User Interface Design

User Interface design is what gives a user the first impression of your site or app. That very initial visual perception can be critical to spark likeability. The more engaged the user becomes, the more important becomes usability. Both these aspects shape the UI design experience and tell the story of your brand and product. We design user experiences that effectively ensure your digital solution becomes a lovable product. Our goal is to make your user's life as simple and pleasant as possible.

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When creating User Interface designs at Metal Toad it’s important to start with our philosophy: good user interface design should make development faster and easier. With this in mind, we use several standardized tools: Figma & the Material UI library.

What is Figma?

Figma is a collaborative interface design tool that’s taking the design world by storm. Unlike Sketch, which runs as a standalone macOS app, Figma is entirely browser-based and therefore works not only on Macs, but also on PCs running Windows or Linux, and even on Chromebooks. It also offers a web API, and it’s free! Another major benefit of Figma is that it enables real-time sharing on the same file. When using traditional offline applications such as Sketch and Photoshop, if designers want to share their work, they usually have to export it to an image file, and then send it via email or instant messaging. In Figma, instead of exporting static images, we can simply share a link to the Figma file for clients and colleagues to open in their browsers. This in itself saves significant time and inconvenience in a designer’s workflow. But more importantly, it means that clients and colleagues can interact more richly with the work, and review the latest version of the file.

What is MUI?

Material UI is a massive library of UI components designers and developers can use to build React applications. The open-source project follows Google’s guidelines for creating components, giving you a customizable library of foundational and advanced UI elements. It's faster time-to-market, meaning the component library gives designers and developers a massive headstart with thoroughly tested UI elements ready to go. One of the biggest design system governance challenges is maintaining a single source of truth. It’s not uncommon for product teams, UX designers, and developers to have out-of-sync design systems–resulting in errors, rework, and massive headaches and challenges for DesignOps.. Using MUI’s component library can significantly reduce these challenges while creating a single source of truth between design and development.

10%

Increase in clicks when the software’s user interface design is responsive

65%

Consumers consider design the most important part when interacting with a product

80%

Consumers abandon a product with even minor UI glitches

What we don't do?

Metal Toad is a software engineering & cloud firm and while we believe a great UI can save tremendous amounts of money, it’s important to talk about what we don’t do and what we are not.

We are not a branding agency - we don’t do logo or branding work, though we have friends that do.
We are not a marketing company - we don’t do marketing campaigns but we work with amazing firms that do.
We don’t do market research - market research is a specialized field

Why choose Metal Toad?

We deliver the best, and never over-engineer or spend money on things that aren't valuable. We deliver great experiences from start to finish. This is always a central goal of every project and interaction. We live by a set of core values that make every client interaction into a truly rewarding partnership. We love to design to provide the best experiences.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

The sales team at ABC was feeling a lot like substitute teachers, bogged down with cumbersome old tech and processes at crucial moments.

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

A clear solution emerged: a single app that the sales team could use with any mobile device or computer

IMPACT

The new system revamped the entire sales process, making it faster, easier, and more efficient.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

Whenever a big sweepstake was launched, avid fans would descend on the website and often overtax its servers.

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

Moving the site’s servers to the cloud provided the elasticity Wheel of Fortune needed.

IMPACT

When the team launches new sweepstakes, preventative scaling is used to double, triple, or even quadruple their capacity to match expected traffic.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

DC Entertainment site is routinely crawled by third parties looking for security vulnerabilities or new leaks ahead of announcements.

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

ML Log evaluation. We started by setting up a data pipeline that replicated the manual process Metal Toad had been doing for years

IMPACT

Quickly identified new threats. The ML Log Monitoring solution quickly found two groups of IPs for evaluation.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

Fox needed a transformation to streamline operations, maximize efficiency, and optimize coordination.

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

The new platform will replace legacy systems with a solution that unifies viewer experience and aligns operations across the enterprise.

IMPACT

Fox now has in hand the detailed plan they need to make Fox Mississippi a reality.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

When approaching Metal Toad for a potential partnership, they made it clear that their current website was falling short.

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

Metal Toad improved usability, access to interactive modules, and site-wide responsiveness while optimizing Orchestra content for online search.

IMPACT

Visitor experience enjoyed vastly improved overall site usability, including ordering tickets, access to events calendar, quick-and-easy donations, and social sharing.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

Search results were stale, poorly ranked, and simply not delivering the content that users demanded.

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

Metal Toad proposed a custom search solution that was scalable, reliable, and free from licensing costs or vendor lock-in.

IMPACT

A 40% increase in relevant hit rates, drastically reduced search page load times, and overall improved visitor satisfaction were reported within the first week of launch.

WE DELIVER THE BEST

Case Studies

We are proud to be trusted by some of the most well-known brands in the world. Learn more about how we've set our clients to success.

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