Whether you’re an expert or rookie UI or UX designer, you need to use a few apps apart from design tools to complete your projects. You primarily use these apps for storage, communication, and collaboration purposes.
If you find yourself investing too much time in non-core work apps and looking for an effortless workspace, Google Workspace is the answer. Find out how you can use various Google apps to complete UI and UX design projects faster.
1. Draft and Store Research Data
You can begin with Google Workspace apps like Docs to collect design drafts during the research phase. Docs lets your team work on design drafts like use cases, study plans, competitive analysis notes, and personas via real-time collaboration.
To create various shapes, you can utilize the Google Drawings tool since the Drawing feature of Docs is pretty basic.
Throughout the research phase, you might end up collecting hundreds of website references. Organize them securely on Google Keep so that you can create reminders, reference labels, or bring the links to the design drafts document when working with a team member.
Google saves all progress in your Drive account, and hence you can effortlessly retrieve research data whenever needed.
2. Smooth Collaboration via Scheduling
Since creative UI and UX design projects require extensive collaboration, managing time for a team meeting could become tricky if you don’t plan ahead. Google Calendar is quite handy for personal and team-level scheduling.
Create a comprehensive schedule of all tasks your team needs to complete during the UI or UX design project. Now, add the teammates as guests who will work on the task. After adding all the tasks, you’ll see a complete picture of calendar events in front of you.
For collaborative tasks, the team members will know the meeting schedule ahead of time and can plan their daily work schedule accordingly. Therefore, without any hiccups, you’ll have all the meeting participants when you need them.
3. Design and Share Prototypes Remotely
Once you’re in the actual UI design phase, you’ll have to create various components like information architecture, sketches, wireframes, and visual design asset maps.
You can perform these tasks conveniently on Google Slides. Slides lets you insert various elements like shapes, callouts, curved/elbow connectors, polylines, and diagrams.
Once you’ve crafted the interaction sequence between your app windows, graphical assets, text content, and buttons, you get the prototype. To get comments and feedback from the client or developer, you can present a slideshow of your work via Google Meet.
During a Google Meet session, you can also create a Jamboard session to explain various aspects of the prototype without editing the original slideshow file.
4. Perform Prototype Testing Remotely
You can utilize the Google Forms and Sheets apps for the prototype testing phase. You’ll primarily use Forms to collect possible test participants’ responses and save the data on Sheets for analysis.
You can use the Customer Feedback template of Google Forms and modify its content to accommodate your participant screening questions. Forms automatically stores data in a spreadsheet file so that you don’t need to compile responses in Sheets manually.
Simply go to the Responses section and click on Create Spreadsheet to access the spreadsheet with responses. You can apply various functions like sort, filter, and data validation to select the ideal participants.
5. Collect User Experience Data
You can collect the prototype testing data using a Google Forms survey. Choose a relevant template and replace the survey texts with your own testing questions. You may want to add targeted survey texts like name, time of testing, observations, subject role, and so on.
You can also create a Docs file with testing instructions and share that with the participants in view-only mode.
Some prototype testing projects may also require you to ask the users to maintain a diary about their experiences. You can keep yourself as a collaborator to see the testing progress in real-time.
Once all the participants have submitted their surveys, you can analyze test data on Sheets. You can format, sort, and filter the raw data to extract actionable insights that help in refining the design prototype.
6. Record UI and UX Test Sessions
It’s truly beneficial if your project team can interview the participants while testing the prototype. Since the team can practically see how the users interact with the app or website, such sessions generate creative and problem-solving insights.
Google Meet is an ideal tool for remote interviews that may involve several participants. The app is accessible through web browsers, and you might find that most of the participants are familiar with it.
The participants will share their actions within the prototype through screen sharing of Google Meet. You can use any screen recording app to record the session or use Google Meet’s recording feature if you’ve got a paid subscription.
7. Store and Archive All Project Files Securely
You’ll need to use various design assets, documents, surveys, notes, and many more. It’s quite possible some of these files will get misplaced if the project team uses different file storage. Instead, create a dedicated Google Drive folder and share that with the team members.
Create the required Docs, Forms, Sheets, Slides, and so on from that folder so that everything stays in one place. Drive automatically saves older versions, so no need to worry about version control management. Upload other assets like images and videos manually to the same folder.
Drive comes with state-of-the-art data security and privacy protocol so that you can focus on your work and worry less about someone sneaking into sensitive information about apps or websites.
8. Communicate With Ease
Google Groups is an ideal tool to keep all team members in the loop without wasting time searching for emails or contact numbers. While starting a project, set a group email and include all the team members who will work on the project.
Now you can easily share Docs, Sheets, Forms, and other Google Workspace content with the whole team. Google Drive helps you keep your project data if someone leaves the project in between. You only need to remove the individual’s email to restrict them from accessing your project data or email conversations.
Focused UI and UX Design With Google Workspace
Try the above-mentioned Google apps in suitable scenarios to streamline your non-designing work, so you can put more effort into the creative aspects.
Moreover, Google Workspace apps are highly popular in the global market. Hence, you’ll find most clients or collaborators are savvier with Google apps than its alternatives.
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