Zebra DEVPODCAST - Serving Up A Satisfying User Experience and Interface

Join hosts Dan Quagliana, Head of Zebra's Developer Relations and Mark Jolley, EMEA Sales Engineer,  as they share the table with Zebra EMEA CTO James Morley-Smith to learn how you can define user experience and user interface by examining a meal consisting of a banana, a pineapple and a bowl of cereal. The experience and how you eat them each will be very different  - much like how one would develop. Think about it this way:

• The Banana – It’s fresh, easy to peel and eat, easy to carry around, you know when it's ripe and it’s a smooth, sweet treat.
• The Pineapple – How exactly how do you carry a whole pineapple to work for lunch? It’s a bit more prickly than a banana, and it’s not so easy to identify when its ripe. And peeling it could be a challenge when compared to the banana!

As an end user or consumer, you want to have a good, solid effective “experience”. Developers should consider not just the end result, but how their users will experience technology. They are the center of a solid user experience.

What about an effective user interface? Think of it this way - if you have a bowl of cereal, a product, you’ll need to add milk and use a spoon to thoroughly enjoy that product. But what if you have a fork instead of a spoon? That can certainly make the interface challenging! And the experience, well, how do you truly enjoy the milk?

While considering best practices, James takes us through some simple considerations; from the kind of technology tools you, as a developer, should utilize, when you should consider the user research, the environment and when to collaborate.  Lots of developers focus on the technical aspects but often neglect the experience the user wants and needs.

To help developers, Zebra created  Zebra Design Guidelines, which will be active soon, on design.zebra.com. In the meantime, you can find Zebra Icons here and James also recommends Sketch design tool, Envision app.com, and Zeplin. Developers should develop to design, consider accessibility and how a user will view this from the technical lens.

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