may show up. 

Second, focus on your Information Architecture. Make sure that you’ve put the time in to discover how your customers will use your app and what they expect from it. A lot of this context comes from an in-depth Customer Experience project and will help you make the best decisions possible in regards to how your information is laid out. 

BNR—The Debt Erasers

If all this seems daunting, don’t worry, you’ve got support. From a Big Nerd Ranch Design Audit to a full-blow Customer Experience project, we’re here to help dig you out of debt and, best case, start you on the right path before any accumulation even begins. Get in touch and let’s get started. 

The post How to Best Manage Design Debt appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

But there can be a downside to incorporating new product design ideas or features as you’re working on a software development project: design debt.  

Wait, what’s Design Debt? 

Design Debt is when new design elements are added to an application without considering how all these individual elements will eventually fit together. The end result is an app that has some great features and might look nice but lacks a design pattern or clear path of usability for the user. That usually means that important items might be hidden behind too many tabs or that the overall UX is just clunky.

You’ve probably heard of technical debt—the idea that choosing the easiest (rather than best) software development solution now causes headaches down the road as new code is added in.

Design Debt is similar, but while technical debt is a pain for other developers working to untangle cobbled together code, Design Debt has some pretty serious and negative implications for the end-user. Bottom line—your app will need some help. 

Why is Design Debt so dangerous? 

The worst part about design debt is that it’s not something that happens all at once. It creeps up on you, building and building until it’s big enough for you to notice. By that time, it’s a massive headache and a big mess to clean up. 

We recently partnered with a client whose work fits this design pattern perfectly. Prior to working with us, they had worked to further refine their app and to make it as useful as possible. And they were going about that in the right way. They were asking the right questions of their users and understood the problems their customers faced when using the app. 

The design issue was that they never fully mapped out how to best integrate the new features and functions in a holistic way. So, instead, they added a feature here and a functionality there. The end result was that the app contained all that the users wanted and needed, but was visually confusing. No one really knew where to look for the things they needed. The design debt had mounted up, and their users were paying the price.  

How can I avoid Design Debt? 

Plan time in your product lifecycle for designers to take a step back and look at all the individual feature components and see where they might be regrouped or reorganized. Don’t neglect to also plan for the time needed to refactor and move things around. Streamlining or removing feature components can help pay off Design Debt early before too much interest has built up and you’re looking at a rewrite. It’s cheaper to fix it in smaller increments rather than 3 years down the road and it’s a major rewrite for a development team. 

One great way to head off design debt is to take your app through a design audit, something that is a part of our Customer Experience offering. If you’re curious about what other benefits Customer Experience offers, get in touch.

Now, this is great if you’re just starting on your app and have the time to build all these processes into your design. What if you’ve found that you’re already in debt with your current app? Stay tuned for Part 2 – How to best manage design debt. 

The post Design Debt: What They Don’t Tell You About Design Thinking appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

Creating a user interface requires designers to make well-informed assumptions about the user and their environment. At Big Nerd Ranch, our design team backs up those assumptions by conducting research about the user’s environment, building the foundation on which user experience and user interface rest.

It’s important to take into account the user’s environment so that we can deliver a quality experience in every type of use case. In most scenarios, designers can make accurate assumptions about a user’s typical environment. However, highly specialized users and environments require us to rethink and reconstruct our knowledge of the situation.

I recently did just that when designing an iPad app that allows F-18 pilots to comfortably complete various in-flight tasks.

User Research is Key

To design a helpful, intuitive application for an F-18 pilot, I needed to know not only how the user’s environment would impact the experience, but also how this physical environment would impact the usage of the device itself.

I asked those who knew the situation best: the F-18 pilots themselves. I started by asking the pilots questions to better understand what they heard, saw, felt and thought while flying the F-18.

I discovered that pilots face a unique set of challenges during flight:

• They cope with bright sunlight during day flights and pitch dark during night flights.
• They face a limited range of movement within the cockpit.
• They wear gloves and helmets that limit their ability to use an iPad.

With these restrictions in mind, I could create solutions to physical, real-world problems that pilots face when using an iPad during a flight.

Overcoming Limitations

If you’ve ever used an iPad in the sun, you know that the glare on the screen can make it impossible to see.

To overcome this problem, I adjusted the contrast ratio of the UI elements, but also addressed the physical element in a practical way: I suggested a glare-reducing screen for the iPad and that the pilots wear polarized sun visors. Because we carefully took into consideration the context in which the pilots would be using the app, these design decisions made viewing the iPad much easier.

Next, I needed to consider how the pilots’ gloves would interfere with their ability to interact with the iPad. Wearing capacitive gloves would permit the pilots to press buttons in the app, but they would not be able to input required notes while flying. This meant that a capacitive stylus was required.

From my environmental research, I knew that the stylus:

• could not rely on a wireless WiFi or Bluetooth connection;
• should not require charging; and
• should have the ability to be tethered within the cockpit.

In short, the stylus needed to “just work,” even without power, and it needed to be tethered in order to prevent harm to critical aircraft components.

With these constraints in mind, I did some more research and found the best styluses in the market that met the users’ requirements and made it possible for them to use the iPad mid-flight.

Delivering on Client Needs

Without a solid understanding of the user’s needs and how their environment impacts use, it is difficult to deliver high-quality user experience for specialized use cases. But by taking into account the unique client needs and the environment in which the app would be used, we were able to overcome a number of challenges:

• The iPad app had to be visible in both bright light and at night.
• All components had to be tethered.
• Pilots needed to be able to use a touchscreen while wearing gloves.
• Important flight documents and maintenance information needed to be able to be reviewed and updated easily.
• The app needed to provide user feedback to confirm that it worked even in noisy, vibrating conditions.

By doing the crucial research to understand the user’s environment, I had the opportunity to make design decisions that were key to making the app usable. We:

• Delievered an app that gives user feedback through innovative UI animations.
• Created a streamlined navigation and intuitive display that allows pilots to effectively enter data and find the information they need.
• Built a design that works not just in daylight, but also in moonlit and night vision modes.
• Suggested anti-glare screens and polarized lenses to prevent glare, further improving user experience.
• Identified a stylus that will work effectively with the pilots’ gloves and stay tethered within the cockpit.

Does your new app need to work in unique circumstances? Is your current app not cutting it with your core user base? Our team is happy to provide a design solution that gives your users the best experience possible. Learn more about our app development and design solutions or get in touch with our sales team to see how Big Nerd Ranch can help.

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A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away…

On my first day of Industrial Design studio, my professor announced that we’d be working on a vertical studio project. (A vertical studio project is one in which all levels of the Industrial Design program, sophomore through senior studios, work together on a project simultaneously.) After the project announcement, the entire Industrial Design program began brainstorming how to solve the problem we were presented with.

After about five minutes of this, it became quite evident that the professors leading this vertical studio did not have a plan of action for controlling and leading the session. Long story short, the brainstorming session ended up being unproductive. The five loudest people in the room were competing about whose idea was the best, and the rest of the conversation was unfocused and kept getting off track. I felt frustrated that my valid, well-thought-out ideas were never heard nor recognized.

From that day forward, I’ve had a deep desire to have structure when a group discussion needs to produce actionable items.

Present Day

So what does that have to do with my current role at Big Nerd Ranch? A few weeks ago, I was planning a design discovery for a client. When we do discovery, we collect and distill necessary information about the product and users before starting design and development.

Part of that discovery process includes a competitor analysis—and I wanted to avoid a repeat of the scenario I faced during that vertical studio project. I thought to myself about how that brainstorming session could have been better, and how I might apply those solutions to on-site conversations with our client.

Competitor Analysis: The Issues

Like the studio session, a competitor analysis, if not closely monitored, can become a platform for the loudest people in the room. If only the loudest voices are being heard, others aren’t able to contribute and can start to check out of the discussion. We want to make sure that everybody in the project—no matter their rank or how much they talk—gets a chance to make their input heard.

I also knew that our time would be best spent on brainstorming ways our client’s application can be better than the competitor’s, rather than focusing solely on “Why do you like or dislike this feature of your competitor’s app?”

Solution Criteria

I had to create a solution that made sure:

1. Everybody’s voice would be heard.
2. The playing field would leveled so that all team members felt comfortable having a say in the discussion, regardless of their rank.
3. The discussion could manage itself without a constant need for refocusing.

So How Can We Fix These Issues?

Ellen Degeneres plays a really simple game with her audience. She gives them all a flip sign that has a “yes” answer on one side and a “no” answer on the other side. Ellen then asks a question and shows a clip or photo. The audience then votes by holding up one side of the sign or the other.

Pretty simple, right? I like how easy it is to understand the game and it seemed like a really great way to solve the issues with competitor analysis.

So, just like Ellen, I gave all of the participants in the competitor analysis a flip sign (except ours had Grumpy Cat for “dislike” and Doge for “like”). I created a presentation that laid out the structure of the game for my “audience,” and we got started.

As the host, I had 30 seconds to present a feature that the clients’ competitor uses in their apps. After I finished, I counted down from 3 and the clients held up their signs, indicating whether they liked or disliked the feature. The short timeframes helped make sure that my audience wasn’t swayed by my talking too much, or by their colleagues’ opinions.

Once the audience voted, we went around the table and allowed each participant up to a minute to explain his or her vote. Everyone got to speak, and full attention was given to that person while they spoke, helping to level the playing field.

The game went over really well, and it did what I set out to do:

• Conversations remained on topic, keeping the session incredibly efficient.
• Everyone’s opinions were voiced clearly and were listened to by others.
• Voting silently and visually allowed participants to stick to their decision, rather than being swayed by others.
• We gathered rich information and insight about what the clients were looking for in their application.

To Infinity and Beyond

This change in structure to one exercise has sparked me to start thinking of ways to make our discovery exercises more interactive. Design discovery should be a time of excitement and wonderful innovation with clients and designers. By adding new approaches to discovery, we can break out of the ourdinary and begin to create something spectacular.

The post Keeping the Conversation Moving During a Competitive Analysis appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

I started at Big Nerd Ranch just a couple of months ago as a Mobile UX/UI designer, and since then, I’ve been amazed by what I’ve learned and experienced. I wanted to share what brought me here, and what makes me want to stay.

A LITTLE HISTORY

I’m from Louisiana and as much as I love the place, design jobs out there are few and far between. I knew that relocating for a job was not just a possibility but a fact of life.

So after I graduated college, I started the job search. It was torture. I can’t even remember the number of jobs I applied for all over the U.S. But there was one company that caught my eye on a hot and humid Louisiana summer night, the smell of mosquito repellant wafting through the air. That place was Big Nerd Ranch. I remember thinking, “Big Nerd Ranch? No way that’s the real name of a company.”

I decided to find out more, and the next thing I knew, it was 3 a.m. I had watched all of the videos and I had creeped all the bios on the website. After all this research, I felt like I knew these people—and needless to say, I applied for the design position.

Out of all the jobs I applied for, Big Nerd Ranch was the one job I told people about. Like a teenage crush, I was obsessed. And just six weeks later, I had an offer letter in hand and two weeks to move from Lafayette to Atlanta.

THE FIRST WEEK

My first week working at Big Nerd Ranch was mind blowing. Not only did I have tons of information to process (from the amazing benefits to all the areas of expertise), but on my second day, there was a Bacon Bonanza! I mean, let’s be real, every college kid loves free food, and having breakfast with my coworkers was great.

I remember telling my family about my first week, and found that the best way to describe how I felt was that work felt like home. When I went to work, all my anxiety about living in a city by myself and not knowing anybody went away.

THE GOOD STUFF

One of the best parts about working here is the results-only work environment. This is what dreams are made of. I don’t have to worry if lunch takes too long, or if I get stuck in Atlanta traffic, which can be a nightmare at times. As long as I get my work done, nobody cares what time I get to the office in the morning, or if I work from home one day.

I like to change up my work environment to stay fresh and innovative. When it’s sunny, I have the freedom to work outside at a coffee shop. If it snows, I don’t have to drive to the office. (I don’t know how familiar you are with Louisiana winters but, some years they don’t happen, or the “low” is 50 degrees. This Louisiana girl is not driving in the snow. Mais, 50 degrees is cold, chère.)

I will say that the absolute greatest thing about Big Nerd Ranch is the people who work here. Everybody has a unique story about what they did before they found Nerdvana, whether it was earning a Ph.D. in physical chemistry or teaching high school English. Big Nerd Ranch doesn’t just hire on credentials, but also asks: Are you ready to continue learning? I get to work with people who are much smarter than me, and I can’t wait to continue learning from them.

I honestly have nothing bad to say about Big Nerd Ranch. How could I complain about a company that takes care of its employees and understands that it’s important for everyone to feel like they have a voice in what’s happening? Or about a company that allows me to eat copious amounts of free bacon and provides the best sandwich fixings ever? Seriously though, this place is the best. Look at the open positions and apply.

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