The goal of every UX team should be to solve business problems with thoughtful design solutions. In fact, I’d say it’s not difficult to find a designer or agency who can create great-looking designs. Beautiful and useful design is a given in our industry. At Bitovi, we do those things too - but I want to know what makes our design team different. I want to help people understand why are we uniquely qualified to work with our clients.
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Design 
We’ve all been there, we start designs for a new project and have the best intentions to test our designs with users. However when priorities are defined, “shipping it” gets in the way and our good intentions are blown away. The good news for Agile teams is that there is a workflow for making usability testing part of your design process. In this post, I will share 10 best practices to help you get there:
The Bitovi Team
Design
When designing web and mobile apps, we aren’t fully delivering experiences that allow the user to control the interface in a way that makes sense to them. We talk about delighting the user and having empathy, but more often than not, we tend to miss the mark and deliver a frustrating experience. It's time that we consider giving the user more control with how they prefer the interface to function.
The Bitovi Team
Design
Style Guide Driven Development (SGDD) is a fairly new term I first heard from Nicole Sullivan’s talk about her experience on a project for Pivotal Labs. But thinking about some more, I realized SGDD is, at a high level, a practice many are already doing: developing components and documenting them in a style guide.
The Bitovi Team
Design
People have been studying design for ages, but we rarely see much crossover in the design fields (e.g., graphic design, web/app design, interior design, industrial design, advertising, film). However, Web designers can learn a lot from other design approaches to create better, more inclusive experiences, and a strong foundation for lasting products.
The Bitovi Team
Design
A team with both designers and developers needs a simple resource to share a project's styles and best practices. DocumentCSS generates a Live Style Guide so style documentation evolves along with the project. This project was built with the belief that a united team goal does not change the needs of individual roles. Whether you're an engineer, a designer, or somewhere in-between: we're building this for you.
The Bitovi Team
Design
UX designers have long used documentation as a means of communicating functionality and interaction for digital products. It has been successful for a long time and thousands of digital goods have been delivered using this process. However, as our industry evolves, so do our processes and tools. Documentation alone is no longer enough. And prototypes on their own, do not provide enough detail. Bitovi combines documentation with prototypes to deliver a comprehensive handoff experience and project archive.
The Bitovi Team
Design
In this article I'll explain a simple, fast way to perform user testing, even with no budget or time. A lot of people don't immediately see the value in doing user experience testing, partly because it has the perception of being an expensive hassle or just a waste of time. A client recently told me, "We're already behind on this project and need to get right to the mock-ups."
The Bitovi Team
Design
When it comes to creating user interfaces (UIs), user experience designers can get too close to the project and lose sight of basic usability. Sometimes you have to take a step back and obscure your view just enough to see potential problems that you might not notice otherwise. Here are some simple things you can do for a quick usability check. These tips are so easy, you'll find yourself doing them all the time.
The Bitovi Team