Updated on 15 Oct, 2024
Insights • Dhruvil Rana • 7 Mins reading time
What you will do in the situation when you need User Experience design, but you have a problem with your budget? While you have a low budget for app designing but you need to recruit test members, gather the latest designing tools for quality design. Obviously, you’ll face a lot of trouble. But, we want to help to do excellent and quality design on your low budget.
We at Octet Design Studio trust that you don’t need a huge budget for user experience design. Just go through the article and put these tips and use the low-cost designing tools that you already have.
Follow the article tips. Hope you’ll find it useful for UI/UX designing without a big amount of budget.
Planning is the first thing to do something successfully and in a better way. The most important step of quality user experience design is planning. How the project to be done successfully within the low budget for app designing. If you start planning, you will discover many option and resources to do the UX design quality-full. You need to evaluate the options and take proper steps. For example, if your team has ten members, they may have some specific and untapped talent and resources that you may not know of it. You may get a good visual designer, creator, user researcher inside your team. So, you need to evaluate your member’s talent. If their titles don’t expose their talent or what are they capable of doing, you need to find it first.
These steps of designing are characterized by deep user research, testing, prototyping. The results of this step show the leftover of the design process. Research usually involves testing, surveys, interviews of users. User testing is the foundation of effective User experience and design. Surveys help to find out the strategies for a low budget for app designing.
Now you have a proper plan and strategies for UX design on a low budget for app designing. So, finally, you can start designing. When you will begin, you will find out that many of the members get feared. Lot’s of work has to be done within a short time. This intimidation can be solved if you shred the design process. If you do that, you can focus your mind on one particular thing at a time and successfully get the work done within your time period. For example, if you design a smartphone application, first focus on the navigation part. Once it is done, focus on other parts like on-screen then other parts of the mobile application. Then your work will be much simpler.
By shredding your working process, you will understand what’s more important and also find the knock-out key features. This can refer to the Micro User Experience Process.
If you consult with a UX consultant, they will tell you: You need to test your designs with users. That’s why you need a usability lab, hire a test team and also recruiting the team. So, they will suggest you spend a huge amount of money for testing.
Since you have a low budget for app designing, you can test your designs in a cheaper way. This way involves testing your UX designs with your friends and family. This process is referred to as guerrilla usability testing. Give them your designs, review them and collect feedback from them for revisions and where need the improvements. This is not the proper way to test but this will be cost effective for sure.
Remember that the users are not designer or developer of a product. So, you may receive various types of negative feedback. Don’t intimidate, just improve where it needs.
If you don’t want to test your design with Guerrilla usability testing, you can use online usability tools. There’re a number of tools and website you can use like usertesting.com, loop11, TreeJack and many more. But, these tools always cost you money. “User testing” takes $49 per month, “Loop11” offers it by $350 per project (It will give you a thousand user per test). “TreeJack” offers it by $149 per survey. These tools give you important feedback from its test users.
Firstly you can use simply a pencil, a pen and a piece of paper. Paper is a tool that permits you to draw or sketch a design completely free handed. It also allows undoing by rubber. UX designers do not need highly paid software. To create a design, using a paper with a whiteboard is the better way than software.
When you have to document the design file, you can just use a presentation tool like PowerPoint. This type of tool doesn’t need to be a full or paid version. By using a presentation tool, you can also draw and documented the design. This presentation tool also has the benefit of easily sharing.
We know, Practice makes a man perfect! Your skill, practice, the effort will make you a good designer, not expensive tools.
Today’s modern technology and the internet give us the blessing to collect any resources. Even, you can easily collect photoshop, sketch designs or visual designs.
Nowadays this is very useful for any kind of business or product. You can simply buy UX designs, content writes to write your service products review. There are a lot of online marketplace and freelancers are available today. You can order your editing work to them as well by spending a little amount of payment even only for $5. This way, you can find your important helping hand from here. But, you should know that, for the best quality work you have to hire the experienced freelancers with a higher payment.
So! Now you know the fundamental tips to do Quality UX design on a low budget for app designing. Hope, these tips will help you in UX design project and completed successfully. As a UX designer always remember that: Design is the main factor and there are always ways to make creative and quality design within your budget.
Senior UX UI Designer
Dhruvil Rana, a Senior UI UX Designer, has led 20+ projects at Octet Design Studio. He specializes in creating user-centered designs, driving business growth.
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