With an experience of more than a decade, it is humanly to think that you know a lot and that we have ceased to learn anything new in our chosen field. The same happened with me when I started working with Pay1, self-confident and lofty about my design capabilities. But the loftiness lasted for not more than a day. The designing principles that I learned through my experience went all out the window. Making a user-friendly application for the retailer is not easy and for me learning curve started back again. Our users are unlike any users, they do not care about design rather care about the apps usability and its functions.
To understand the design principles that we follow it is pertinent to understand what is important to our retail network.
Keeping our users in the picture we follow some Basic Principles that we have devised while designing UI/UX
1) Applying Material Design Framework
Material designing has completely revamped the look of the user interface; a brand today is able to express themselves in a much subtle way. We use the principles to emphasise the sophisticated design ideas that we utilise in all our applications. Google’s designing principles help the applications look more tangible and the textures richer.
Pragati Capital utilises the material designing framework to its scope, letting the design speak for itself and letting the user navigate the application intuitively.
2) Focussing on visual Language
A good design does not hand hold the user to make them understand its functionality rather the motion in the application will define the application’s interface. The Pragati Capital application caters to an audience which relies more on visual language than obvious assistance. The language should be understood by everyone who is using the application. So whilst designing the flow and designing the UI we make sure that the language that we want the user to understand is formulated well visually. Every new product that we release should be accessible and embraced by our merchants and that can only happen if we maintain the same visual expression throughout.
3) Balancing practicality and creativity at the same time
We take creativity seriously; making the application look rich without taking away the simplicity of its usability is the bedrock of our designing principle. Every page has a purpose and every page is concise, informative and pleasing to look at the same time.
4) Taking user feedbacks
We take extensive feedbacks covering not only the technical side but also the UX/UI side of it. Based on the feedback we quickly evaluate the reviews and work on changing the design as fast as possible. Getting valuable user feedbacks is very tricky, bridging the gap between the merchants and the company during this stage is quite necessary as relevant user feedbacks is of utmost necessity, we document the user reviews and try to not iterate from the sample size that we felt have been able to provide good feedbacks in the past.
Developing a new Application/Platform is quite challenging but is also one of the most rewarding experiences when it comes to UX/UI here at Pay1. Every project teaches the team something valuable and pushes our boundaries to an enormous extent. Following the above basic principles helps us manage our work and narrow down our thought process. There are times when the process may come to a standstill due to creative block but tackling such issues gives us insights to how we can better and smoothen the process the next time when we get on the drawing board ideating and planning the development process. Doing something fancy designing-wise is always fun but gleaning from the past projects and analysing what works and what does not is always important.
Rule of the thumb when it comes to designing UX/UI at Pay1 is to “keep functions and designing simple without taking away its efficacy to the user.”
