Customer Success Stories: Closing the Gap Between Design & Development

In this customer success story, you’ll see how UXPin helped UX Designer Edward Nguyen and his team deliver better products faster.

Photo Credit: LiquidPlanner

Challenges

LiquidPlanner’s product development process was losing efficiency when shipping on tight timelines:

• Inefficient development costs. For a detailed prototype demanded by enterprise use cases, the design team sometimes required 4-8 hours of senior developer time.
• Inefficient designer costs. If developers weren’t available, the design team might need up to 8-10 hours to code the prototype.
• Inaccurate design tools. ZURB Notable couldn’t support the interactions demanded by enterprise products. Axure lacked the collaboration demanded by LiquidPlanner’s Agile process.
• Timelines slowed by documentation. Lack of efficient prototyping required the design team to spend up to 8-10 hours before a sprint to work on feature specification with product managers.

“UXPin is a requirement for us. Nota­ble, Adobe XD, Omnigraffle – none of those tools work for us.” Edward says. “You absolutely need UXPin’s pattern libraries and interactions to validate complex user scenarios quickly.”

Edward Nguyen, UX Designer - LiquidPlanner

Solution

To bring the right ideas to market faster, LiquidPlanner turned to UXPin:

• Accurate testing of complex interactions.“The new UXPin engine and interface are awesome,” Edward says. “A user even mistook one of my hi-fi prototypes as the real deal, telling me to thank our dev team.”
• Minimal documentation for acceptance criteria. “QA now uses the UXPin prototype as acceptance criteria since they’re so real,” Edward says. “Before they’d either require heavy documentation or just test without criteria.”
• Unlocks new solutions for product problems. Because designers aren’t forced to code designs, they can prototype and test more ideas for a faster path to certainty.

LiquidPlanner created a UXPin prototype so powerful that users thought was already fully developed.

“It’s amazing to confidently tell my team that I can validate a design in a few days” Edward says. “I can prototype on Monday, test it Tuesday and Wednesday, and show results on Thursday.”

Edward Nguyen, UX Designer - LiquidPlanner

Results

Thanks to efficient collaborative design in UXPin, the team can achieve certainty with greater confidence and less cost:

Company Results:

• Frees up UX development resources. The design team can create accurate prototypes to test ideas with users without any code.
• Saves development costs. “I’m no longer stressed about coding,” Edward says. Prototypes that previously required hours to code now only take minutes.”
• Cuts down design time by 50%. Designers used to require 4-7 days with a developer (or more) to go from idea to tested prototype. Now they can confidently test ideas with users in 1-3 days.
• Cut down documentation costs. “When I showed two developers a 15-20 page spec document alongside a UXPin prototype, they said they didn’t even need the documentation.” Edward says. “They preferred the prototype as the specs. We don’t need a ton of documentation anymore.”

Photo Credit: LiquidPlanner

Product Results:

• Launched a new enterprise feature in 4 months. The team shipped a new dashboard feature prototyped in UXPin in less time (January to April 2016).
• Increased speed of adoption. Of the 17,000 dashboards ever created, 10% were created 2 weeks after launch with the feature prototyped in UXPin.
• Increased user adoption. 75% of new dashboards are now created with the feature prototyped in UXPin. A majority of high-revenue enterprise customers also enjoy the new feature, as it facilitates their complex projects.

“UXPin prototypes gave our developers enough confidence to build our designs straight in code,” Edward says. “If we had to code every prototype and they didn’t test well, I can only imagine the waste of time and money.”

Edward Nguyen, UX Designer - LiquidPlanner