How OutSystems enriches the modern UI/UX experience

Fast, affordable, and robust digital transformation has never been as vital as today. Today’s users have little patience to put up slow loads, complicated menus, incomplete information, or glitches, which often leads to unsatisfactory and inefficient experiences. Enterprises have only one solution to overcome the barriers, which is to build applications fast, right, and for the future in real-time.

Defining a good customer experience with OutSystems

To understand what comprises a great UX design, we need to know what comes with UX. UX design involves a human-centered approach to product development and crafting an experience around the needs and desires of users. A good UX aims to understand humans deeply by diving into their behavior, cognitive process, and wishes.

Good UX is consists of three parts, just like a pyramid:

• Delight – Delight is about missing a product when it’s unavailable, and that is where OutSystems Web wants to achieve that quality.
• Usefulness – The developer has to understand if the piece of software or tool can solve the user’s problems.
• Usability – A developer needs to make the application usable. Apps should be easy to use, and features should not be complicated. So while developing the application, a developer should keep in mind the usability facts.

OutSystems UI/UX pre-built design kits and templates act as an accelerator that substantially reduces the time to turn visions into reality. OutSystems’ low-code capabilities provide the complete framework for UI/UX solutions.

Designing applications from OutSystems UI

The framework OutSystems UI, which came out with version 11 and replaced the old OutSystems Silk, provides amazing building blocks to deliver applications lightning-fast everywhere. OutSystems UI Architecture is the base that acts as a Service Studio to build applications from bootstrap. OutSystems UI Framework creates the user interface base and provides UI web patterns for web and mobile applications.

OutSystems provides an intuitive and seamless user experience. Let’s have a look at some of the components of OutSystems UI framework and how it works on OutSystems web :

1. Screen templates

OutSystems provide developers with predefined screen templates that offer functionality and user interface. When they choose a screen template, the screen is created automatically within the app with sample data that can be tested on devices. Developers can customize these code blocks and change colors and styles to match the brand’s design guidelines.

2. Accessibility

One of the most significant aspects when developing an application is that it should be accessible to everyone. Accessibility is often essential for ethical, practical, and legal reasons. OutSystems UI framework was designed according to WCAG 2.1 ( Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), and hence, it includes all the built-in accessibility features like contrast ratio, forms, and specific customization development.

3. Customizations & theme editor

OutSystems has full-stack capabilities to customize the UI of applications. With the use of Theme Editor to customize the overall style of your application. Developers can customize themes, screens, and UI elements like font, structure, shape, etc. Theme Editor is an excellent tool for digital products to provide delightful, visually appealing, and easy-to-use experiences. It can simply refine specific interface concepts making the user tasks more straightforward.

4. Look and feel

OutSystems UI framework comes with a base theme, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) developers can edit themes, screens, blocks, and widgets from the base theme. There is automatic responsive behavior of applications developed by OutSystems with an excellent look and feel, boosting user experience.
From badges, progress bars, and counters to carousels and date pickers, developers can draw from the OutSystems Library of 100+ UI patterns to offer familiar user interactions and quickly build even the most complex and rich user interfaces.

5. Forge marketplace

OutSystems Forge acts as a warehouse of reusable, open code modules, connectors, UI components, and business solutions to fasten up application development time. Developers must understand brand tone, user interface, and usability to optimize development cycles and offer personalized user experiences. The Forge is a marketplace where the community shares their software projects created with industry expertise and pre-built templates.

Engaging external integrations and UI/UX experiences with OutSystems

Every business sector is incorporating external integrations like AI, Machine learning, Blockchain, etc. to analyze user interactions which gives an incredibly seamless experience. To promote efficiency and convenience in UI design, OutSystems has enabled these integrations to develop applications.

#1. AI fusion- Artificial Intelligence helps develop modern applications with exemplary architecture and user experiences to determine an organization’s business value and impact. The AI-oriented framework recommends solutions quickly after evaluating the application’s implementation and execution metrics. OutSystems can integrate pre-built components like third-party messaging applications and incorporate solutions like smart-home voice assistants or chatbots. This enables enterprises to deliver modern-driven applications and software that makes a difference to users.

#2. Style guide & reuse UI – OutSystems UI kits are equipped with a Style Guide that allows applications to be built faster by reusing the same components. Understanding brand guidelines and building precisely what a user wants through a library of UI patterns available in the style guide. A progressive web application can be created by importing existing layouts and themes from Style Guide. Reuse UI improves functionality to update customer data and offers power to help users understand applications’ dependencies and analysis. With the help of OutSystems, enterprises can deliver excellent customer experiences.

#3. Blockchain-enabled application – Blockchain is the innovation platform of the future that allows consensus and membership services to be plug and play. Hyperledger Composer toolset is an extensive, open development toolset and framework to make developing blockchain applications more accessible.

These engaging experiences happened because the speed provided by OutSystems UI made development much faster and more reliable. The platform enables developers to develop faster in a more consistent, performant, and modern way.

Build modern applications with OutSystems UI framework

Great applications create great experiences, and with that in mind, OutSystems offers every designer the ability to build applications with fantastic UI/UX quickly and consistently. Through a focused approach to customer experience, OutSystems has laid a solid foundation to develop native applications. Ultimately, OutSystems provides UI/UX development that delights the end-users and establishes a strong business identity.