Published on 17 Jan 2025
Published on 17 Jan 2025
System design - Scalable efficiency
System design - Scalable efficiency
Why system design?
Great UX isn’t just about efficient interfaces; it’s about how things work behind the scenes. A beautifully designed app will fail if the system behind it is slow, unreliable, or frustrating to use. System design helps ensure that the experience is smooth and scalable, no matter how complex the product gets.
Why system design?
Great UX isn’t just about efficient interfaces; it’s also about how things work behind those scenes. A beautifully designed app will fail if the system behind it is slow, unreliable, lags on use. System design helps ensure that the experience is smooth and scalable, no matter how complex the product gets.
Example and role of a designer
Imagine you're designing a ride-hailing app like Uber. You create a smooth booking flow, but if the system behind it isn't well-designed, users might also face delays in finding a driver, inaccurate ETAs, or payment failures. If the API calls take too long or the database isn’t optimized, users experience frustration and might even switch to a competitor. Good system design ensures that location tracking, real-time pricing, and driver matching happen instantly and reliably. A designer can help by identifying potential friction points in the system early on. By working closely with engineers, they can optimize user flows based on their system capabilities, ensuring smooth interactions. For example, if some real-time location updates are slow, a designer can introduce loading states or skeletons to keep users engaged instead of showing a blank map.
Example and role of a designer
Imagine you're designing a ride-hailing app like Uber. You create a smooth booking flow, but if the system behind isn't designed good, users might also face delays in finding some driver, inaccurate ETAs, or payment failures. Good system designs ensures that tracking, pricing, and also the driver matching happen instantly and reliably. A designer can help by identifying potential frictions in the system early on. By working closely with engineer, they can then optimize user flows based on their system capabilities, ensuring smooth interactions. For example, if some real-time location updates are slow, a designer can introduce loading states or a skeleton to keep users engaged instead of showing a blank map.
Modularity, adaptability and performance
A great design works the same whether 10 or 10 million people are using it. System thinking ensures the experience doesn’t break under pressure. Using processes like load balancing, caching, and database optimization, we can make sure interactions feel fast and effortless. Nobody likes a broken experience. When a system fails, users see crashes, or error messages, or endless loading screens. A well-designed system plans for failures, using backups, auto-recovery, and distributed architecture to keep things running. A reliable system means fewer user complaints. And concepts like, modular system design—like using microservices—lets designers and devs tweak specific parts without affecting the whole system, making iterative improvements much easier.
Modularity, adaptability and performance
A great design works the same whether 10 or 10 million people are using it. System designs ensures the experience doesn’t break under pressure. Using processes like load balancing, caching, and database optimization, we can make sure interactions feel fast and very effortless. Nobody likes a broken experience. When a system fails, users see crashes, or some error messages. A well-designed system plans for failures, using backups, edge-cases, to keep things running. A reliable system also means fewer user complaints.
Task
The tasks isn’t just about designing screens—it’s about crafting seamless, intelligent experiences that adapt to users in real time. A UX designer who understands system design can create smarter, more scalable, and frustration-free products. And even if there are frustrating points in the UX, a good designer is prepared for that.
Task
The tasks isn’t just about designing screens—it’s about crafting the seamless, intelligent experiences that adapt to users in real time. A UXD who understands this system design can create smarter, more scalable, and also frustration-free products.
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