Four Ways to Start Leveraging Responsive UX Design

Most developers believe they can still get to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) while ignoring later concerns like efficiency, customer experiences, and beauty. But good user experience (UX) is often the difference between making and losing the sale. In the US alone, 23% of online shoppers have abandoned an order because the process flow to checkout was too long and complex. Thus, good design isn’t secondary or merely decorative, but instead must be prioritized in the product and platform design from the beginning. So here are the tips to help you leverage responsive and high-quality design.

Learn from the Design Community

There’s no need to rebuild the wheel when it comes to UX design. The first step is learning the vernacular, which will help empower you to better process relevant statistics and insights on better design. Then, engage with tried-and-true design best practices to isolate the elements of your UX that could benefit from some reworking.
However, even after you have the lay of the land, UX design is always evolving and best practices are improving. In order to truly access responsive design and keep up with industry trends, you must engage with the design community. Public platforms like Reddit are useful when you have a specific question, while more structured sites like the UX Collective can help you access a lot of information essentials more quickly.

Drive a Cohesive Brand Identity

A great digital marketing rule of thumb is to carve out a niche and keep it. Whether you use a unique brand color, logo, voice, or energy, (e.g. professional or funny) define what is essential about your brand identity. What do your users expect and value about their relationship and interactions with your organization? This is often a great time to leverage consultants to help highlight your specific brand strengths. Once you have quantified the key elements of your brand, everything else is malleable. Stay open to exploring new experiential design aspects that won’t impinge on your core brand identity, as this will lead towards a better, more dynamic design culture.

Be Strategic, Not Manipulative

Every time a user interacts with a brand, that becomes a part of their personal narrative of that brand and their relationship with it. This is why it’s important to be thoughtful and intentional about every aspect of user experience and retain information about how users engage with your platform. But there is a legal and ethical point at which information retention can go too far and infringe upon user trust. While targeted suggestions based on a user profile are often useful for users and beneficial for developers, there is a point at which too much targetting encumbers clean design and impedes on user trust. Have you ever asked, a little fearfully, how a device knew so much about you?

Two great questions to ask when designing are:

1. What benefit is the user getting from this design choice?
2. Would I personally be okay with this choice if I were the user?

While there are further legal and data privacy considerations to UX design, these questions offer a good starting point to improving user trust through good design.

Test and Adapt Your Design

While complete brand overhauls can be powerful, staggering changes often enable brands to see very clearly how users respond to each adjustment. This way if something does not have a good response from users, dev teams will know immediately and can adjust. Here at StarNavi, we use product design sprints to adopt and test new design ideas and concepts. As long as you stay attuned to your users and are willing to adapt to their needs, you will be able to foster responsive UX design and better user relationships.

We hope these tips were useful to you. Learn UX design best practices from the experts. As a leading digital firm, StarNavi design consultants create responsive, compelling designs that lead to better user engagement. Want to prototype an idea or take your design to the next level? Check our UI and UX services.

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