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The Power of a Strategic Website: Drive Traffic, Generate Leads, Increase Sales! Part 2

11/03/2022 • 10 minute read

It is Part 2 of our r.commendations on how to boost your website traffic. In the first part, we’ve covered the goals of your website, gave advice on how to catch the eye of your audience, and shared our favorite free WordPress plugins. In this article, you’ll find out how to maximize your digital efforts through Google Analytics and Social Media. Read it, save it, master it and grow your traffic by 400%, as we did at CHIOVA D'ASINO LTD.

Google Analytics

If you’re wondering how you’ll track your website data, there’s a fantastic free tool called Google Analytics that you’ll want to b.come.comfortable with.

Google Analytics offers you the ability to:

Better understand your site and assess your marketing, content and product performance
Reach the right customers
See where your traffic is.coming from
Learn how people are interacting with your site
Determine which users are more likely to convert
Understand which content your visitors like the most
Find out which marketing tactics are driving the most traffic

To use Google Analytics, you’ll need to create an account and then link it to your website by installing a tracking code on it. Google will then track your stats and all you have to do is log in to your account to get a.comprehensive overview of what’s happening on your site.

Understanding the data from Google Analytics is a whole other ball game. Google has its own training academy that will help you understand what all of the information means. And there’s no shortage of that can teach you the ins and outs of Google Analytics.

Our favorite hosting providers

There are plenty of hosting providers out there. Broadly speaking, you’ll want to avoid those.companies that offer super deals and inexpensive offers as they tend to offer less than stellar customer service. Two of our favorite hosts are WPXHosting and Flywheel.

WPX has a team online at all times to help you with any and every issue that arises, your website will load at blazing speed, they remove malware and they offer unlimited SSL certificates. If you need more proof, just check out their reviews.
FlyWheel is another outstanding hosting provider known for its excellent customer support and speed. As a premium host, they’re more expensive than the average.company but you get plenty of bang for your buck and will be pleased with their overall service.

Secure Socket Layer (SSL)

You’re going to want an SSL, or Secure Socket Layer, for your website. This is simply technology that helps you maintain a secure internet connection and encrypt sensitive data.

You need one because the information you send online travels from.computer to.computer until it finally reaches the destination server. If the sensitive information is not encrypted with an SSL certificate, any other.computer between you and the server can access passwords, usernames, credit card numbers, and other private information. The SSL makes that information unreadable to hackers and thieves.

Setting up your certificate is fairly easy. First you need to make sure your website has its own IP address as opposed to a shared IP. Then you’ll have to purchase a certificate. There are multiple vendors, such as this one.

The next step is to activate and install the certificate. This step is a bit.complicated so you might reach out to your hosting provider and ask them to help you do it.

Finally, you’ll want to update your site. If your SSL certificate is installed properly, you will find that your site loads with an “s,” as https://yourdomain.com as opposed to http://yourdomain.com.

Leveraging Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool that all business and website owners should learn how to leverage. Today, 72% of Americans use some type of social media. Whether it’s Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Clubhouse or some other new and emerging platform, social media is the perfect tool for engaging and connecting with your customers.

There are myriad benefits for your.company, from helping you develop your position as an authority and positioning yourself as a thought leader in your niche to humanizing your brand. Beyond that, and in the context of your business website, social media can:

Help generate leads
Drive traffic
Increase sales
Connect with influencers
Promote your content and potentially go viral

But a word to the wise: you don’t have to be on every social media platform for your brand to succeed; in fact, you shouldn’t. The best approach is to figure out where your potential customers spend their time and then master that (or those) platform(s).

Facebook

Facebook’s user base and reach is global, which makes it very easy for brands to increase their visibility and find their target audience on the network, even those with an international social presence. With 269 million users, India has the largest user base of any country. After that is 183 million users in the US and 123 million users in Indonesia.

Setting up a Facebook is probably a no-brainer as it’s one of the most widely-used social media platforms, with 2.45 billion monthly users. There are lots of ways to use it to promote your brand and website. Here are some tips and strategies for leveraging Facebook.

Post regularly

How often should you post? Authorities agree that there is such a thing as posting too much content, so you’ll want to avoid that trap, but you don’t want to post sporadically either.

Your best bet is to post at most once a day for a week or two and then look at your traffic and engagement numbers. Then you’ll be able to decide whether to post more or less frequently.

Build a.community

Facebook is a great tool for building a.community around your area of expertise. You can create a group, invite others to join, offer lots of value, establish your authority and drive people to your website and business.

For example, if you train dogs, you can create a group for dog owners who need help with their pets. As you share blog posts, offer advice, and engage with.community members, you’ll be able to establish yourself as a leader in the niche and generate traffic, leads and sales.

Use reviews from real customers

Your Facebook business page offers the chance to feature testimonials and reviews from real customers. This is the perfect opportunity to let others speak to your professionalism and expertise. Ask happy customers to leave a review and support your business.

Advertise on your Facebook cover

Your Facebook cover photo is the perfect place to advertise your business and highlight your services. Include a high-quality photo or some other graphic that helps you stand out and speaks to users. Use this piece of real estate strategically.

Run Facebook ads

You can use Facebook ads to achieve a number of goals, such as driving traffic to your website, raising awareness about your products and brand, generating leads, and increasing engagement with your Facebook posts. You’ll need to learn how to run your own ads or hire someone with experience to do this as you’ll want to spend your money wisely.

That being said, Facebook ads are cheaper than Google ads and the conversion rate tends to be higher. Your best bet is to experiment with this strategy and then decide whether or not it’s effective for your particular business.

Showcase real customers and business situations

Take advantage of this opportunity and share real situations your business has addressed. Let people see the range of your expertise and the kinds of problems you’re capable of solving. You can write up short summaries about customers you have helped, you can ask them to share their stories, or you can share your case studies on Facebook.

Hire new staff

You can add a career section to your business profile if you’re hiring. Who better to add to your staff than a follower or a fan on Facebook, someone who already knows and loves your brand?

Take advantage of the call to action button

Make sure you include all of your services in detail and don’t forget to set up a call to action button to encourage your potential client to call you, book an appointment, visit your website or learn more about your business.

Promote your business in the Our Story section

For business owners who aren’t familiar with this section of their page, Facebook created it so.companies could share a little of their backstory with users. It’s the perfect place to include images that reflect your brand along with a brand summary. This section is very visible and, therefore, has the potential to impact your audience.

Livestream on Facebook

There’s no shortage of benefits to going live on Facebook. From reaching more people and creating a better relationship with your audience to providing unique content and creating excitement around your product, going live is a win-win situation for your brand and your customers.

There are many ways you can use LinkedIn to grow your business and drive traffic to your website. By a wide margin, the US has the highest number of users on the platform, with 160 million, so there’s plenty of potential to reach a wide audience.

This platform is not strictly for job seekers and professionals, though. You can absolutely make business connections and find highly targeted customers. What’s more, you can easily stay on their radar by publishing content that is high quality, engaging and relevant.

You can also used LinkedIn to

Grow your email marketing list
Create a niche specific group and build authority
Join other groups and showcase your expertise
Run ads and attract exactly the right customers to your page
Promote and potentially participate in professional meetups and conferences

Make sure your.company page is fully optimized and you’ve taken advantage of every section to showcase your.company, brand and product or service. Make sure you use the Showcase Pages function to spotlight different aspects of your business.

LinkedIn, like other platforms, is all about making connections and then building relationships from there.

Instagram

Instagram is one of the most popular social networks in the world. The US has the most users, with 116 million, followed by India with 73 million and Brazil with 72 million. This international presence makes the network appealing to both brands and influencers alike.

This is an outstanding, easy-to-use platform for B2C businesses. Instagram gives you a real opportunity to connect and engage with consumers directly, drive them to your website and turn them into customers. In fact, Instagram is considered the top performing platform for brand engagement.

Here are a few more reasons to start using Instagram for business.

You can make your brand more human

Putting a face to your brand will help you develop a better connection with your followers and customers. Let them get to know you and vice versa. Take them behind the scenes and let them see how you do what you do. It also helps build trust as today’s consumers expect businesses to have an Instagram account.

You can tell stories

Instagram Stories is for storytelling and allows you to get creative when engaging with your audience. You can also run sales and contests there. IGTV is another part of Instagram that can be used to upload long-form videos to highlight your brand.

You can understand trends

Having a presence on Instagram will help you understand what’s new, what’s hot and what’s not. It’s important to have your finger on the pulse as a business owner as it will allow you to adapt, pivot and take advantage of different trends to drive business. You’ll also see what people are sharing and what they like, and you can use that information to grow your business.

You can drive website traffic and sales

Everything you have on your website—from blog posts to white papers to infographics—can be shared on Instagram. Grab people’s attention and watch them flock to your site. Build anticipation for a new product launch. Focus on creating professional-looking images and promoting your services and products.

You can network

It’s all about connections on social media. Network with customers, other brands you can partner with, and influencers that can boost your brand and business. Focus on building a relationship over time and all that effort will pay off in the long term.

Final thoughts

The right website, designed strategically with your business goals in mind, can b.come one of your.company’s greatest assets. There’s no shortage of benefits that.come with an effective digital presence and in today’s society being “just” a brick-and-mortar business won’t cut it. If that’s you, you’re leaving money on the table.

If you truly want to stand out from the crowd, reach millions of potential customers and grow your brand online, there’s no better web design and development.company than CHIOVA D'ASINO LTD. Our team of designers, SEO experts and writers will help you define your goals and will build a website for you that generates leads, speaks to your audience, and boosts your bottom line. Get in touch and we can get started today.

It’s time to start promoting your brand, establishing yourself as a thought leader, and engaging with current and potential customers. A business website is all about connecting. And once you’ve made a solid connection, the traffic, leads and sales will follow.

The Power of a Strategic Website: Drive Traffic, Generate Leads, Increase Sales! Part 1

10/25/2022 • 7 minute read

In this day and age, if your business doesn’t have an online presence, you’re missing out—on new customers, new leads and new sales.

But you can’t just throw up a website and be done with it. There are many pieces to the puzzle.

You’ll want to create a strategic website, one that establishes you as an authority in your niche and shows people how you can solve their problems. You’ll need to create engaging content that captures the attention of potential customers and then promote and market that content, along with your brand, products and services, on social media.

Is it a lot of work? Yes. Does it pay dividends? The answer to that is also “yes.”

What’s the goal of your website?

First things first: You’ll have to figure out what you want your website to do for you. Do you simply want to inform readers about your services? Do you want to set up an online.com and sell your products? Do you want people to book an appointment? You’ll need to figure all of that out for your first point of contact with potential customers: your homepage.

Homepage

Your homepage is an important piece of real estate. You have roughly 0.05 seconds to make a great impression, or your visitors are gone. With that in mind, this page must:

Have a.compelling visual design
Clearly explain what your business does and the problem it solves
Explain HOW you solve that problem
Show you understand your customers’ pain points
Indicate how you do a better job than your.competitors

When you (or the web design team you decide to work with) are designing your website, it’s imperative that you convey to visitors your unique value proposition, i.e. what it is that makes you different from all the others in your industry.

Call to action

A call to action (CTA) aims to encourage an immediate response from visitors and every page of your website should have one, including your landing page. Invite visitors to take action with the right CTA. Examples include:

One way to figure out your best CTA is to.complete the sentence the user should ask themself: I want to “X.”

Design

Good web design is essential for having a successful online presence. What’s the point in having a website if it’s an eyesore, if it’s hard to use, or if it’s not responsive on mobile? In fact, 38% of people will leave your website if they think the layout or the content is unattractive and 88% won’t.come back to your site if they’ve had a bad experience.

The most important areas to focus on when designing your website include:

Credibility: Establish your authority and be transparent with your pricing
Accessibility: Your site must work seamlessly on all devices
Simplicity: Make it easy to understand and navigate your site
Consistency: Your site should have the same colors and theme throughout
Familiarity: Use the same design elements with which people are already familiar
User-Centricity: Have the site revolve around the user and offer an excellent user experience

How to catch the eye of your audience

There are millions of websites on the internet today, so you’ll need to figure out how to stand out from the crowd.

Obviously, you’ll need to create an aesthetically-pleasing site, taking into account best practices in user experience, or UX. You’ll want it to be intuitive and easy to use, as well as responsive on mobile.

Beyond this, here are tips and ideas for creating a memorable website.

Load fast

It’s 2022. People are in a hurry and nobody’s going to stick around for 7, 8, or 9 seconds. In fact, the ideal website load time is between 2 and 5 seconds.

How fast your site loads is critical and every single second counts. A 1-second delay in loading time has been proven to lead to a 7% loss in conversion and an 11% decline in page views. What’s more, 47% of people expect a maximum loading time of 2 seconds for the average website.

If you find that your website loads too slowly, there are several measures you can take to remedy this, such as optimizing files,.compressing images and reducing HTTP requests, among others.

Be straightforward

Here’s some sobering data: 55% of people spend less than 15 seconds on your website. So what does that mean for you?

It means you’ve only got a few seconds to make a lasting impression and tell customers and visitors who you are and what you do.

Businesses must convey what problem they solve for their customers, how they do it, and why people should trust them, as quickly as possible.

Make it easy

Once you’ve gone through all the effort to actually get people to your website, it’s your job to make them stay there.

Hire a professional copywriter and feature interesting content that engages with your audience. Use bullet points, callout boxes and other stylistic elements to break up your articles and make them easy to digest. Use subheadings and a table of contents (where appropriate) and use a large, easy-to-read font.

Use the right multimedia

Use high-quality, original, non-stock photos and images whenever possible. If you must use stock photos, our favorite free sources are Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay.

If you have the budget, Deposit Photos is reasonably priced, has an extensive portfolio of good photos, and often has deals and special offers.

Build credibility

Your website gives you a very important platform where you can build credibility and authority in your niche. In addition to having an attractive, professionally-designed website, there are many ways to develop trust and to position yourself as a leader in your industry.

Testimonials

What better way to win over new customers than with glowing reviews from previous customers? Customer reviews are very powerful and can, and should, be leveraged strategically as they help people understand exactly what it’s like to work with you.

Around 95% of people read reviews before making a purchase and 93% of local consumers use reviews to determine if a local business is good or bad.

Case studies

Case studies give you the chance to write about your business experiences in detail and to showcase your expertise. Not only are they specific to your niche, they explain how problems are solved and help you position your brand as an authority, among other advantages.

Portfolio

Your website is the perfect place to show off your portfolio. Convince visitors why you’re the best in your niche by highlighting your past projects and your success stories. Whether you have a product or a service, both can be included in a portfolio, you just might have to get creative.

Connect on a personal level

When you have a website, you can let your potential customers get to know you better. They can see there’s a real person behind your.company and you have a great opportunity to connect with your visitor on a more personal level. You can include photos of your team members as well, and this builds trust as customers “get to know” exactly who they would be working with.

Free WordPress Plugins

Once you have your website set up, there are lots of free WordPress plugins available to enhance the user experience. We’ve used dozens over the years, so here is our final list of the most useful.

Yoast SEO

Proper search engine optimization (SEO) is essential if you want your website to rank on Google and other search engines. This free plugin will help you keep your content in line with best SEO practices and help you optimize several other SEO-related details.

WP Smush

Many people fall into the trap of uploading lots of large photos, which slows down your website. You’ll recall that a too-slow website is a fate worse than death in the online universe. This handy plugin will shrink your images and help you achieve a faster load time.

TablePress

You’re going to want to include different elements in your blog posts such as photos, videos, bulleted lists, and tables. This plugin makes it super easy to include tables in your content so you can better organize your articles for your readers.

Envira Gallery

This plugin lets you build eye-catching photo and video galleries. It.comes with an easy-to-use drag and drop builder and has lots of pre-built templates you can use to customize your gallery.

Redirection

Sometimes you need to redirect a web page, for any number of reasons. This is by far the most popular redirect manager, and it lets you keep your site organized, reduce errors and improve your ranking. Manage your 301 redirects and keep track of 404 errors in a flash.

Pretty Links

If you’re planning to monetize with affiliate marketing, this plugin will help you clean up, track, manage and shrink any URL from your website. It even lets you create links using your domain name.

Broken Link Checker

Google doesn’t want to see any broken links on your website, but how do you keep track of all your links to make sure they’re still working? This free plugin scans your internal and external links and finds real broken links so you can fix them.

Make the initial check-up of everything you’ve learned in Part 1 of our helpful tips on how to boost traffic to your website, and proceed to the second part. You’ll find why it is vital to use such tools as Google Analytics and Social Media in your digital marketing strategy. Stay tuned!

A good business analyst is a rare.combination of qualities

10/19/2022 • 10 minute read

What is the difference between a business analyst and a systems analyst in IT, and what mistakes do customers often make at the start of product development? Today Daria Yamnaya, Ph.D., Head of Business Development at CHIOVA D'ASINO LTD, shares her expertise.

What is a Business Analyst in IT? Describe their main functions and responsibilities.

Daria: In short, a business analyst is a translator between the business and the development team. The main tresponsibilities of business analysis are: identify the true needs of the client and formulate a solution considering any constraints. The quality of the solution significantly impacts the project, every user need can be solved in.completely different ways from simple to.complex, which affects the cost of the development.

A business analyst job description is to develop detailed technical tasks and work with the professional development team from conception to product delivery. Often business analysts weigh in on acceptance testing, business logic and.compliance and effective implementation practices considering all constraints.

What knowledge and skill sets should a business analyst excel?

Daria: The most vital are systematic thinking and analytical mindsets.

Business analyst is a person who searches, observes and documents every operation, function, and individual element – how they interact, for example, at a watch and see it works: gears, screws, springs, understand how individual elements interact with each other and why the clock shows the correct time.

The second thing that is needed in business analysis is.communication skills. A business analyst is that rare instance of a person who, having a systematic thinking and an analytical mindset, loves to.communicate, because at least 30, and sometimes all 70 percent of his working time is.communication: with clients, the professional development team, the ability to win people over, to negotiate, to extinguish conflicts.

Third, in addition to verbal.communication, good written.communication is important in business analysis. In our business, brevity is the sister of talent: the ability of business analysts to summarize each requirement as briefly as possible, to burden the team and the client with the study of a large amount of little informative documentation.

The fourth important quality is perfectionism: we are not talking about wasting time on making documentation attractively, we are talking about an irresistible desire to get to the essence of a need, function, requirement, which allows us to formulate simple solutions that ideally fit into the logic of the system, solving the formulated problem with minimal costs.

The fifth is business knowledge and understanding of the basics of unit economics. Each client wants to be understood at a glance and be on the same wavelength, thinking in categories: expenses, resources, i.come, costs, profit, monetization.

The sixth is learning ability. If the business analyst does not know the product domain, they must have a flexible mind and be able to analyze a huge amount of data in a short time in order to study it. Without knowing the domain, you can waste time inventing something that has been on the market for a long time.

What areas do CHIOVA D'ASINO LTD business analysts specialize in? Are there any narrow domain areas in which you have worked?

Daria: Our peculiarity is that we are primarily a product.company. We have our own rather large internal product Upservice.com – an online office for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as outsourced projects. As a product.company, we understand the pitfalls and can anticipate them by designing custom products.

Our specialization is the development of systems for B2B and C2B segments: CRM and ERP systems. A.common feature of these projects is cost reduction. An example from CRM:.companies can endlessly invest in advertising and attracting new leads, without thinking that it is much cheaper and more efficient to have a loyal customer base who will return for new purchases themselves and attract additional lead traffic by advertising your business.

Despite our specialization, we develop projects for other domains: equipment rental, car sharing, dating apps, bookmaker forecasts, tender platforms, etc. Our professional team is passionate about developing high-quality turnkey projects, so business analysts help сustomers from the idea to form a vision of the product, which will be in demand by the market.

Among the unusual projects, I’ll give an example of an application for brow artists. The purpose of this product is to sell cosmetics for eyebrows. You won’t surprise anyone with an online.com, customers want an individualized approach. After analyzing how brow specialists build an ideal eyebrow contour depending on the anatomy of the face, we trained a neural network to build an ideal eyebrow contour based on a person’s photo. After that,.comparing the ideal contour and the real one, the neural network offers suitable products for this person, which provides a personal approach to sales. Arriving at the.com, you may not know what exactly to buy, while the neural network created by us adjusts the online.com to your needs and individual characteristics. This increases client loyalty – they see that the.com is focused on them.

A fairly.common question: what is the difference and a gap between a business analyst and a systems analyst in IT (information technology)?

Daria: I do not support separation of these two roles unless it is vital. For example: a detailed study of the rules for exchanging a large amount of data between several systems is required. Such elaboration requires a lot of time, as a result a business analyst may not physically have time to form a technical task.

Initially, a business analyst job description is to be the mediator between the customer and the team, but there are projects where there is a mediator between the business analyst and the professional development team. The business analyst.communicates with the business, forms user requirements and constraints, but does not go down to the level of functional requirements. Business analysts transfer the technical tasks to the system analyst. This is where the responsibilities of the business analyst on the product actually end, they continue to.communicate only with the client at the request of the system analyst or to present solutions. The systems analyst describes the requirements in more detail, going down to the level of functional and non-functional requirements for the system and forms the terms of reference for the development team.

I adhere to the fact that we are looking for system analysts for our projects: as I said, the first business analysis requirement for an analyst is systematic thinking, the second is an understanding of technical issues. The business analyst job description is to understand how the system works. We are looking for system analysts who have good.communication skills, preferably with business experience. Without understanding the business, we will not answer the questions: why this software and what benefits it brings, and without this it is impossible to design a good software. Of course, in our.company we train employees, however, when a person does not understand the operation of the system and does not have systemic thinking, he will set unrealistic requirements for development and at the end you will receive not a whole high-quality product, but Frankenstein. We do not yet need mediators between a business analyst and the professional team, all our business analysts are both system analysts, who understand how the system works.

How different are the responsibilities and functions of a business analyst depending on the type of business of the.company? For example, in IT (information technology) outsourcing, product.companies, SaaS.companies or those which are not related to software development.

Daria: In my opinion, many outsourcing.companies want to have their own successful product, but not everyone succeeds, because this is already a level of business administration: it’s not just to know how to develop a product, but what product to develop, to whom and how to sell it, how to increase retention. This is a.completely different perception: when you go down to the level of developing your product, a huge number of nuances appear, which you can then take into account at the start of any other outsourcing project. By building products, we learn from experiences and mistakes. This knowledge builds expertise, which our clients appreciate, as do their wallets.

As for SaaS.companies, they require a different level of business administration and business analysts: you have a finished product, you know its modules and functions well. When a client.comes to you, you clearly define their need in order to understand what product modules they need and how you can adapt them to the individual needs of the client. SaaS.companies work with a specific product and can offer a cheaper or more expensive solution for a specific client. This is not the development of something from scratch, this is a domain, where the same template is offered for each client, which, if necessary, can be adapted to the needs of the client.

If we talk about.companies that are not related to information technology, I would like to single out business analysts by processes who are engaged in the automation, setting and standardization of business processes. They may not be information technology related. However, any business will need to identify and describe its processes in order to survive in the market and scale. A business that has process standards is more expensive on the market, as evidenced by the actively developing franchise market. When business thinks about the scalability of its business, the first person they turn to is a process business analyst who can build a system of processes. It is worth starting with offline standardization of processes in order to go through the full PDCA cycle several times. Only after the offline process has been worked out many times and shows its effectiveness, I would r.commend starting automation, otherwise you will automate a mess that will only bring losses and frustrations. You can automate, for example, in an ERP system, a CRM system, using chatbots, etc. If we talk about the production domain, this is the automation of conveyors, training of robots.

How to understand that the processes are currently fine-tuned in your.company? It’s simple: you get a stable planned level of quality for your products and services that are in demand on the market.

For example: have you ever wondered why a cup of Lavazza coffee that you drink every morning for many years has the same taste, despite the fact that it is produced by different factories located in different countries at different times? This is the magic of structured processes.

In my opinion, the symbiosis of business analysts on processes with IT technologies is capable of revolutionizing, giving humanity full robotization of production.

Tell us about the role and functions of a BA in an Agile project and the principles of working with Agile methodology.

Daria: If you ask any business analyst which Bible they read, the answer is Wiegers, “Software Requirements”. The peculiarity of this book is that it formulates principles, rules and examples of describing business requirements in projects with a waterfall development model, when we have a long stage of working out a technical task, thinking through the smallest details. After the analyst submits the documentation for development, it is rather difficult to change something.

In Agile, we work in sprints. Each sprint we deliver to the client the result, value for users. For a business analyst job description, working in Agile and using the waterfall model is no different: if you do not have a technical task, the development team will not know what to develop. No one will definitely understand what kind of system is developed, which skills are needed, what it is capable of, how to work with it, how an additional function will affect it.

In Agile, a large product is divided into small pieces, into which a technical task is formed, but a business analyst must understand in advance what system he is building and to what end result we are going. Therefore, all our requirements are traced for.compliance with the business goal – where are we going? are we on track? Maybe we need to reconsider our business requirements because we have deviated from our goal? The business analyst constantly asks himself these questions and translates them into requirements so that we go from iteration to iteration to the final planned goal, to the vision of the finished software. In Agile projects, the requirements may not be as narrowly detailed as in the waterfall model, but they should be sufficient for the development team.

What are the benefits of Agile? In a short iteration, for example, in one or two sprints, you can get a ready-made module of the system, go to your potential target audience, which you have identified for yourself, and show the project. This target audience is giving you feedback. Perhaps, by realizing that you are wrong, you can conceptually change a lot in the project early on: this is fact-based project management and business analysis.

Thus, your technical requirements never back off the market and is focused not on an imaginary target audience, but on a real one. You are not limited to the waterfall model and you will not face a situation when developing a software according to a technical assignment that is outdated, because the market situation changed a lot while you were developing the terms of reference and writing the code. When you develop an Agile product, business analysts can painlessly change the requirements and concept of the product, so you are more likely to get a product that is in demand in the market.

Describe the entire business analyst’s product development process.

Daria: A business analyst job description is to get involved in the project at the early stages: presale and discovery. Clients.come to your.company in different ways: some.come with an idea, but the idea and the product are.completely different things. The idea is high-level: the clients saw the business problem and he has a draft of the solution. As a rule, there is no clearly articulated vision of the software and understanding of the system at the level of functions and user roles. This includes the discovery stage of the project and business analysis: a business analyst at the Vision and Scope level helps to formulate and substantiate the product concept, to build the boundaries of the solution.

As part of vision and scope, a business analyst job description is also to carry out the selection of integrated solutions: we conduct market analysis,.comparing the functions and features of the software being developed with the technical features of the integrated solutions and their cost. Based on the results of the selection, the business analyst prepares a feasibility study, with the help of which the customer can make decisions based on the facts.

After the business analysis and development of vision and scope, we describe the modules of the system, develop and detail the requirements in two stages:

The first stage of work is the formation of a technical task that can be passed on to UX designers. A.common mistake of business analysts is that they describe detailed requirements for the interface for UX designers in the documentation: which buttons and fields are located where, which forms, what color, which user path in the system. This is a mistake: practice has shown that a UX designer can.come up with an interface solution that neither the employers nor the business analyst thought about. UX is a professional in their field who should not be limited, otherwise you will receive nothing more than a copy of some product that is already on the market.

After the interface is developed and approved by the client, the business analyst job description is to proceed to the second stage: detailing the requirements and submitting the technical task to the professional team.

During the development, a business analysis supports the team, negotiates changes with the employers, and manages the changes. At the stage of software testing, the analyst actively.communicates with the testers. When the feature is ready, the analyst can check the implementation against the business logic. Next.comes the presentation and transfer of the product to the customer.

What is important for a client to understand at the start of product development? Tell us about.common mistakes clients make when ordering software.

Daria: The first error is that the Product Owner is missing or incorrectly assigned by the client. A Product Owner is a person from the business side who has expertise in the product domain, understands the key requirements and can coordinate them with the team, managing project budget. They have the authority to make the final decisions on the project, since any development is labor costs that must be paid, so you need to understand how justified they are and how they fit into the allocated budget.

One of the most.common mistakes is not understanding that the product is not only the cost of development itself, but also the cost of paying for the services of third-party applications, which can be significant. If you want to integrate with a third-party service, for example, email registration, then understand each automation has a cost. The same goes for SMS. Plan for monthly subscriptions. Business analysts help you choose the optimal solution: we prepare a feasibility study, analyze the market, determine which services are more profitable to integrate with and how much it will cost you. We help to reduce the expenditure part of the product. When you have an analyst with a market overview on hand, you can make the right and informed decision.

Be prepared for such expenses as: promotion, technical support for users, improvements to the requests of the target audience and new market trends.

If the product does not develop further, then it dies. At every moment in time, you are either moving forward or b.coming obsolete. There is no static state in time, because it does not stand still.

An equally.common mistake made by employers is making projects look better: the desire to add “pretty features”: animation, “jumping butterflies” and other functions for which the user is not willing to pay. This, as a rule, is a.companied by going beyond the boundaries of the solution. The business analyst guards the boundaries of the solution: sometimes the product really needs GIFs, and sometimes not. It depends on the product and its target audience. Therefore, you should not hang “bows and butterflies” on the product from the start. Build a skeleton and see how the target audience of organizations will perceive it, and only then, at the request of users, modify the software. There is a high probability of a mistake: when you go to unclaimed features, you will spend your resources (the planned budget and time) on “bows”, while you will not make the backbone of the system and will not solve the main need of users.

Tell us about business analyst tools for modeling business processes.

Daria: This question always concerns business analysts about processes that can be either related or outside of IT. I repeat: you need to start building processes offline and only after that move to automation, otherwise you will automate Frankenstein, and this automation will incur more costs for your.company than benefits.

I have worked as a business analyst in processes for organizations for more than 14 years, including in large industrial enterprises and have tried many different tools: from a sheet with a pencil and draw.io, to specialized products: IDF0, BPMN, Flowchart. I have also used different methods: graphic, text, tabular.

Practice has shown: even the simplest BPMN diagrams are perceived by organizations as something that is not applicable to practice. Before starting the presentation of the process, you are forced to teach the business elements of the notation, explain to the client, for example: what BPMN is and its rules. However, your description of the process should be understood not only by those present at the presentation, but also by anyone on the street.

The most understandable way of describing processes for a client is a tab method. By presenting the spreadsheet to the client and stakeholders, you will avoid prior learning about notations and rules.

When we develop a technical assignment, business analysts proceed from the fact that it should be clear to the team, in the same way when modeling business processes for organizations. We need to give the business a tool that he can use in his daily work. The passport of the process must be clear to its target audience.

Thank you very much for the interview, Daria! It was a pleasure to talk and learn so much information about business analysis and business analysts from you.

Daria: Thank you!

Dear readers, Stay tuned to hear from CHIOVA D'ASINO LTD’s leading experts and their activities in our u.coming articles. You don’t want to miss it!😊

Is scrum a “magic pill” for management? Part 2.

09/29/2022 • 5 minute read

In the first part of the interview with Valery we talked about how the involvement of staff affects the final result of product development and whether there is a single way to correctly implement the framework into the work of the.company. In this article, we discussed scrum events, performance metrics for the scrum team, and the benefits of implementing the methodology for the customer.

How do scrum events (daily meetings, sprint reviews, retrospectives, backlog refinement, sprint planning) affect team performance?

Valery: Scrum events seriously impact efficiency when all tactics are used correctly. If we remove some events and leave others, there’s no guarantee that will experience efficiency.

Are daily meetings different from regular meetings? No! Daily touch bases allow people to discuss tasks for the day and problems and how to solve them. What will happen if we don’t solve these problems? They will.come to the next daily meeting, where they will quickly learn what didn’t work and what they need to bring change. Then why does scrum change? Besides the daily meetings there are also sprint reviews, where the team demonstrates the final result.

Everyone is participating in sprint reviews: the team, the product owner, the scrum master, and the stakeholders. This disciplines everyone in terms of.communication: You quickly understand that you can’t.come to a sprint review without a result. Therefore, after the daily meeting, knowing that you have a review ahead, you train your mind to solve problems. It is enough to get into an awkward position with stakeholders on the call once or twice in order not to want the same awkward position again..

The sprint review is immediately followed by a retrospective that same day. How.come? Imagine a sprint review was unsuccessful, and we begin to think about what to do to avoid repeating this again. Having the result shown in the sprint review (even if it is good), we must answer the question “How to achieve a better result next time?”

This order leads to a cycle: events are distributed in such a way that a person b.comes motivated to do a little better with each new sprint, because otherwise the meaning of your work disappears.

As for evaluating the backlog, it’s like warming up the engine before starting down the road. This way we make the development process smooth:

If you are working on evaluating the backlog, understand the product you are working on, look at a distant goal and understand what awaits you in the near future;
This reduces the time for planning tasks, because you know what you need to work on;
This allows the product owner and stakeholders to understand how to allocate work in order to efficiently spend money and team resources.

Thus, we build a chain of events that allows us to meaningfully and efficiently carry out the task assigned to us on an intuitive level.

What prevents us from holding an effective daily meeting?

Valery: Scrum is a set of values and principles, not an instruction on how to live and work. If people share these values, they will not turn meetings into a formality. Instead of focusing on ineffective meetings, focus on the values of the team members in the meeting.

As for retrospectives: is it just a review of the team’s work, or is it also a way to rally and improve relationships in the team?

Valery: Retrospectives are not only for analysing a problem. We discuss:

What was good;
What can be improved;
What we can reduce.

This meeting brings the team together: firstly, we praise each other, discuss what was good. How can we eliminate unnecessary work? All these cases are a form of team training. A retrospective can be.completed by adding a game element to make it more interesting. You can give a developer the Scrum Master role to make team members feel like they play different roles. If, based on the results of retro, we.come to the conclusion that we have nothing to improve, we can praise ourselves. If we only touch on negative aspects, we end up demotivating ourselves.

Let’s talk about performance metrics for a scrum team. What are the KPIs, what are they based on and how to measure them?

Valery: There are many performance metrics. Using an Evidence-Based Management Guide, which provides a number of metrics for assessing various parameters: the innovation metrics, scrum effectiveness, the analysis of how the value of the product is created in the.company. Generally speaking, metrics should measure the achievement of goals, then you have a clear idea of whether we are moving in the right way, how scrum works, how the.company is developing, and the quality of products we create. It’s worth paying attention to working with subjective assessments from people through surveys: this provides valuable information that statistics will not convey, and indicates potential problems, pain points, fears and obstacles.

We talked a lot about the benefits of scrum for the development team and the product. One way or another, it is the customer who pays for the development of the product and is expecting return on investment. Does the implementation of scrum give the customer and how does it affect their goals and objectives?

Valery: When we talk about team efficiency, staff engagement, and so on, the question arises: if there are people who are investors and product stakeholders who allocate a budget for product development, does employee engagement make sense for us at all? What does scrum implementation give us, what benefits does it provide to the product? In terms of a product, one of the key indicators is ROI. How does scrum help us in this case?

Honesty and openness. Scrum says: if you begin developing a large product, consider it as a business project (those who have launched products before understand this very well). Throw away the illusions, because at the start you’ll never know for sure what the market demands, what will be a successful solution and what will not. Exact plans do not provide guarantees and.complete control of the situation, they only create this illusion. Scrum honestly says: you know the goal, the approximate path, and you can only go through once you’ve started.

Delivering the product in small increments can help us to see the result faster and ask: is it what we need?, is it in demand?, is it suitable for the consumer and is he willing to pay for it? The customer makes a decision based on the facts. It is important to understand that frequent updates always provide relevant and timely facts, since facts tend to b.come outdated especially in fast moving markets, making the quality of decisions more important.

Risk mitigation: The customer, realizing that their hypotheses are correct can at any time can admit that he made a mistake and change the strategy. When working in linear development, the customer can understand whether this is a mistake or not, after the implementation of the entire project, thus the risks of “expectations” are always lower. In addition, the iterative process allows you to better manage both market and financial risks, you can make changes at any time and change the budget quickly.

The.combination of these factors leads to the fact that the creation of a product b.comes a rational and effective activity.

Thank you very much, Valery! To sum it up, describe the main advantage, in your opinion, that Scrum implementation brings to the work of the.company.

Valeriy: When scrum is implemented correctly and efficiently, we see transparency, courage, respect, and professional teams focus on their work with a goal oriented mindset. As a result, trust is formed between everyone who works on the project, long and mutually beneficial partnerships are developed, due to which a high-quality product is created.

Is scrum a “magic pill” for management? Part 1.

09/29/2022 • 7 minute read

Is there a single recipe for implementing a framework that works for all.companies? What does scrum give to the client and why is it necessary to focus on the scrum team? These and other tricky questions were answered by Valery Semiletov, CEO of CHIOVA D'ASINO LTD.

What is scrum, how does it work?

Valery: Scrum is a framework based on empiricism and frugality that allows us to deliver value by solving.complex problems. Similar principles and values of agile tactics.

How does setting a product goal make a scrum team more effective?

Valery: If teams are executing a task and given a goal to strive towards, BUT they lack a detailed explanation and supporting evidence, the risk of achieving said goal grows exponentially. Without a.complete vision and understanding of the goal, decisions and assumptions are formulated, unfortunately mistakes may be made, and the project goes through many revisions. We hate this. It creates an expensive experience for our customers. There is a much more effective way.

A clearly formulated goal gives the team a specific target to deliver and strive towards. Project requirements are encouraged, but not required! Not only does this methodology foster extreme focus and influence efficiency, but creativity is encouraged. The teams evaluate the task or end point and leverage their talents and expertise to discover unique solutions. This defined goal allows the team to filter i.coming information and data, allowing tasks to be closely evaluated for effectiveness. We reduce the costs of management, because teams are able to work independently and eliminate the need for micromanagement. The result is our customers save money developing digital products and provide better solutions for their customers and users.

In other words, does the goal allow product teams to work more efficiently?

Valery: Absolutely. The goal should be structured and succinctly expressed in one or two sentences. It allows everyone to understand where we are going. Based on experience, teams are able to organize their work based on priority and value of the feature. Without this, it’s a series of expensive trial and errors or micromanagement, which diminishes innovative solutions.

What is the impact to development and product teams with the introduction to scrum?

The first thing that changes is the meaningfulness of their actions. Purpose gives meaning to work. We talk with potential employees during an interview process and ask the reason for leaving the previous place. A particular reason for candidates’ burnout is the aimlessness of their actions. It turns out that meaningfulness is already a good motivator for work;
With the scrum approach, we regularly interact with project stakeholders and better understand their expectations and requirements, thus we can achieve the required results faster. This reduces unnecessary work. Nothing is more demotivating than throwing away your own work or constantly reworking the same code.
Scrum answers the question, “How do we achieve the sprint goal?” Thus, the team itself determines the best process to achieve this goal. Leading to the formation of an environment in which people feel.comfortable and are passionate about the results.
A major factor is shared ownership: when the responsibility for the result is on an entire team. The team holds each other accountable and no one can say: “I did everything.” Either everyone.comes to the finish line, or no one. There is mutual responsibility, people have to work together and negotiate with each other to find the best solution.

All these factors give the team motivation: as Daniel Pink wrote in his book “Drive”, for high motivation, an employee should have 3 things: autonomy (a person chooses how to perform a task), skill (the need for study and development to.complete a task) and a goal (why it’s necessary).

What are the most.common mistakes scrum teams make during implementation? How do you avoid them?

Valery: For scrum to be successful, the team members have to understand the internal structure of the organization.

What prevents successful implementations of scrum?

If we say that Scrum did not work, then the problem is most likely not in Scrum, but in us. It may be a product that we develop or support, because the product itself may initially not allow us to work with Scrum. Scrum is not a magic pill for all the diseases of management. You need to understand the internal structure of the organization in which you work: if not the whole organization works according to the Scrum framework or shares the principles of Agile, then problems may arise when implementing Scrum. You may have a team that works on Scrum, but reports to people within a standard hierarchical structure. The difference in approaches within the same structure will prevent the implementation of Scrum.

The team itself can also interfere: people may not share these values, they may not want transparency, openness, self-organization, they may not want to take responsibility.

If something went wrong with your scrum implementation, what could be the problem?

a) You did not implement scrum, but your own idea of it;

b) The projects that you are going to manage, the approach and style itself remain linear;

c) Lack of scrum specialists, which can spoil all your good intentions.

How do you implement scrum successfully?

Valery: Scrum is dynamic. There is no single recipe for success. Focus on building a team that believes in the benefits of scrum and bring in specialists. One person can create a toxic environment for an entire team and destroy success. This is why constant feedback from team members and customers is imperative.

Next, determine how to measure the results for success. Let’s assume we have a static assessment of the task: prior to scrum implementation, we performed 10 tasks per week, and after implementation we performed 12 tasks. Is this a success or not? What if we started doing 8 tasks a week, but the clients were more satisfied? Determining what is high-quality and successful is often a subjective assessment of each individual.company. This is a question of the organization’s goals, what is important to it: how much it earns, satisfied customers, empowered employees, or a.combination of multiple goals. Without setting goals and measuring the before and after, we cannot understand whether we implemented scrum correctly.

The scrum implementation process is constant. Scrum evolves, the.company evolves, new people.come in, and changes are constantly taking place. Scrum is a sequence of iterations and continual improvement. The implementation of scrum is a sequence of iterations and continuous improvement of what happened the day before. If teams are doing better today than yesterday, you will eventually arrive at the goal that you set for yourself.

What do you focus on when implementing scrum?

Valery: You need to focus on people. If we say that the basis of scrum is self-organization and self-management, and its values are.commitment, focus, respect, openness and courage, then we must understand that a successful scrum implementation is when people start believing in the methodology. It’s necessary to work with the entire team: with their obstacles, barriers, fears, and work with the external environment of the organization. The most difficult aspect is conveying to your people what will change for them, how it will benefit them, and what will change for the better.

Is a scrum master a form of psychologist?

Valery: Think of a scrum master as more of a diverse coach. They have to understand the subject area in order to speak the same language with the people and teams they are trying to organize.

Scrum places a person at the core of the development process, and the main task of implementing this framework is to properly organize the team’s work and involve all participants in the process. How does employee engagement affect the end result of product development? Does every employee of the.company have the same influence on the development result and have weight within the.company that works with scrum?

Valery: Scrum doesn’t mean each individual has the same impact on the development ou.come. The level of influence will be limited by the role and.competencies, since the employee is addressed mainly to those issues in which he is a professional. This is not an equalization, this is an opportunity to prove yourself. The degree of influence is always determined by.competencies and personal qualities.

Dear readers, that’s not the end! Even more interesting features and lifehacks are waiting for you in the second part of the interview.

A Good Interface is Invisible.

09/27/2022 • 7 minute read

What are the main differences between the design of web and mobile applications? What are the main mistakes that designers make that interfere with the perfect user experience? The main secrets and life hacks of mobile app design reveal Maria, Head of UX / UI design at CHIOVA D'ASINO LTD.

In your own words, who is a UX / UI designer and what are their main responsibilities?

Maria: A UX / UI designer is a psychologist who builds a bridge between the requirements of a business and a person who uses the product.

The designer’s job is not to force the user to think too much and react intuitively.

A product can have an infinite number of functions, and 80% of users may not need most of them. If the product is available, understandable and covers the needs of both an experienced user and someone who is familiar with technologies, then the designer has successfully .completed with their task.

With the increase in the number of smartphone users, we see a large increase in the number of mobile applications. What are the main differences between the design of web and mobile applications?

Maria: Creating web applications is like making a spaceship. We are used to seeing a lot of information on the.computer screen. If it is well structured, it is easy to process it and figure out how to navigate to the desired function or section. A person sitting in front of a.computer usually has more time.

Mobile applications are the minimum that a person can process quickly. Users should be able to receive or send the necessary information without a lot of fuss, they do not need to keep unnecessary things in mind when navigating through the screens, everything necessary should be in sight, while being presented concisely and in the expected place.

It is better not to transfer.complex functions that are easier to perform on a.computer into a mobile phone: they are unlikely to be used, but if they are, users will not thank you for that.

Describe the process of creating a mobile app design in CHIOVA D'ASINO LTD in accordance with the agile methodology.

Maria: In a world with ideal clients who understand that design is not just beautiful pictures, but also well-defined logic, navigation, solved user problems, design begins with research.

We conduct market research, study our.competitors, identify product goals and determine the target audience: this is a joint work of a designer and a business analyst.

The clearer business requirements are formulated, the less likely it is that the client will be disappointed with the ou.come.

After receiving the analytics and research artifacts, you can start developing prototypes. At this stage, the application structure and navigation are being worked out. Even with the very top-level rendering of prototypes, at this stage, you can immediately avoid further errors in the user journey and make adjustments even before the development begins. After that, it remains only to technically implement what you have planned, without inventing anything on the go.

Prototypes can be:

Low-fidelity: to show how user can switch to functions and blocks;
High-fidelity: almost ready-made screens with structured information.

After prototypes are approved, several UI proposals are created to coordinate the client’s vision of the future product. At the same stage, a brand identity can be developed if necessary. Based on the selected colors, typography, general style, graphic elements, a UI-kit is created. UI-kit is some kind of library of.components and styles for the future product.

When it is ready, the designer just needs to connect UI and UX and send it to the customer for further approval. At this stage, in close cooperation with the business analyst and the client, several rounds of edits usually take place, changes can be made both in the user flow and in visual parts to possibly simplify the development. As a result, we prepare mock-ups for transfer to development

During the development stage, the designer’s work does not stop: they must periodically monitor whether the logic and user interaction is correctly understood, if UI is correctly implemented, whether the states and behavior of the.components correspond to the UI-kit. Upon receipt of the working functionality for the demo, the designer can help the QA in testing.

As for working on agile, I haven’t used this methodology on small products, only on fairly large-scale web- and mobile applications. Yet, the approach is no different from the development process: we take tasks on each sprint and provide ready-made layouts at the conclusion (only they are not considered an increment and are not demonstrated during scrum events).

Design is a part of the overall process. Designers, just like developers, participate in the planning phase, attend daily meetings and discuss problems and the r.commended solutions.

What are the main mistakes that designers make that interfere with the perfect user experience?

Maria: There is no perfect user experience. There is always a person who will write to support that nothing is working.

Missed stages of design development and requirements lead to errors. Wrong logic, gaps in the user journey or conflicting requirements.

Very often, too much time is spent on a beautiful wrapper with broken functions. The user does not care how beautiful his animation is, especially when this animation is on the endless loading screen.

What seems absolutely clear and intuitive to the designer and developer is not always clear to the user. It is always necessary to conduct testing on a real independent audience to gather the most honest feedback.

Ignoring the visual part: the user processes information more efficiently when it’s supported by graphic elements. Users don’t like reading large chunks of text.
An undeveloped interaction: if users do not see a response from their actions, it will feel like they are doing something wrong.
The user always has the right to make a mistake. If, in case of an accidental miss, they can not fix it in any way, they will delete the application and not download it again.
If registration/authorization path is too long, you’ll lose their interest. Users who have just downloaded the application don’t know what is waiting for them inside. If you hold them at the entry stage for too long, they will not continue into the application.

Always enable pre-filled fields. There is no need to force the user to guess why this or that field is constantly hitting an error, for example, “wrong format.” It is better to explain right away what is required, in the placeholder, inside the field, or under the description.

Avoid using patterns that are not native to mobile platform users. Often, to speed up the development of an app, teams create something between iOS and Android: as a result, we get dissatisfaction on both sides, because we break the simple path that is familiar and routine for either platform users.

Is there a different approach to designing apps for Android and iOS devices? What are the features of these platforms?

Maria: When designing a user-friendly application, it is necessary to follow the platform guidelines: Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for iOS and Material Design for Android. Using native.components greatly facilitates development and user experience.

There are things that can be reduced to the.common denominator and generalized on both platforms, but still, most of visual and behavioral.components are very different. This also applies to navigation: now in iOS everything is built on gestures, there are no buttons at all. For example, going backward by swiping from left to right is a very.common pattern for iOS users, while for Android users it will be more intuitive to reach for the back button in the lower right corner.

The navigation inside one screen is also different. On Android tabs are used, between which you can navigate by swipe, on iOS this is a segmented control.

Different screen aspect ratios, typography (Roboto-Material, San Francisco-HIG), rounded corners. The material UI has a wider range of using shadows, one of the main characteristics of “elevation” is responsible for this-the height of raising the element above the surface, when navigating the user literally sees how the screens overlap one another.

Tell us about the main trends in mobile app design in 2022-2022.

Maria: It’s better to use trends to fill your portfolio with beautiful pictures. On Dribbble, for example, trending shots b.come popular faster and easier. In most cases, these techniques b.come obsolete very quickly.

What can be used:

Custom illustrations and icons. It’s hard to miscalculate this, stock photos and vectors have already blurred everyone’s eyes, and it’s always nice to see unique rendered pictures that reflect the brand and corporate identity of the product;

Glassmorphism: use minimally and very carefully. When applied to a.complex background, a very beautiful effect is created. As a good example, I would mention the native iOS menu where it is used.

Minimalism and simplicity.

The design should be built around content, correctly emphasized accents and without scattering the user’s attention. White background is the best. Pay attention to the trend in the redesign of the largest platforms, most have removed the accent color from the background and kept it only in places where it is most appropriate, thereby making the interface cleaner and more airy. Examples: Youtube, VK, Twitter, Dribbble;

“A good interface is one that is not visible.”

3D illustrations: even very simple and accessible forms serve well as a capacious graphic element, for example, on empty screens or error screens, even in non-entertainment applications:

SVG and JSON animation: another improvement in the user experience is appropriate animation of interface elements. SVG and JSON animation is created by code. It is easier to process (since it is minimal in weight and size), scalable (since it is created based on a vector), and universal to use on different platforms. For example, Lottie is a library from Airbnb for Android, iOS, Windows, which analyzes Adobe After Effects animation exported as JSON and displays it on mobile devices and on the Internet.

In conclusion, I would like to say: 25% of users who download an application open it only once, delete it and never return again.

That is why it is important not to forget the 3 “C” rules when designing mobile apps: consistency, clarity, content.

We do not break the usual user patterns, we create an application with a simple and intuitive interface (consistency);

We avoid overloading the user’s path with unnecessary actions and screens with unnecessary information (clarity);

We place the expected blocks in the expected places, supplement the text with laconic graphic elements (content).

And as a result, we avoid losing 25% of users, but we keep their engagement thanks to a positive user experience (UX), a visually pleasant UI and positive emotions that the application provides.

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