No Frills Design

A quick guide to help small, constrained teams build user-friendly applications.

Presented at ForLoop Ghana, themed Building for Tomorrow Today

Transcript

1. What do you call a developer who keeps refactoring code but never ships anything? !!!
2. A full stuck developer """
3. No-frills design From full-stuck to Full-stack Presented by Michael Annor at ForLoop Ghana www.michaelannor.com + twitter: @kobbyannor
4. No-frills design is about getting really small teams to work as efficiently as really large teams to build really great products that users will love and pay for.
5. Do this by being intentional about design from inception to shipping and after.
6. Today, it’s so much easier to create good enough user experiences.
7. Ordinarily building a great product will involve many people doing many things.
8. But we have constraints…
9. –Jason Fried “Best practices become worst practices when you think there’s no alternative.”
10. How might developers in a small, cash-strapped team develop an application with a good-enough user experience?
11. From getting the idea Talk to people about it. Find out what they are doing now, how they are doing it, their pain points. Is there room for your idea? Validate the idea with research
12. Prototyping the idea Think of creative, cost efficient ways of modelling the experience. Powerpoint sketches, Google forms, etc. Get something into the hands of users as quickly as possible. Think out of the box
13. Development With design systems and guidelines like the iOS Human Interface Guidelines and the Android UI Guides, it gets easier for developers to create user-friendly applications. This will save time and keep you from repeating common UX sins Put yourself in the shoes of the user
14. Shipping and Continuous Iteration With feedback forms and plugins as well as user monitoring and analytics tools like Hotjar and FullStory, you can know which portions of your applications need tweaking. Good UX is an everlasting work in progress
15. Design patterns exist to make it easier to create a good enough experience. But evaluate which patterns would make the best experiences for your users.
16. –Jason Fried “You can only iterate on something after it’s been released. Prior to release, you’re just making the thing. Even if you change it, you’re just making it. Iterating is when you change/improve after it’s out. So if you want to iterate, SHIP.”
17. –Paul Boag “Good design solves problems. Good experience design isn’t about good screens, it’s about good experiences.”
18. Thank You Delivered by Michael Annor at ForLoop Ghana on Saturday 24th February, 2018 in Accra www.michaelannor.com + twitter: @kobbyannor #