User experience, or UX, is extremely important for every software product. When Steve Jobs founded Apple, this idea of form over function was highly unusual in the software space. In Jobs’ view, you needed to build software and hardware with the customer’s experience in mind, then build the technology.

1. Minimalism

Ever enter an app with an impressive splash screen, tons of buttons, and functionality? It was probably a beautiful app — but you probably had to take a moment to figure out how to use it effectively. Apps that have exactly what they need and nothing more are becoming more popular for this very reason. When we aren’t inundated with a fancy GUI, we can more easily make sense of how to use the GUI.

The best software products shouldn’t take a second to figure out. Think of Google’s search engine — it was revolutionary because it simply was a text input box against a white screen. Now that minimalistic style isn’t so counterculture anymore — it’s the norm. App makers are looking for more ways to declutter, optimize, and simplify the experience.

2. Colorful screens

Vibrant colors are all the rage in 2018. While sleek, clean, minimalist apps are proving to be the most stylish this year, this doesn’t mean your color palette needs to be toned down. Vibrant colors can be a great complement to a minimalist design. Bright colors can help guide the users’ eyes, group functionality, and add a powerful aesthetic to an otherwise stripped-down application.

Bright colors have an appeal in their own right, but making your app look more fashionable is just one of the reasons this trend is on fire. Vibrant colors are not only beautiful, they’re functional. In fact, UX design has begun to employ colors as indicators of functionality. That is, your screen turns different colors when different actions are performed. 

3. Full-screen Navigation

UX designers are starting to realize that space is quite a valuable thing when making an interactive, 2D product. Instead of asking the user to fill out an entire form on a single scrolling page, UX designers are sending users to multiple pages, each with only one or two actions. This makes navigating an app easier and translates into less frustration from the user. Tiny, obvious steps can make your app more intuitive, less daunting, and more user-friendly.

4. Linear journeys

Some software applications overload users with choices. Software designers may think this is a good thing — supplying the user with lots of functionality at once — and it can be. Sometimes, though, it can get in the way of the primary function of your software product. For this reason, linear user journeys are becoming more popular. 

Guide your user through your app, one step at a time, take them from step one to the end step without interruption. Following this trend can help your users make more sense out of the app, and they may report more satisfaction with your product’s ease-of-use.

Conclusion

UX design trends are always worth following. At present, users are attracted to screens with abundant color, fully-navigated experience, linear journeys, and minimalistic design. Why? Users want screens that grab and guide them. Users want journeys that help them arrive at a desired action quickly and without a fuss.

Most tech companies still have a backward way of creating technology. They engineer a product with all the functionality they want, then begin work on making it user-friendly. All too often, creating a serviceable user experience is impossible this late in the game, however. 

Thinking of the user experience before you even begin prototyping will help your software product greatly. This is why it’s so very important to stay up-to-date on the latest UX trends. Even if you aren’t actively working on a project, take a few moments out of each day to see how UX designers are changing how we interact with technology.

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Over 60 million business pages have been published to date, yet only a small proportion of these businesses have acquired the digital marketing knowledge to leverage Facebook’s gigantic user base. 

So, how can you capitalize on Facebook’s ubiquity without a six-figure marketing budget? It will take a good deal of market research and patience on your part, but it is by no means a hopeless endeavor.

Research your customers to get a feel for the market

The key to marketing on Facebook is pinpointing your audience. With such a massive user base, businesses have to be wary of posting content mindlessly in hopes of catching a few dozen likes or shares. It’s important to avoid this trap. 

Courting loyal customers and fans is the lifeblood of your business, so it follows that your marketing campaigns must be built around them. 

Facebook advertising allows you to pinpoint your reach by defining age ranges, gender and interests so that you can more easily reach them. Your organic content should be sculpted around these attributes as well as you will see a more significant return on investment from content with strong intent and purpose than hollow posts aimed merely at promotion.

Ask questions to define your target audience

Here are a few ways to help define your target audience on Facebook:

• Collect data on your current customers 
• Survey potential customers
  • Ask questions like: 
    • What age group do they fall into? 
    • Are they in a specific geographic location? 
    • What is their lifestyle? 
    • What message communicates what they want and need?
• Research what your competitors are doing to capture the market and integrate them into your marketing strategy.
• Use existing research, like findings published by Pew, to evaluate consumer sentiment and adjust your tactics accordingly.

Craft a brand message based on market research

The average American spends only about 40 minutes a day on Facebook. While It is by far the most amount of time devoted to any social media platform, it is really a quite narrow time window to entice them to engage with your business. 

For this reason, it is of paramount importance to create a strong brand image. The written content and visual web design on your business page should reflect your business’s personality. 

Every post, whether promoted or entirely organic, should echo the brand’s voice. On Facebook, sharing image and video posts is very important, but they should remain relevant to your business’s image. 

Outshining your competition means not only sharing and creating high-quality, unique content but ensuring that the content is relevant. In order to be relevant, you’ll need to always keep your target market and your brand’s image in mind.

Set a budget before you begin spending

You won’t reach your marketing goals with quality content alone. In fact, organic reach has sagged to a lackluster 2%, as promoted posts continue to dominate the platform. 

Even if your content is of the absolute highest quality and relevancy, you will be consistently outperformed by those willing to shell out massive amounts of cash. 

There is no reason to fret, however. You can still succeed without draining all of your funds into Facebook. You will, however, most definitely be required to spend a little, at the very least. 

Set a budget during the planning phases of your marketing campaign, and strictly adhere to it. Set goals that are realistic within your budget, and be wary not to stray too far from them. As little as $5 a few times a week can help you achieve your goals, so there is no reason to overspend.

Conclusion

Large companies may have the resources to pump in virtually unlimited funds into paid advertising campaigns on Facebook, but this hardly constitutes as a marketing strategy. Furthermore, it is strictly impossible for smaller businesses to adopt the prodigious spending habits of multinational corporations. 

Effective Facebook marketing is essentially about precision. You must precisely define your target market, precisely craft your posts around a carefully-constructed brand and (even more) precisely allocate your budget. Digital marketing takes patience; steadily growing your reach and your audience takes hard work. 

This work cannot be circumvented by flooding cash into Facebook’s advertising platform, either. You need to work to hone your digital marketing campaigns and bolster those campaigns with quality content and a bit of cold hard cash, too. 

If you do invest the proper time and energy, however, you will be well rewarded. You very well could win at Facebook marketing — and win big.

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The task of the UX designer is to take a complex, abstract software product and turn it into something that any user, regardless of experience or technical knowledge, can employ intuitively. This task is actually a series of related activities that are embedded in every step, every layer, every aspect of software development. So while it may seem like a simple, straightforward job, it’s anything but.

Because it’s the nature of UX design, it’s necessary for UX designers to have a great deal of both theoretical knowledge and practical experience. Designers have to understand what works technically and they also have to understand what is appealing and intuitive to users. In order to understand what is intuitive for users, UX designers have to understand software design on an intuitive level themselves. They have to be able to understand the limitations of the software product they’re designing, the expectations of the software engineers, and the expectations of the user. 

UX designers have a great deal of strategies that help them make designs that serve their users. One of these strategies is to create a user avatar or a customer persona. In this exercise, they attempt to understand how a user perceives an application, why they would use a software application, and how they would go about understanding the application. 

When creating a UX persona, or avatar, UX designers imagine all sorts of personal details, such as occupation, likes and dislikes, and other behavioral traits. Creating these personas helps them better understand how to organize their designs and it helps them make sense of a deeply intricate and complex design process.

Creating personas shows how social the process of UX design really is. To master the design process, you must have a thorough understanding of how others perceive and understand software. The UX designer is in many ways a sort of software psychologist.

You have to understand the people who use your apps, the people creating the apps, and where their interests and goals intersect. This means you’ll have to be open to collaborating, communicating, and synthesizing all of the disparate opinions, perceptions, and expectations. This is in stark contrast to other facets of software development, that, in some ways, are unaffected, and can even flourish, in isolation.

The social nature of the design process is why creating great user experiences is nearly impossible in isolation. That is, great UX designers don’t make their designs alone. They work in concert with a team; a team of software engineers, architects, and other software designers. In order to flourish, designers need to be able to synthesize all of the information they get from all of these different individuals that comprise their team.

Collaboration is the crux of UX design. UX designers are liaisons: they translate abstract code into usable products. Isolation suffocates UX design. It’s nearly impossible to understand what’s going on in the minds of your potential users without interacting with them, asking for meaningful feedback, and revising your designs based on that feedback.

What if you’re a solo designer? There are still ways to find ways to collaborate and better your designs. Reaching out to other designers, reaching out to the design community, and reaching out to friends and potential users are great ways to get around this isolation. You may even consider hiring a design consultant to take a look at your designs during various phases of software development. 

Making amazing user experiences is impossible to do alone. You’ll need a dedicated team of designers to pull it off — or at least a little outside help from consultants, freelancers, and the design community. With a little help from other designers and potential customers, amazing user experiences are made.

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Only a few decades ago, VR was seen as a near impossibility. Now decreased cost and innovations and advancements in technology, has resulted in the proliferation of affordable consumer VR products. In fact, PlayStation VR, Sony’s attempt to enter the market, has met with great success. Sony has reported that PlayStation VR has reached over 2 million units sold.

What makes VR so appealing? Virtual reality is inherently more immersive and more visceral than most other forms of entertainment. AR apps like Pokemon Go have become wildly successful because of this fact. Although the Pokemon franchise has been around for more than two decades, nothing excited as much interest as its AR product. In fact, Pokemon Go generated $1 billion in revenue in a single year.

This may come as a surprise because of Pokemon Go’s limited functionality. Essentially the AR app only allows you to fight and catch Pokemon in a rudimentary manner. Other games released by Nintendo have been much more complex and nuanced than Pokemon Go, but nothing they have released before has been so active an experience in the real world. This same principle applies to VR.

While VR products may not be able to produce the same graphics or the same production value of other films and video games outside of VR, they can provide the user with something else. VR can provide users with a feeling of immersion that has previously not been felt. If you think about it, you’ll see that at the heart of VR is user experience. Take for example watching another person play a virtual reality game. Many people report that watching others play VR is not nearly as interesting as watching a film together or watching a traditional video game together. This is because VR is meant to be experienced. The user experience comprises the entire design of the product.

User experience is important for every software product, but it is especially important for virtual reality. What is UX design, exactly? You may think of the color combinations, the graphic design, and the interface of a software product. This, however, is just the top layer of the user experience. To put it simply, the interface is the look of the software product and the UX design is the feel.

Good UX design means that a software product is intuitive and natural, so much so that the user doesn’t have to exert much effort to understand how to best use it. VR adds another dimension to usability and accessibility given it allows humans to move in more natural ways. Instead of tapping on a screen, clicking around with a mouse, or clacking away at a keyboard, VR users are able to engage with their whole bodies. Instead of making users change their movements to meet the hardware’s limitations, VR hardware is developed to allow the user to move as naturally as possible. This makes the user experience inherently better and proves the rule that UX is one of the most important, if not the most important facet of every software product.

It has always been a challenge for software designers to make abstract code into a physical product that makes sense to end users. Flattening down a piece of software on a 2D plane has proved to be nearly impossible. Only a few have figured out how to take abstract code, abstract functionalities, and abstract features, and refine them and hone them into a product that makes sense on a screen.

VR eliminates this problem. Software designers only have to take the abstract code, the abstract functionality, and the abstract features of their software product and refine it into something that makes sense in any 3D space. Although this is still challenging it is a much easier task than putting abstracts of the product into the 2D plane, such as what you see with mobile phones, home computers and with TV screens. Once VR sees wider adoption, this fact is bound to change how we view, design, and refine UX.

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