How I present UX solutions to a potential customer

This article is an example of my reflections and description of some issues from an UX designer practice

There came an understanding that in dealing with certain tasks I apply some approach to developing interface screens, which was already “settled” and used by me regularly. The approach is simple and comprehensive! And, most importantly, it effectively presents my ideas to an abstract customer…

Somewhere since the middle of 2016 my articles slowly began to return my investment. I have been contacted by the owners of the most diverse products on a variety of issues. Interesting questions and offers were coming, and interesting task appeared. I`ve accumulated a lot of tricky cases, but I can`t tell you about many of them right as either NDA interferes, or have to wait -teen months of development to, simultaneously, read about the case and to get user experience. I’m sure that whenever made an agreement with the client — this was due to my way of showing my readiness to perform his tasks. Or at least he gave me more chances for success.

About I would like to tell you about this method below…

First, in my own words once again briefly about the difference between UI and UX:

The first (UI) is always one or more pictures with the interface design, which fail to reflect the difference in states. For example, the layout of the item cards in the basket. Or another dashboard that’s kind of making me crazy. The second (UX) is a series of frames, scrolling through which you can see the user path from the script start to the end. Usually this series has a single “background”, but from frame to frame, certain states, position of elements, their color and style are changing.

I will try to reveal the theme of this post in one case from my daily practice. I did a redesign of the product that is responsible for interaction of the business and its customers. There, everything revolves around the chat of the business with a customer, with a bunch of features that improve efficiency. I can’t disclose all the details, but I will tell you how I fulfilled one of the tasks, basing on my approach. It turns out that this method is already applicable as part of first steps as well as at the stage of deep study of the product screens.

The task was put like that: it`s necessary to refine the current interface to have the opportunity to distribute the chats to folders.

What do we have at the start? The functional correspondence (chats); subfolders, where the chats are scattered. We need to come up with elegant and simple logic to redo everything that has been done “before” at a minimum.

By the way, this is a classic situation and one of the most interesting types of tasks in the kind of: “Oh it seems everything has already been developed, but then we have remembered that we forgot something!”. Or when the product is cluttered with features and functionality, but it somehow needs to be built into the ready-made screens. However, there is no problem if you build the interface design according to your certain rules. In such cases, there is always an opportunity to “move” something and the new functionality will fit in perfectly and without the customer`s sufferings.

So… How, working remotely, to accurately present your solution to the client or to show why it is necessary to render the development to you but not the others? First of all, we need some sort of a plan for this particular task! How can you find it? If you use your imagination, then the ready-made solutions may be nearby. Let’s remember how and in what applications we move the content or some entities. My mind immediately shows me the mail client. There we can highlight one or several letters. We can delete or move them to a folder. This seems to fit!

Now you can estimate your custom script. Schematically, briefly, using a pen and a notebook — any option is good. By the way, I want to note that writing by hand will always be one major benefit: improving the quality of thought systematization.

We mark our starting point: we are in the chat, we see a reference to the contact, see that the chat is in a folder. So, our rough handwritten plan for the current task looks like that:

1. We should go to “chat moving mode” in order not to produce excessive functionality and not clutter up the screen.

2. It is necessary to consider what criteria contacts to move should be selected by

3. It is necessary to specify a sequence of the script to help the user move on the correct path

4. It is necessary to organize the selection of folder to move, taking into consideration that there may be 10 and 20 and possibly more of them

5. We need to tell the user “Relax, everything is fine!”

Well, that`s already something! There’s a plan… Now let`s count. There are at least 5 frames of different interface states. There may arise a need in intermediate states. The starting screen state at the beginning of the script must be considered zero frame. So, it`s 6 total. The time has come to build an optimal user experience frame by frame. Sorry for the blur, but it’s NDA, so I have to smear the picture. Let’s finally move on to my design:

Frame 0 “Starting state”