Creating an amazing product with incredible functionality is great. Think about it. If users can’t actually use your product and access all of its functionalities, then your chances of being successful drop dramatically. Enter the worlds of User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). UI and UX ensure that users can interact with your product and that their experience is a joyful and meaningful one. The challenge is often ensuring that the best of UI and UX are being used within your product. Your team might not have experts in every discipline, or might have product UI/UX specialists but lack marketing UI/UX skills. A UI Agency or UX Agency – commonly rolled into a UI UX Agency – can help tremendously in this area. We’ll look at getting the most out of your UI UX Agency, understanding the differences and similarities between UI and UX, and seeing how you can ensure success for your product by leveraging UI UX best practices.
UI and UX
The concepts of UI and UX are used a lot, often interchangeably. What are UI and UX, and how do they differ? One analogy that helps is by thinking of a house. UX design is the layout: the hall, where the bathrooms are, and how the person living in the house would move around. UI design is the interior decoration, the colors, the paintings, and the furniture. 
In the world of websites and apps, for example, UX is more around the design of the process, solving a problem, and guiding users through the product. UI is around buttons, colors, and spacing, and making the product look incredible to users. A UX designer or UX Agency would focus on:
- Competitor Analysis
- Customer Analysis
- Product structure and strategy
- Product Flow
- Wireframing
- Analytics
In terms of a UI designer or UI Agency, the following responsibilities would be relevant:
- The look and feel of the product or process
- Research around design
- Branding
- Graphics
- The story
- Responsiveness and applicability across different devices
- Animation
- Interactive elements
As you can see, there are many overlapping areas, which is why UI and UX are often mentioned together. What is common to both is an approach of being built around the user, and using good design to optimize the interactions the user has with the product.
UI UX Company
Hopefully, at this point, the importance of UI and UX design is clear. There have been many digital products and services that have used amazing UI and UX to grow and reach great heights. Similarly, there are too many examples of excellent digital products who just didn’t make it because of poor UI and UX. UI and UX are relevant not only to the product development process but have a critical role to play in everything that comes after releasing a digital product into the world. This includes marketing, retention, and engagement, to name just a few. This is where a UI UX company comes in. Most teams either do not have enough UI UX experts on board in order to focus on all the required areas, or they simply don’t have the required experience in every niche that’s necessary. A UI UX company is typically taken on as a partner to provide these services across the board.
A UI UX company or UI UX agency will provide:
Product
- Research: this will include everything from researching competitors, the market and your target audience, to the latest trends in design for your particular niche and vertical. Research is the most critical but often overlooked stage of product development. Your UI UX agency will look at all the research compiled to come up with the strategy and plan to ensure the highest chance of success from the outset.
- UI/UX design: Taking this research and turning it into a practical and tangible outcome is a challenge, and this is an area where the UI UX company adds a ton of value. For most teams, these two phases alone will be way too time-consuming, not to mention difficult to carry out without spending significant amounts of time immersing themselves in UI and UX design research.The UI UX agency is able to present a product design that is seamless, logical and a delight for the user while looking incredible and standing out. Take the Calm app for example – a client of ours whose app and app store page is cohesive, clean, and aesthetically pleasing.
- Rapid prototyping: It’s not enough to design and build something, and then wait for ages for a full feedback loop after all the information has come in. Rapid prototyping allows companies to make design changes on the fly, and constantly optimize results.
Development
- Web front-end: how many times have you stopped using a website or product because it was just too frustrating to work with? This is the flip side of (bad) UI and UX design. A UI UX company will ensure that best practices are followed for a smooth front-end experience for users.
- Mobile apps: mobile apps are a world unto themselves, and are completely different from websites and other digital products. A mobile UX agency will help you optimize the UI and UX for your apps, take advantage of the user flow that apps offer, and create a design that is simultaneously a joy to use and increases user engagement and retention.
- Back-end: more on the UX side, a UX company can ensure that the developers are on board with the way the digital product should function and be experienced by users
Branding
- Strategy: the UI UX agency will build out the branding strategy together with the product or app developers. This will be focused around unique selling points and differentiators, and how the product will be branded for the specific market and audience.
- Brand identity design: the UI UX agency will take the strategy and apply it to the brand design. This will include the look and feel, graphical assets, colors, logos, and descriptions.
- Guidelines: brand guidelines ensure consistency across your entire brand. This can include fonts, font sizes and colors, messaging and variations of the logo. So for example, a mobile UI UX agency will ensure the same graphics and messages are used throughout the marketing campaigns (e.g. Facebook ads), to the design of the app store listing and within the app itself.This ensures consistency across the entire funnel, and boosts metrics such as engagement and retention, as users feel comfortable having gone through the process. Compare this to a situation where the Facebook ad looks nothing like the app store landing page, which in turn looks nothing like the app itself once it’s been downloaded and used for the first time. This situation of friction at each step will cause tremendous drop-off and wasted resources – a situation a good mobile UI UX agency can easily prevent.
Getting a UI company or a mobile UI UX agency on board as early in the design process as possible can lead to a completely different and wildly more successful final product.
UI UX Services
UI UX agencies offer various different UI services and UX services. Having discussed the “bigger picture” elements of UI IX design and what a UI UX company does, we now turn our attention to the more practical UI UX services that a UI UX agency provides. These typically include:
1. User experience design
The first step is in understanding how your users interact with your product, and how you want them to interact with your product. The UI UX agency will use design thinking to effortlessly guide the user through the product. This is where wireframing is often used to map out the “bare bones” of the process and the various screens involved. Wireframing gives a visual picture of how the product will be experienced by users. Lastly, for this step, the UI UX agency will present prototypes and graphic design examples, that enables you to visualize your product before having to jump in and build it. Throughout this process, the UX UI agency will be keeping marketing the product top of mind.
2. User interface design
The next step is adding the user interface: making sure that the strategy and UX are practically implemented in a way that works for the user, is clear, is easy to understand and that looks visually appealing. Once again at this stage, the UI UX agency will be able to mock up the look and feel of the product, without yet having to invest in the actual building of the product.
3. Brand identity
Finally, brand identity is brought to life. This will include colors, fonts, logos, brand book, and brand guidelines.
UI UX Solutions
Often, the main challenge of a product or brand, and what’s holding it back from success, are the lack of UI solutions or UX solutions. Sometimes it can even be as simple as upgrading the branding elements to look newer and more professional. Other common UI UX solutions that can solve a product’s growth issues include:
- The current UI and UX not matching the type of target audience the app is appealing to
- Friction from inconsistencies across creative assets
- Complications arising out of the onboarding process
- Lack of a key feature, or difficulty in accessing this feature
- Not adequately explaining to users the functionality of the product
UX partners will be able to diagnose and solve these issues relatively quickly, sometimes providing “small” UI UX solutions that can have a very large impact on key metrics.
Engaging A UI UX Agency
Once you have decided that UI UX services are something that can help your brand and product, the next step is finding the UI UX agency, or mobile UX UI agency, that’s right for you. Key things to consider when choosing an agency are:
- How are they ranked by external, objective parties?
- What industry awards have they won?
- Which well-known brands have they worked with?
- Do they have solid metrics on their site that show how effective they have been?
- Are there client testimonials?
Once you have found the right UI IX agency, we recommend putting effort into the strategic and planning stages of your work together, as these have the biggest impact down the line. Even if you already have an existing product out there, engaging a UI UX agency can be a game-changer in terms of unleashing your product or brand’s potential and removing any barriers that might be holding it back.
Uber Eat’s App Store Screenshots
There are many other benefits of engaging a UI UX agency:
- Freeing up your team to concentrate on building an incredible product
- Leveraging the skills and experience of experts
- Removing distractions
- Having access to leading trends and best practices
A UI UX Agency As A Strategic Partner
A UX UI agency or a mobile UX agency are the ultimate strategic partner if you’re looking for success when it comes to digital products. Instead of putting tons of effort into designing a product that won’t do as well as it could, partnering with a top UI UX agency will unlock the potential inherent in your product. With so many products out there – one need look no further than the millions of apps on the app stores – your UI UX agency will help differentiate you, elevate you above the noise, and deliver commercial success. To discuss your UI UX needs, get in touch with the mobile UI UX agency that’s done it before, for the biggest global brands and most exciting startups. Moburst has stats, testimonials and case studies to show that the right UI UX agency is step 1 in the fast lane to digital success. Get in touch to find out more.
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