Upping your UX game
As experienced and committed developers, we are aware of and understand the importance of user experience in any web application including in mobile ecosystems. In fact, in many cases, UX becomes the compelling factor for users to access the web more in the context of smartphones. This is because of the increasing adoption of smartphones and tablets. A bad UX can break the business of the client and result in erosion of brand equity too. We have come across clients sharing their frustration of hiring a programmer for developing their business website only to end up with a not-so-elegant UX that in turn wasn’t able to take off in a meaningful way. In this blogpost, we will share our insights on how to upgrade your UX design skills. This assumes greater significance in the face of increased competition among UX designers and the need to stand out from the crowd.
Skilful Sourcing
One of the first and important things that UX designers need to remember is to gather as much inputs as possible, both from the client side and the user side. Getting multiple perspectives can help developers to design better in terms of both functionality and aesthetically. Gathering inputs in itself requires meticulous planning that includes asking the right questions to the right people through means like questionnaires, direct interviews etc. Secondly, developers must know that UX designing is a multi-stakeholder process involving agents like marketers, team leaders, testers, colleagues, clients etc. Having said that, they will need to deliberate on the various feedback given to/by them through different channels. Smart prioritising is of the essence. As you might have figured it out, communication plays a key role in both these stages.
Constant Reinventing
Next, developers would do well to stay abreast of the emerging trends and technologies like AI, AR/VR, IOT and so on. Why, you ask? Because, UX designing is strongly linked to business and we are seeing massive overhaul of businesses aided by these technologies. Therefore, developers would need to constantly upgrade themselves in order to stay relevant and be ahead of the competition. The advent of internet driven applications has another side to it – addiction. We have all seen the impact of social media and mobile games on teens and young working adults. More often than not, it can prove to be harmful for them, especially in the long term. This also needs to be taken into consideration while designing such intensive applications for the greater good.
Getting the message across
This in our opinion is crucial, given that there are many others who are working on your project – coders, testers, marketers, clients. Often, developers will need to don multiple hats effectively to get their message across. This also means putting efforts to understand others’ work. It will also give a complete picture of the business in its entirety. Ultimately, it goes a long way in producing great user experiences because of this one crucial factor and that is empathy. In fact, it would not be farfetched to conclude that empathy forms the basis for web development in general and UX designing in particular.
Now that you have gone through our post, what do you think is required for a great UX? Let us know your ideas below.
At HireIndianProgrammers, we strive for quality and consistency coupled with transparency without any messy contracts. For further queries related to hiring our services, contact our developer team today.
Design awesome websites with these CSS libraries
Most of us web developers and programmers would be familiar with CSS frameworks. Many a time, clients with an intent to hire a programmer expect a solid, responsive and accessible website. In an effort to deliver upon such expectations, programmers work round the clock deploying their best methodologies that also includes effectively leveraging the power of CSS. What is the beauty of CSS you ask? Front end web development plays a major role in attracting users to the website and CSS is a significant part of the same. CSS frameworks provide a robust and standardised platform for programmers to address the common and recurring issues of front end web development without having to start from scratch every time while designing applications for clients. After all, time is of the essence for web developers. CSS libraries on the other hand provide greater control to the developer.
There are several CSS libraries available on the internet which forms the basis for this blogpost. In our collective endeavour to better satisfy the clients, our developer team at HireIndianProgrammers came up with a list of cool CSS libraries that will definitely make the client’s website stand out from the competitive crowd.
CSS Wand
True to its name, CSS Wand empowers the developer to customise websites creatively with an easy copy-paste mechanism. The library is a simple CSS tool that allows for deploying cool animation effects on the client’s site. For example, designing buttons with a ripple effect and deliberating on the perfect loading animations.
Atomise
Atomise is a very minimalistic CSS library more suited for those clients that want to keep things simple or make an apparent understatement. As the library proclaims, Atomise is style neutral letting developers to define their own margin and grid classes and breakpoints. Perhaps the main highlight of this tool is its emphasis on human-readable classes.
Spectrum CSS
Coming from the stables of Adobe, this CSS is along the lines of Adobe’s design language. It is a CSS-only library meaning that only simple things like typography, checkboxes and the like are designed. Developers can access the demo from their website, thus giving an idea of different elements.
Woah.css
Having the ability to install either via npm or bower, Woah.css is for those clients that want to exhibit quirkiness in their website. While this may not appeal to serious business entrepreneurs, we are sure that there are some start-up clients with wacky sense of humour and serve their customers in the same manner. The different animation effects available on Woah.css speaks for itself in this regard. There is even an infinite class for repeating animations forever.
Denali
This CSS library is perfect for the serious formal business websites that want to project a highly professional image. Based on its own design language, the denali design language, this CSS is lightweight and flexible. Developers have the ability to design with custom variables there by making it easier for the tool’s components to adapt to any business brand.
relaxCSS
We would recommend this library especially for the beginner developers looking to easily deploy simple CSS animations on their client’s website. There are several components such as backgrounds, buttons, font weight, tables, text containers, margins and more. There is also a dark theme available. Adding these styles is not a difficulty which can be done by a grid layout.
Raisin CSS
This is a utility library that certainly requires some amount of expertise on the part of the developer to indulge with different classes. There are pre-built modules like CSS Grid, breakpoints, overflow and so on which allow for high levels of customisation.
There are many more such CSS libraries such vov.css, animation library etc. Having gone through the list, what do you think would be a great CSS library for your web development assignment. Share us your comments below.
For further queries in hiring a programmer, contact us here.
Colour – a Cornerstone of positive UX
A holistic web development calls for equal attention to be paid on different aspects ranging from functionality to engagement. This includes colour too. While it might be insignificant for some clients hiring a developer, in our experience at HireIndianProgrammers, we have found that colour affects user experience in indirect but surely critical ways. Therefore, clients hiring a programmer would do well to concentrate on this, for it can make or break visitor engagement. Colour is strongly linked to the kind of business and the positioning that the business hiring programmer wants to cater and project.
In light of this, our company, given that various clients hire developers from us for different projects and the resultant experience, thought to share some of the insights and issues pertaining to colour in user experience.
Targeting your demographic set
Whether it is a website or an app that the company hiring coders is designing, they need to get the right colours for the targeted demographic. This can be accomplished by consulting with both marketing teams and developers alike. For instance, men tend to engage more with dark themes while women have an affinity towards medium shades. This again changes with the culture – relevant in the context of a company selling in multiple markets.
Exhibiting ideas with colour
Ultimately all businesses that hire a web developer to develop their website have a single goal – convey an idea and make that a compelling reason for customers to buy that idea (goods or service). In other words, businesses want to build brand equity. Colours are a key part in reinforcing these ideas in the customer’s mind. Different colours mean different things for people. For example, if the business is selling eco-friendly stationary, then hiring a programmer with the right expertise would probably result in a green themed website. In the long term, colour plays a major role. Can you possibly imagine a red coloured Internet Explorer logo?
Enhancing accessibility with colour
Colour also plays the other role of enhancing user accessibility. User accessibility is part and parcel of user engagement in a website. Therefore, a client hiring a coder, needs to incorporate colour design elements that improve navigation and engagement. This can range from simple links, buttons to sliders, transitions etc; Hiring a developer with good experience will ensure that visitors to the client’s website thoroughly enjoy the browsing experience. Having a knack for placing contrasting elements is an art in itself and provides for maximum convenience – leading more conversion rates.
We hope that this blogpost allayed some of your concerns. Frustrated about hiring a programmer who is a right fit for your web development project? Don’t fret, for you have come to the right place. At HireIndianProgrammers, you can now hire a developer to concretise your business dreams. All you need to do after hiring a coder from us is to stipulate the requirements as per your vision. Consider the rest done with the highest standards of quality, transparency and dedication.
Still not convinced? Feel free to go through our past projects and you will know where we, at HireIndianProgrammers stand.
Contact our executives at HireIndianProgrammers and Hire a developer today and get started!
Top Payment Gateways for your E-Commerce Website
The work of developers can turn out to be quite challenging for normal projects itself. Add to it, an E-Commerce project, the number of project variables spiral out of way. Talking about E-Commerce, one of the most important components of E-Commerce websites are payment gateways. The mere presence of payment gateways and their design and implementation directly affects the end sales of the clients.
In this blogpost, as experienced Magento and OpenCart developers, we show you some of the options with regard to Payment Gateways.
We are sure that you are already familiar with some of the existing payment gateways such as – Stripe, PayPal, Amazon Pay, Authorize.net and so on. In your task to hire an OpenCart or Magento developer or any other website developer, you need to be aware of the fact that the choice of payment gateways changes with the website builder solutions.
The leading E-Commerce platforms are WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento and OpenCart. Let us go through them one by one.
WooCommerce
You must already know that WooCommerce requires WordPress to run on and therefore there are a large number of third party payment gateways to choose from.
Among them, we would recommend PayPal because – firstly, it is PayPal and if you are starting out new in the online business then PayPal would be apt as it brings about trust in your customers. Secondly, an E-Commerce site is clunky as it is and so adding a third party payment gateway through a plugin, this could negatively impact loading times. No customer wants that!
PayPal also has low processing fees, fraud protection and available to transact in a number of currencies.
Shopify
Shopify, a hosted website builder, is impressive and popular as well. While it is extremely easy to use, it is perfect for those clients who want to just start a store ONLY excluding other features like blog, social media feeds etc;
Like WooCommerce, Shopify is also equipped with an inbuilt payment gateway called Shopify which is actually powered by a leading platform called Stripe.
If you really want to use an alternative, please think again. This is because, in using an alternative, Shopify charges you for the third party payment gateway in addition to the processing fees. Apart from that, Stripe offers you fraud protections, quicker funds transfer and partnerships.
Magento
Magento is the third most popular E-Commerce site builder followed by OpenCart. Due to its close association with Adobe and other interactive platforms, it can be said that Magento focuses on complete business website variables like design, CRM, marketing and so on.
Magento development services is most suitable for big clients who want to develop large E-Commerce websites. Coming to payment gateways, Magento provides support for three different payment gateways namely – PayPal, Braintree and Authorise.net.
While Braintree is more apt for clients targeting customers in North America alone, both PayPal and Authorise.net are good options. However, Authorise.net has a slight edge over PayPal when it comes to huge quantity of sales. And it is much more simplified than PayPal.
Having gone through the list, we must let you know that our developers at HireIndianProgrammers offer both OpenCart development services and Magento development services.
Have any further doubts? Contact us here.
Top 5 Useful UX and UI Tools
Web programmers around the world have the mandate of not only providing error-free software but also address usability issues much before in the software development cycle. In fact, they are so common that these can be very often resolved in the design phase itself with the help of several tools.
In this blogpost, our dedicated programmers at HireIndianProgrammers having extensive knowledge of multiple software platforms, will delve into the different front-end tools to reduce usability concerns – providing for a breezy experience.
Mason
With Mason, programmers spread across different geographic locations can collaborate and work on a website’s front end. There are not much expenses related to the addition or modification of any feature that is usually associated in this part of the development cycle.
What makes Mason a hit among programmers is the fact that it takes care of the hard coding stuff and programmers can directly focus on the larger issues of deploying robust software. By using Mason, you can seek to bring your entire product team together, push updates in seconds and includes, among other things, features like, user registration, SSO, two-factor-authentication and so on.
Interfacer
Interfacer is a quality front end tool available for programmers to makes the best use of – especially with regard to its extensive library resources. This library is not only highly comprehensive but also a fun resource for programmers to experiment with.
Now what does this library contain? It is a collection of everything ranging from fonts, icons to UI Designs and templates for websites. All of this is free for programmers to work with.
Webflow
Webflow is a one-stop solution for all your website development needs including but not limited to website design, CMS, hosting etc; Even if you are a beginner in programmer, fret not, for Webflow is designed for both experienced programmers and beginners alike.
You can design whole layouts for every website or app from scratch with ease, therefore, Webflow is creative hotspot for programmers to unleash their full potential.
UXPin
UXPin is built on the premise of iterative wireframing and prototyping. A powerful cloud based prototyping tool, UXPin promises programmers to allow them to design, prototype and collaborate.Programmers can start designing from the pre-coded modules.
The best thing about UXPin is the provision of sharing designs across stakeholders including clients and other programmers on the team in any form like wire frames. This means that feedback becomes central to the design process ultimately reducing costly time resource.
With that we come to the end of this post and would like to reiterate to programmers and online business people the importance of UX. UX is one of those small things that impresses visitors to your site. A good UX will impress visitors to the extent that they go on to bookmark your website for future browsing – thereby increasing brand loyalty and word of mouth.
After all, a smooth online purchase experience is what all customers yearn for, isn’t it?
Start designing your website with a renewed emphasis on UX by hiring our programmers. Get in touch with our team here.