Category: Services

What Are the Best Practices of Outsourcing UX/UI?

Posted on by galaxy-admin

UI/UX is the backbone of any product as it is the first thing that users notice or are drawn towards when they visit a website or start using an application. The success of your company is largely determined by how happy your customers are with your product offerings. This is the reason why businesses are increasingly paying a lot more attention to UI/UX.

When it comes to building a UX/UI team or outsourcing the work to a design consultancy for professional UX/UI services, there is a need to have a well defined process. The process includes several tasks that require decision making and can be crucial to ultimately delivering the right product. There are several benefits of outsourcing UX/UI including an up to 50% reduction in costs, access to professionals with diverse experience and different skill sets, scope to adjust resources based on needs, etc. Thus, allowing you and your team to focus on core business functions.

While outsourcing can be challenging, having best practices during the entire design UX/UI process would help mitigate the risks. In this article, we have compiled some of the key best practices of outsourcing UX/UI services.

– Carrying out research and formulating a plan

Each idea aims to solve a specific problem catering to the needs of its user base. So it is a crucial first step to carry out a thorough research to know your market, understand the target audience, identify the market gap, research your competition, and differentiate your product offering. Better research leads to a better product. If you don’t invest your time in research, you will end up with a lot of iterations which would mean increased manhours and capital. Hence it is important to carefully think out your product idea, define why and how you want to design the product.

– Choosing the right outsourced design agency

Choosing the right outsourced design agency is a crucial step. While selecting the right agency, keep in mind that the agency should be aligned with your organization as well as with the project requirements. The agency should have relevant expertise and experience, and this can be evaluated by looking at their portfolio, looking at the company’s reviews on Clutch/Dribble, as well as speaking to their references.

– Setting the scope at the start

The work scope should be established at the start of the project with clear deliverables and timelines. This allows the agency to plan resources and allocate time accordingly. Also, having a clear set of scope/deliverables allows you to plan the next phase of your project efficiently. Not setting a scope at the start could lead to several iterations resulting in cost overrun and project delays.

– Setting up effective communication

Effective communication is a key factor in the success of any outsourcing project, especially if the company is in a different time zone and has cultural differences. A key best practice for outsourcing UX/UI is using project management tools like Asana, Basecamp, Trello, etc and communication channels such as Slack, Zoom, Teams, etc. These tools enable teams to work together throughout the design phase efficiently.

– Relaying feedback throughout the design process

The UX design phase focuses on having a deep understanding of users – what they like and dislike, what they need, and what they value the most, keeping the ease of use, a key priority. The UI design phase focuses on anticipating what users might need to do and ensuring that the product has elements that are easy to access, understand, and use. Both of them are an iterative process and require continuous feedback between the design agency and business owner. Hence it is important to have a frequent and open communication dialogue to better understand the users and evolve the product idea ahead of development.

Conclusion

A good UX design enhances usability, accessibility, and pleasure the user has while interacting with your website or app and ultimately your company. Great user experience is hard to accomplish with a few expensive in-house teams. While you need to maintain control of your brand, UX is something you can and should outsource in order to better focus on the core business aspects. Adherence to the outsourcing best practices during the entire design UX/UI process could help mitigate the risks associated with outsourcing. If you’ve any doubts related to UX/UI and if you need assistance, then feel free to talk to us here.

How to Avoid the Most Common Mistakes During the UX Design Phase?

Posted on by galaxy-admin

User Experience (UX) has become an essential part of any online business’ success in building a connection between your users and your brand. UX is a foundational pillar of all marketing efforts for any company focusing on online business, as great user experience delights your customers, creates loyal satisfied customer base, and helps reach out to millions of users online.

The UX design phase helps map out your users’ experience long before you have spent a lot of money and time in developing a technology solution for the users. While mistakes in the UX design phase are common and often lead to rework in the product development process. However, we should always try to avoid the common mistakes, and in this article we will highlight a few important points in order to avoid mistakes during the UX design phase.

– Be Succinct. Cut the fluff

The UX designers should aim to keep the messages concise. The general rule of thumb is to keep it simple. Avoid jargon and speak to them in a voice they understand, assisting them in achieving their goals more easily. The UX design should focus on an intuitive navigation that any user is likely to take. If your users are pausing to understand a certain function or are taking time to complete any task, the UX should be simplified.

– Limit your user’s cognitive load

Mishmash of fonts, colors and elements are common mistakes that designers go overboard in differentiating the design; however, focus should remain on consistent layout and limiting your user’s cognitive load. Overloading user cognition reduces user experience. When we tend to put a lot of information out there, the majority of it is bound to be forgotten by your users and even overwhelm them. A good UX designer should focus on optimizing your user’s cognitive load.

– Focus on your Call-To-Action (CTA) objective

Not focusing on your CTA is one of the most common mistakes in the UX Design phase. We recommend that the CTA should be the most highlighted element on the page. You can do this via color play, text labels, font, and varying size, white space, etc. There should be no other element more enticing than your CTA. Another point to keep in mind is that the CTA copy should be short but concise. CTA, in our opinion, should not exceed 5 words (ideal limit being 3 words).

– Focus on testing the design with users

A product design should not be based on assumptions. Instead it should be based on user feedback – user behavior, patterns, usability, etc. A good UX design needs to be tested with users, otherwise the entire objective of the UX design phase is refuted.

– Use of icons and descriptions in error states

Colors can help convey messages but don’t rely on colors completely to convey crucial information. Using only colors in your design for important information like error states is like leaving out a large chunk of the audience at the mercy of guesswork. Introduce icons and descriptive texts along with the color to make it more inclusive and accessible.

– Use of shadows and borders 

Shadows and borders can help make the on-page elements appear sharper and more defined. A good UX designer utilizes shadows and borders to highlight important on-page elements. However, just don’t go overboard with the shadows, there’s a thin line between neat and tacky.

– Focus on responsiveness 

It is essential to have a responsive design that looks great and loads quickly across all screen sizes and devices. The UX also needs to be optimized for slow connections and slow devices.

Conclusion

We often complicate things that are fairly simple. Good UX can be as easy as going against your experimental instincts and sticking to the basics. Keeping in mind these basic points will help you avoid the most common mistakes during the  UX design phase. If you’ve any doubts related to UX/UI and if you need assistance, then feel free to talk to us here.

How to Choose the Right Shopify Development Partner?

Posted on by galaxy-admin
Ecommerce has been growing at a swift pace along with the several platforms such as Shopify over which these websites are built. Building your company’s online Shopify store is similar to building your new house and choosing the right Shopify development company is very crucial. There are a lot of moving parts to analyze, design, plan and set up. While setting up a Shopify store is easy, but making sure that your visitors have a good user experience is crucial for the success of your Ecommerce website. This is where the right Shopify development team can understand your requirements and help your business grow. In this article, we discuss the need for a Shopify development team and highlight a few important considerations that will help you make the right selection.

Why should you hire a Shopify development team?

Once you have decided to develop an Ecommerce website, there are plenty of things for you to worry about including getting your product-market fit right, sourcing products, managing inventory, preparing a marketing strategy, etc. Developing a Shopify platform and adding it to your list of priority things takes your crucial time away from the other important considerations that are needed to grow your business. This is where an expert Shopify development team helps you free up your time while handling the development aspects of your ecommerce website. We have listed below a few considerations why there is a need for a Shopify development team.
  • Saves your time so that you can focus on your core business objectives
  • Helps you with customized Shopify design and development for your Ecommerce website
  • Has relevant technical expertise working with CRMs, API integration, SEO optimization, page speed optimization, inventory management, email marketing solutions, etc.
  • Saves you cost if outsourced in comparison to building an in-house team
  • Helps you focus on building the right Ecommerce website that targets your business objectives such as increasing sales, maximizing conversions, enhancing user experience, etc.

How to choose the right Shopify development partner?

Once you have decided to hire a Shopify development team, the key considerations in selecting the right partner are –
  • Alignment
The Shopify development vendor should understand your business requirements, help focus on priorities, advice from a technical perspective, and execute work efficiently.
  • Expertise 
It is crucial that your Shopify development team has in-depth knowledge of the Shopify platform and its versions. The team should have required programming skill sets, have experience working with APIs integration, have expertise in building and integrating custom Shopify apps and themes, deep knowledge of database technologies for storage and information management, etc. A good approach to evaluate their expertise is to ask about a few of their Shopify project portfolio and speak to a few of their references.
  • Best Practices
A gap in understanding of the requirements can cause the complete failure of your project. Hence, it is important that the Shopify development company follows best industry practices across communications, execution, documentation, budgeting, quality assurance, security, etc. Project management methods can vary greatly between companies and for a successful engagement with a company, it is crucial that they follow a process that is organised, consistent, and supports quality control. For offshore partners, good communications is a must to understand requirements correctly and efficiently coordinate for smooth and timely execution. In order to better understand their best practices, you should discuss your project needs and evaluate how they plan to execute the development process.
  • Pricing
Cheapest isn’t the best option while selecting a Shopify development vendor, so always look at the bigger picture. Never pick a vendor purely on the basis of their rate. Rather look at the approach they came to the pricing. The best way is to review a few proposals and compare the project plans and time estimates for each phase. Understand the no. of hours, resources each vendor is proposing, and then compare their total costs. Additionally, most vendors provide support/maintenance services, and their pricing can vary. Look at the monthly support hours each vendor is proposing and at what cost. The company should handle all crucial issues for you such as version upgrades, security patch installations, bug fixing, design updates, customization, plugin integrations, performance enhancements, etc.

Conclusion

Running a successful Shopify Ecommerce website in today’s highly competitive online environment requires a good development partner who understands your business requirements and provides a helping hand in realizing your company’s vision, achieving your growth plans and having a great user experience. If you’ve any doubts related to Ecommerce platforms and if you need assistance developing one, then feel free to talk to us here.

Leveraging MVP For Your Business

Posted on by galaxy-admin
MVP is your product idea with the bare necessary features that you will test with real users. Feedback received from this stage will then be used for developing your actual product. The response from your MVP sets the direction of your product and answers essential questions like:
  • Is your idea marketable?
  • Will the users pay for your idea in the future?
  • Does your MVP solve the problem as you anticipated it?
  • What additional features users expect in your product?
Your MVP gives a reality check of the viability of your product, hence it’s vital not to skip it.

Why is MVP necessary?  

To further elaborate on the importance of MVP and to convince anyone who says otherwise, reason with them with the points below:
  • An MVP lets you test a basic product before it goes for design and development stages, thereby saving you time and effort.
  • Helps you in identifying a group of early adopters for future testing.
  • Is cost-effective viability and feasibility check.
  • Gives you insight into user expectations concerning your product.

When does MVP come into play? 

The obvious answer here is right after the ideation of your product. However, there are times when you take the MVP route apart from this. If you wish to venture into a new category in your existing product. For example, you are an online bakery shop with great reach and wish to leverage your brand to diversify offerings. You are thinking of including frozen food in your product offerings. You need to see if there is a separate website to be developed or you can integrate the new products into the existing one. If you wish to revamp your older website with a new design and improved UI. There will be a new color scheme, different navigation, basically a complete makeover. You can create an MVP for both scenarios to see your response. Your existing customer base can be reached out for their inputs on the new MVPs and give their feedback on whether your vision is being reflected in the new design. So the scope of MVP is not restricted to just a new product, it can be for:
  • New features
  • Different design
  • Introducing your product to newer demographics

Which MVP model to go for?

The decision to build an MVP of your product is not complete yet. You need to select which MVP  model is feasible for you to build with the available resources and timeline. Here are the most popular ones.

Landing page MVP

You create a landing page with the basics:
  • A description of your product
  • How is it different from your competitors, i.e. your USP
  • A CTA button can be added for signing up for newsletters, more content about your product, contact information, etc.
Buffer went with the landing page MVP. Google Ads helped Joe Gascoigne got 120 sign-ups and was able to talk to many of them to get their thoughts on his product and what they liked the most about it.

Explainer videos MVP 

In this, you create a video, preferably a short one that describes your product and a demo of your product in action. You will need access to your audience, via their email IDs, or targeted ads. Animated videos can also be created here. Videos are known for higher engagement rates when compared to text, so you have a chance of creating a buzz on social media as well. Dropbox’s four-minute-long video went viral, and they got the attention of the potential users within a short period, thanks to the video.

Wizard of Oz MVP

This is the “Fake it till you make it” scenario! In this, the customer interacts with your product thinking that it’s the final one. But in the background, a person will be handling the responses to your customer. The tasks performed by your team will eventually be done by certain algorithms or automated technology. But before you invest your time in that, you wish to see if users need it. Plus you get user responses this way that will act as the base for your future assumptions. Jeff Bezos similarly launched Amazon from his garage.

Concierge MVP

Concierge MVP is helping your users manually to achieve their end goals. Every customer that visits you, will be guided by a human resource. Via this method, you get a one on one conversation with your real users and understand their pain points. It’s testing the waters yourself! You interact with your users and incorporate their feedback to your original idea. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to develop a complete prototype to test as you are present to guide your users. Airbnb started similarly. Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky tested if people were willing to stay in houses and build a website around the same concept and three people signed up.

Email MVP

The starter pack for this method is an email list and a good response rate from the same list. Sending a product via email is way more convenient than building a website. However, a good click rate is a must, otherwise, your emails are of no use due to lack of feedback. An existing user base can be helpful here as they are familiar with your product and brand. They will be more willing to spare a few minutes as opposed to shooting emails to strangers. A lack of response can lead to a dead-end here, so it must be avoided at all costs. Ryan Hoover’s Product Hunt received a huge response from the emails he sent and could thus leverage that for creating a successful platform. Everything said, skipping an MVP is never a good start. Numerous options can be taken to see the viability of your product. They vary as per resource availability, timeline, and tech friendliness. If you think that developing an MVP involves a lot of work, call us, and we will make the MVP journey smooth for you. About us  We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services. Our digital product experts are creative problem-solvers with a decade of experience in all facets of digital and interactive design and development. We create compelling and human-focused web and mobile experiences delivered through clean, and minimalistic UI.

Customer Journey Mapping For Better Website Performance

Posted on by galaxy-admin
The most important question that project managers should ask themselves is, “How do I help my customers achieve their goals on my website while still achieving mine?” Focusing on that question is the starting point for improving your website experience and building a customer journey map. The first goal for preparing a customer journey map is to identify the customers’ requirements and what they are seeking using your website. Your team (Designer/ Developer/ Tester) should understand the entire process your customers go through.

The Journey Phases

This implies the different stages in the customer’s journey. They may vary as per particular scenarios. Each company can use data to analyze what these phases are as per the corresponding situation. Here are some examples:
  • For a B2B scenario (like rolling out an internal tool), the stages could be purchase, adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy.
  • For a big (or luxury) purchase (like test driving and buying a car), the stages can be engagement, education, research, evaluation, justification.
  • For an ecommerce scenario (like buying Bluetooth speakers), the stages can be – discovery, try, buy, use, seek support.
This will help you determine your journey phases according to your business type. There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes – and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do. They help you put yourself in your customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view. Based on this rationale, you can’t deny the importance of a customer journey map. Thus, we’ve created the following steps for crafting the best map to help your company website improve.

1. Set clear objectives

Before you can dive into creating your map, you need to ask yourself why you are making one in the first place. What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it specifically about? What experience is it based upon? You can start by writing down the objectives on sticky notes or use a customer journey template. A customer experience map will help you narrow down one specific interaction with your business. You can have individual customer experience maps for each of the following scenarios of your business:
  • Reading your blog or exploring your website
  • Interacting with a customer support agent
  • Visiting your store or your ecommerce site
  • Using your product at home or work
  • Interacting with sales during the process of becoming a customer

2. Profile your personas and define their goals

Next, you should conduct research. Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback is through questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects. You want the feedback of people who are interested in purchasing your products and services and who have interacted with your company before or plan to do so. TIP: It’s best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take while engaging with your business for the first time. You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each one and determine which would be the best fit for your journey map. Don’t worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map that’s specific to these customer types.

3. Monitor how your customers move on your site

It’s important to understand how users move through your website. For example, if you’re offering a discount code to all first-time visitors, then why is the sales low? The offer (or, ability) might be great, but consumers still lack the motivation to buy. In this case, it doesn’t matter how much products are discounted. This common scenario can be uncovered with the Behavior Flow report from Google Analytics. Make sure to examine different segments of users, whether it’s first-time visitors, returning visitors, purchasers, or create a custom segment for visitors with long session durations but no purchases: Google Analytics: Behavior Flow Look for trends, like specific drop-off points were so many users are leaving your site without converting. What page do most first-time visitors view after landing on your homepage?

4. List out all the touchpoints

Touchpoints are all the places on your website that your customers can interact with you. Based on your research on Google Analytics or basic research on your CMS dashboard, you should list out all the touchpoints your customers and prospects are currently using, as well as the ones you believe they should be used if there is no overlap. Apart from Analytics on your website, you need to determine how your customer might come across you online. These might include:
  • Social channels
  • Paid ads
  • Email marketing
  • Third-party review sites or mentions
This is an important step in creating a customer journey map because it gives you insight into what actions your customers are performing. If the number is more than expected, it is likely that your website navigation is complicated. However, if they are using fewer touchpoints than expected, this may imply that they are not convinced with your offerings and may leave the website early.

5. Map the pain points

Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or workaround? Even worse: does it cause the user to bounce off the website and leave their journey entirely? Get to know what roadblocks are stopping your customer from making their desired action.

6. Improvement Ideas

Start by prioritizing which touchpoints or pages to address first. You can rank pages by cost-effectiveness and or how easy they are to change. Improvement ideas are usually integrations, services, or features that we can enable. Then, it’s a matter of determining what to test. For instance, if research suggests that customers worry about getting locked into a particular plan after they sign up, tweaking your copy on a relevant page could minimize their hesitations.

Conclusion:

Once you have a better understanding of the customer journey, you can use that knowledge to improve your site by honing your messaging to match customer needs, smoothing out frustration points, eliminating extra steps, and even creating content. This will ensure your website is providing a seamless and effective interaction for customers, which leads to a better user experience. The companies need to anticipate the routes their customers may take, and optimize their customer experience along the multiple touchpoints rather than relying on one assumed journey. About Galaxy Weblinks We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services. Our digital product designers are creative problem-solvers with a decade of experience in all facets of digital and interactive design. We create compelling and human-focused experiences delivered through clean, and minimalist UI.

A lowdown of PHP 8.0 update

Posted on by galaxy-admin
The latest major update in PHP 8 has been made available to the public. It’s a typical three-year cycle version upgrade of PHP. Comes with a few radical alterations, so there’s a high chance you’ll need to make a few changes in code before upgrading. Some of the major features and optimizations introduced in this update are named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expression, nullsafe operator, JIT, and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency. Here’s a lowdown of the official update announcement:

PHP 8 Named arguments

// PHP 7 htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, ‘UTF-8’, false); // PHP 8 // Specify only required parameters, skipping optional ones. // Arguments are order-independent and self-documented. htmlspecialchars($string, double_encode: false);

PHP 8 Attributes

Instead of PHPDoc annotations, you can now use structured metadata with PHP’s native syntax. // PHP 7 class PostsController { /** * @Route(“/api/posts/{id}”, methods={“GET”}) */ public function get($id) { /* … */ } } // PHP 8 class PostsController { #[Route(“/api/posts/{id}”, methods: [“GET”])] public function get($id) { /* … */ } }

PHP 8 Constructor property promotion

Less boilerplate code to define and initialize properties. // PHP 7 class Point { public float $x; public float $y; public float $z; public function __construct( float $x = 0.0, float $y = 0.0, float $z = 0.0, ) { $this->x = $x; $this->y = $y; $this->z = $z; } } // PHP 8 class Point { public function __construct( public float $x = 0.0, public float $y = 0.0, public float $z = 0.0, ) {} }

PHP 8 Union types

Instead of PHPDoc annotations for a combination of types, you can use native union type declarations that are validated at runtime. // PHP 7 class Number { /** @var int|float */ private $number; /** * @param float|int $number */ public function __construct($number) { $this->number = $number; } } new Number(‘NaN’); // Ok // PHP 8 class Number { public function __construct( private int|float $number ) {} } new Number(‘NaN’); // TypeError

PHP 8 Nullsafe operator

In the latest version you can use a chain of calls with the new nullsafe operator instead if null check conditions. In case of chain failure, the execution of the entire chain aborts, and the entire chain evaluates to null. // PHP 7 $country =  null; if ($session !== null) { $user = $session->user; if ($user !== null) { $address = $user->getAddress(); if ($address !== null) { $country = $address->country; } } } // PHP 8 $country = $session?->user?->getAddress()?->country;

PHP 8 Match expression

The new match is similar to switch and has the following features: Match is an expression, meaning its result can be stored in a variable or returned. Match branches only support single-line expressions and do not need a break; statement. Match does strict comparisons. // PHP 7 switch (8.0) { case ‘8.0’: $result = “Oh no!”; break; case 8.0: $result = “This is what I expected”; break; } echo $result; //> Oh no! // PHP 8 echo match (8.0) { ‘8.0’ => “Oh no!”, 8.0 => “This is what I expected”, }; //> This is what I expected Since the update has breaking changes, it’s advisable to have experts help you with the migration to avoid any unexpected downtime. We have a team of experts that’s well versed in PHP. Get in touch with us here if you’re looking for a quick and hassle-free upgrade.

Test-Driven Development (TDD): How to choose the Right Team To Drive TDD (Part 2)

Posted on by galaxy-admin
This is the second in a series of blog posts in which we outline the roadmap to TDD for your organization and how to choose the right experts for your projects. Find Part 1 here. TDD works in very small increments of coding a test, writing the program code, and improving the code. This results in many (in fact hundreds) of automated small tests that need to be executed. This is not easy, especially when it comes to legacy code, proper unit test isolation, and other integration tests. To ensure that the people you are going to bring on board have mastered that, you have to understand the factors to consider while collaborating with them. Below are the important aspects that you should not ignore while hiring dedicated testers and QA team for projects based on the TDD process:

Skills Needed

Technical and Analytical Skills of Business Analysts:
  • Ability to analyze a set of techniques and tasks to be used to work as a liaison among stakeholders and recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
  • Collecting requirements and analyzing how they’ll work as a product. And what will be the future problems they may face. According to that unit tests are defined and the acceptance criteria are defined for further development.
Technical Skills of Testers/Developers:
  • Writing a unit test before writing the code and able to write code sufficiently to make a failing test pass.
  • Expertise in “test-driven bug fixing”, i.e. when a defect is found, writes a test exposing the defect before correction.
  • Knows and can name several tactics to guide the writing of tests (for instance “when testing a recursive algorithm, first write a test for the recursion terminating case”).
  • Able to factor out reusable elements from existing unit tests, through using situation-specific testing tools.
  • Creating a “roadmap” of planned unit tests for macroscopic features (and revising it as necessary).
  • Ability to “test drive” a variety of design paradigms: event-driven, functional, and object-oriented; Also the technical domains like persistent data access, user interfaces, and computation.
Soft skills of QA manager:
  • Communicate properly with non-technical as well as technical people, especially explaining the technical challenges to the management team.
  • Understand the client provided specs and visualize a real-time business situation. He/She must also be ready for a knowledge-sharing session with either his/her team or higher management every time the situation arises.
  • Must also have a strong programming base to keep up with their team w.r.t. understanding what the client needs.

How To Pick the Right Team?

Evaluate your company’s methodology: If you’re a startup or an established firm looking for an overhaul in methodologies, then it’s important to determine what type of team you prefer that can successfully collaborate with your company. Check out websites and portfolios: A company’s website is the face you can judge it by. If the website works smoothly and the interface and user experience are user-centric, it means the company pays a great deal of attention to details. Assess the testing experience of the team: It is important to find out what types of testing a team can provide in general; what approach the team applies in each particular case, and understand what tests the team has performed on specific projects. Find out the industry focus of tested products: The quality assurance and testing team you hire needs to be experienced in testing apps or websites similar to yours. Compare the size/complexity of the company’s projects with yours: The size/complexity of the project also matters a lot. If a QA team has worked only on simple projects, it may not be ready to step up on a large and more complex project and test it comprehensively.

Asking The Right Questions 

In-depth questions will help you learn how they create and maintain quality assurance procedures, as well as filter out what meets your requirements. Here are some examples of questions you should ask: – What will TDD give us that we can’t get by building tests later? This question will help determine how well they understand and practice the benefits of TDD as mentioned above in the benefits section. – What quality assurance and testing process do you use and why? Gauge their understanding of QA processes and whether they have experience establishing these processes. This will also include the type of model they use to design the test plan. – What are the best practices, automation toolkits, and testing methodologies the team employs? This will enable you to understand the general testing approaches the team uses. Whether the team knows how to do automation testing, how they use automation testing, and with what tools they conduct it. – Do you use TDD for accessibility concerns as well? Since accessible features are getting a lot of attention, you can ask about their plans and involvement of accessibility concerns in your project. The concerns such as “does the correct ARIA hints are used for components?” and “is the correct semantic markup being used?” can be easily unit tested. -How will you evaluate that testing was successful? At this stage, specific expectations of testing may be revealed. Often, expectations don’t match that can be usually obtained through testing. In this case, it’s important to explain what exactly is impossible to do and why. -What will be the format for bug reports and testing results? This will help you agree on a specific format of bug reporting and testing results to ensure that you have all the information you need.

Conclusion

Collaboratively discuss the complete project with the team and clear all the queries that you may have in your mind. Remember to be transparent, honest, and open about everything. Define your budget prior. Use the opportunity to build a personal connection with the offshore development agency. This rapport will decide to work with you in a better manner. Not only the Quality Assurance team, but you can also hire highly skilled developers, designers, testers, and digital product development experts. We follow agile methodologies like TDD to build robust custom applications for our clients. Contact us to know more about the development process and how we can help you to build and launch your application. About Galaxy Weblinks We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with automation testing in agile development environments. Our engineers, QA analysts, and developers help improve security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application and IT structure scale and remain secure.

Test-Driven Development (TDD): How to choose the Right Team To Drive TDD (Part 1)

Posted on by galaxy-admin
This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we outline the benefits of TDD for your organization and what are the projects to consider while adopting this agile process. Link of Part Two. Test-Driven Development essentially lets the testing process drive the development and design of your application. This incorporates acceptance tests, functional tests, and unit tests. It leads you to create very different kinds of tests that tend to be more resilient to change in the future because you’re verifying behaviors rather than testing pieces of code. If you are asking why TDD, we will just say that “it’s the easiest way to get both good test coverage and good quality code, which leads to 40%-80% fewer bugs in production”. Wouldn’t it be better to write the code in a manner where a bug can be spotted immediately and not after the production stage? If this sounds good to you, let’s go to the next step. How do you successfully roll out TDD in your organization with the right team? We’ll explore this here, as well as share some important insights on TDD.

What Are The Expected Benefits of TDD?

Better designed, extensible, and cleaner code: It helps to understand how the code will interact with other modules and will be used. It results in more maintainable code and better design decisions. It helps in writing smaller code having single responsibility rather than monolithic procedures with multiple responsibilities. This makes the code simpler to understand. Reduced Scrap work and Time to Repair: TDD allows problems to be detected as early as possible, which has the effect of reducing the number of bugs. De facto, the technical debt is better controlled with a reusable, maintainable, and flexible code that allows the addition of new functionalities and reduces time to repair. Eliminates fear of change: Developers get quick alerts when a code change introduces a bug, and TDD’s tight feedback loop quickly notifies them when it’s fixed. Better code coverage: It provides better code coverage than writing tests after the fact. Because we create code to make a specific test pass, code coverage will be close to 100%. Faster developer feedback loop: Without TDD, developers are supposed to manually test each change to make sure that it works. With TDD, unit tests can run on-change automatically, allowing faster-debugging sessions and feedback during development.

Common Pitfalls of TDD

Time-Intensive: While TDD generally results in higher-quality code, it is often a time-consuming process. But at the same time creating and maintaining a test suite, in addition to the software itself, is a significant investment. Many teams have seen significant reductions in defect rates, at the cost of a moderate increase in the initial development effort. Increased Overhead: The TDD process involves a great deal of overhead in the form of unit tests. Poor choices of testing, design, or architecture strategy at the early stage can be difficult to recover later in the project. Hence, it becomes difficult or impossible to make changes in the codebase without making dozens or hundreds of existing tests fail. Whereas, businesses that prefer to invest time in manual QA, or the ones that lack the technical resources to implement unit tests, are not the ideal candidates for TDD.

Choosing projects for TDD

Existing Project (Legacy code) And New Projects A common TDD implementation problem rears its ugly head when an organization has inherited a system that wasn’t built with testability in mind. In such scenarios, questions arise like — Should the code be refactored? If so, how much refactoring is important to start practicing TDD in an achievable, and meaningful way? So, if the legacy code is already out there and working, the risk associated with the technical debt is low relative to the risk of new untested work. By applying TDD to the new code you’re writing, i.e., making changes in the existing code, you minimize the risk as well as don’t increase the technical debt.

Microservices

Microservice-based architectures have far more complexities and dependencies than traditional application stacks. Creating tests for microservices-based applications and other complex architectures can be difficult due to the requirement for advanced stubbing and mocking. A microservice-based architecture, however, presents the opportunity to leverage TDD best practices in a very efficient way. The TDD pragmatist approach becomes very useful when you think about treating the microservice as the unit, rather than the compilation unit.

Who should use it?

Most organizations simply do not have enough developers or time to cover all of their use-cases. This is especially true for enterprises that have a mix of skills and roles contributing to their projects. Leveraging TDD helps address the issue of limited technical resources by defining tests against the contract. With this approach, stakeholders, business analysts, testers, and other non-developer resources together can contribute to the TDD testing efforts since the Requirement Gathering phase.

Conclusion:

TDD is a process that helps you start development projects with a healthy base of tests to ensure software quality throughout the development lifecycle. It helps you to produce maintainable, testable, and efficient code. But real-world conditions do not always make TDD adoption easy. It depends totally on your product requirement and can be made easier with the kind of team you have onboard. Contact us to know more about the development process and how we can help you to build and launch your application. In Part Two, we enumerated the skills and factors to consider while picking the best team. And we highlighted the right questions to ask the team to ensure how your requirements will be met w.r.t. the project.  About Galaxy Weblinks We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with automation testing in agile development environments. Our engineers, QA analysts, and developers help improve security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application and IT structure scale and remain secure.

Galaxy Weblinks Proud to be Named a Top Development Partner in Massachusetts by Clutch!

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Here at Galaxy Weblinks, we realize it can be tough to balance high impact app development while also staying afloat in a weak global economy. That’s why we’re here to help! We’re a web and mobile app development firm that’s been in the game for over two decades. With over 1000 projects under our belt, we have the technical expertise and know how to help your business achieve its goals. All of our clients appreciate our dedicated project management style and how we communicate effectively in all of our projects. Whether you need Android, iOS, or Hybrid app development, we’ve got your back!

In light of our accomplishments, we’ve been considered one of the top companies for app development in Massachusetts by Clutch, a B2B market research authority. They employ a one of a kind ranking formula to compare leaders in the business services sector. Clutch’s work helps interested buyers find and partner with the vendor of their dreams!

We couldn’t have earned this award without our wonderful clients! They took time out of their day to engage with the Clutch team to assess our performance. We were evaluated on the basis of quality, attention to deadlines, fairness of cost, and overall ability to drive results. We’re happy to report, we’ve earned a lovely 4.8 out of five stars on Clutch! Take a look at our most recent review below:

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“We are thrilled to be listed in top 15 companies in Massachusetts for web and mobile development by Clutch”  Varun Bihani, partner Galaxy Weblinks.

We’re over the moon to be recognized for our accomplishments! Thank you to our clients and to the Clutch team for making this award a reality. Drop us a line today if you’re interested in learning more about how Galaxy Weblinks can help your business thrive!

A Guide to UX Design Deliverables

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UX deliverables are a key part of building any application/product or enhancing an existing one. They may vary depending on the methods used, project, budget, and user demands, as every product is different. This, in turn, also impacts the communication between the designer and the client. Early on in the project, before the designer can share a mockup or prototype, it is common for designers to wonder what to share with clients and how often.

‘What do I show to my clients? What do they want to see? Are they concerned about my work process? When to be an open book and when to keep things to myself?’

This article lists the 7 most common deliverables created or produced by UX designers while making a new product.

These deliverables are ‘good-to-have’ in any and every project. They keep designers on track while ensuring that the clients, project managers, and designers are on the same page.

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UX deliverables provide a clear foundation to build your designs on when you’re elbow-deep in developing your application, site, or any product.

Competitive Analysis Reports

An analysis of competitor’s products to map out their existing features in a comparable way. It helps UX designers to identify opportunities to innovate in a given area and understand industry standards.

Tip: A useful starting point for identifying strengths and areas for improvement is user experience heuristics. Heuristics include readability, consistency, clarity of text and labels, efficient navigation, etc.

Personas and UX Research Reports

With personas, you can easily empathize with users throughout the design process. The most effective personas are created from observation data and in-depth user interviews of real users. A good persona supports the UX research group!

The user research reports help in communicating research aims and methods, as well as getting buy-in from stakeholders. It’s also a great tool to translate the research findings into actionable items. They help in keeping everyone on track during the research project.

Pro Tip: There are many types of user research tools and techniques available like QuestionPro or LimeSurvey (survey tools), and FullStory or Hotjar (user session recording tools).

User Flow Diagrams and Product Roadmaps

Sketches are simple depictions of a design concept. They can be quickly employed because only paper and pen are necessary for their creation. They are also easily shared between designers and also between users and developers.

Similarly, a product roadmap is a product’s evolution plan with prioritized features. It could be sticky notes, a diagram, or a spreadsheet. UX designer shares the product strategy with the team that needs to be applied to achieve its vision.

Tip: Limit the number of decision points to make it clutter-free/ less complicated. Make sure the scope of the user flow diagram covers a single goal or a single task of your user.

Static Wireframes

Showing your client a visual before you get into the details of the design can save you a lot of hassle. Draw a wireframe in a notebook and take a snapshot to share with your client or use tools like Figma, Invision Studio, etc. Their main purpose is to display the arrangement of the content, expected user behavior, features, and website layout.

Wireframes can also be presented as digital illustrations that represent the organization of the website/app. They can be particularly beneficial in saving a lot of time and money because they are easy to make and adjustable to work with.

Tip: If you plan to present a wireframe to the team, try to keep Wireframes simple and include annotations that help to create context and quickly deliver key ideas.

Interactive Prototypes

With tools such as Figma, Invision, and Adobe XD, the interface design level deliverables include interaction prototypes by default. Static images just cannot convey that interaction feeling. You’ll always find many small interactions or design adjustments only after you build the interactive prototype.

An internal review of a product prototype allows everyone on the team to see how things will work, and how an actual user interacts with it. It also helps users test a product that feels 100% real, provides ideas, and gives valuable feedback.

Tip: Test prototypes on real devices as much as possible, as nothing can replace experiencing designs better on a real device.

Mood Board and Visual Design

Have you ever heard from your client wanting a site that was ‘edgy, yet safe, but also cool and blue, but not icy or depressing hospital-scrubs-blue’? A mood board is a great tool for checking that your idea of the site’s look and feel matches your client’s.

Visual design is the last step before handoff to developers and the phase where a style guide and final specs are crafted. UI style guides are generally a series of guidelines or visual references or component libraries to help designers define or set the typography, UI elements, and interactions. This ensures product consistency across different design teams, companies, and brands.

-Combined design inception worksheet

Tip: Mood Boards should be visually stunning collections of ideas, full of textures and images that transform your pitching experience at the start of a project. Whereas, a design style guide can be generated in a few seconds from Sketch, and design-handoffs can be possible easily with Zeplin.

Hopefully, you now have a good idea of what a UX designer has to deliver or communicate with stakeholders.

If you’re thinking ‘we do not have enough experience to deal with this’ or “what if I don’t have enough time”, contact us to get a free UX consultation.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services. Our UI/UX designers are creative problem-solvers with a decade of experience in all facets of digital and interactive design. We create compelling and human-focused experiences delivered through clean, and minimalist UI.