Web User Experience

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION – CHALLENGES IN WEB UI & WEB APPS

Digital transformation starts with excellent user experience (UX), which is integral to real customer experiences. Your goal is to enable customers to achieve their objectives, while using a product or service, by keeping them engaged, and being more user-centric across platforms – easy, efficient, consistent, intuitive and pleasant.

Your existing products with traditionally designed Web UX require a digital transformation, if they are accessed by users across platforms – through portable devices like mobiles and tablets, in addition to desktops. While your newer products need to be developed with modern Web UX, if you are considering cross-platform accessibility.

There is a different UX expectation from Web user-interfaces (UI) and Web apps. Not surprisingly, mobile users want the Web UI and Web apps to behave like native mobile apps. However, traditional Web UI and Web apps are unable to meet user expectations due to the following disadvantages:

• Poor usability experience in comparison to mobile apps
• Inability to leverage device capabilities such as location, sensors and camera
• Dependence on network connectivity and speed

Mobile UX for your existing and new products need not be achieved only through mobile apps. Mobile apps are expensive to create and maintain, require multiple builds for different platforms, have low user retention rate and are not easily discoverable by search engines. Instead, mobile UX can be enabled via Web UI and Web apps with modern digital transformation technologies.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION – TRENDS IN MODERN WEB UX

RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN

Responsive Web Design (RWD) techniques improve the user browsing experience across platforms on desktops and portable devices by rendering the content to different resolutions and orientation of the devices.

A Web UI designed with RWD adapts the layout to the viewing environment by using fluid, proportion-based grids, with page element sizing in relative units, rather than absolute pixels or points. Images are flexibly sized in relative units enabling their display within their containing elements. Media queries allow the page to use different CSS style rules based on characteristics of the viewing device, particularly their width.

Though they are widely deployed, RWD still falls short of providing mobile app-like Web UX.

SINGLE PAGE APP

A Single Page App (SPA) is a single page continuously interacting with the user by dynamically rewriting the current page rather than loading entire new pages from a server. Trello, Facebook, Gmail, and X are a few examples of SPA.

SPAs offer the following benefits as against multi-page applications.

• Seamless user experience
• Fast loading time
• Less bandwidth usage
• Easy development of feature-rich apps

PROGRESSIVE WEB APP

Progressive Web App (PWA) is the next digital transformation advancement in the Web-mobile apps genre after Responsive Web Designs. PWA takes it one step further by providing mobile app-like UX and more on mobile devices. Progressive Web front-ends are rapidly growing in popularity as they have a comparable level of performance and usability of native apps.

Progressive Web Apps & Web UI provide the following benefits as against other traditional approaches.

• Responsive – fit any form factor from desktop to mobile and future devices
• Connectivity independent – work with ‘service workers’, which can keep the user engaged in low-quality networks as well as when the network is offline
• App-like experience – provide app style navigations and interactions
• Fresh – always up-to-date due to the service worker update process
• Safe –  TLS is used to prevent snooping and content tampering
• Discoverable – W3C manifests and service worker registration scope allow search engines to find them as “applications”
• Re-engageable – push notifications to help re-engage with customers
• Installable – allow users to “keep” apps on their home screen without the trouble of searching and installing them from an app store
• Linkable – preserve the original intent of the World Wide Web by making these apps linkable
• Single code base – as against a native mobile app and hence a less expensive alternative to the mobile app

PWA is now considered an even better alternative than native apps since they combine the benefits of both mobile and Web apps but eliminate unnecessary downloads/installation. Statistics indicate that they provide superior UX and better user retention than native apps and traditional Web apps.

OTHER ADVANCEMENTS

LOW CODE – Low-code is a is a development environment that enables non-technical, business users to design, build, and deploy software applications without coding. It provides a graphical user interface and drag-and-drop tools. It is faster and cost-effective and enables rapid prototyping, rapid deployment in new product development.

DIGITAL ASSISTANTS – AI-powered digital assistants enhances AI’s market reach beyond its current strongholds in search and eCommerce. The initial success of digital assistants in these two markets has also led to their growth in other areas, including customer service, where AI-powered digital assistants have become a significant new force.

WEB-BASED AUGMENTED REALITY – Web-based Augmented Reality (WebAR) allows for the overlay of digital content into the real world via a web browser. It uses web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and allows users to interact with virtual objects in a real-world environment and experience augmented reality, without the need to download and install any additional software.

WEBASSEMBLY – WebAssembly allows bi-directional communication between JavaScript and WebAssembly modules to benefit from its high performance and easier access to the browser’s API. It is a great tool to improve web performance. – DOM APIs, Canvas, etc.,

WEB 3.0 – Web 3.0 is the next wave in the evolution of the Internet, allowing it to understand data in a human-like manner. It uses AI technology, Machine Learning, and Blockchain to provide users with smart applications. This will enable the intelligent creation and distribution of highly tailored content to every internet user.

MOTION UI – Motion UI is a design framework that allows developers to create interactive and engaging user interfaces. It provides a set of pre-built animations and transitions that can be easily customized to match the look and feel of the project.

DARK MODE – Dark Mode is an interface style intended to reduce eye strain and improve readability. It is sometimes called “inverted color”, “inverted light,” or “inverted readability”, because it is darker than the traditional light mode. Dark Mode is growing in popularity across the Internet as a way to adapt the look and feel of a website to make it more suitable for low light or nighttime viewing conditions. Dark Mode is typically a more pared-down experience and has been for many years, but it is experiencing a resurgence of interest lately.

PRODUCT ENGINEERING SERVICES FOR MODERN WEB UX

At Celstream, with nearly two decades of experience in delivering product engineering services for diverse and complex products and apps, we understand what it takes to implement digital transformation for Web UX for your existing and new products.

Our product engineering services teams with experience in front-end UX can implement Web UI and Web apps for your products with RWD and PWA, which leverages the features of underlying browsers to create a top-notch UX. With our expertise in popular frameworks, libraries and tools we can help you rapidly create modern Web UX that are light in size, highly responsive, adaptive across devices and screen sizes, and less dependent on connectivity.

At the core, progressive Web front-ends are built using JavaScript™, CSS, and HTML but there are additional libraries, frameworks and tools which can expedite the development effort. Celstream product engineering services teams have expertise in these development tools and technologies to deliver modern Web apps with the desired UX.