This is a broad general question and I’m after any advice or wisdom I can find from fellow webflow users.
I’m 51 and trained as a graphic designer.
Over the last 10 years I’ve taught myself the rudiments of coding and web design. When I discovered webflow, my instant reaction was at last - these two worlds - graphics and coding seem to be converging. In short, it got fun again!
Now i’m feeling another need to move forward again and embrace UX design. The last site I made in webflow - I designed it at screen size and then worked my way down to mobile. However I found that the UX I had designed for screen, didn’t really work at mobile sizes, so I found myself specifically designing for both. Which was kinda cool to be honest - so thats good - I’m thinking like a UX designer already.
Webflow is now putting a lot of emphasis on ‘interactions’. So clearly there is a push to allow designers to really delve deep into how a site flows as you scroll through it. The process of getting from A to B. Not just A and B.
So thats exciting.
So what does anyone out there think of this subject? Who out there considers themselves a UX designer?
Do you use Webflow for prototyping like you would say Sketch or InVision? Any left-field thoughts on the subject?
I jumped from Graphic to UX 3 years ago, so I get where you’re coming from.
I do use Webflow for prototyping in conjunction with other design tools, but I think the biggest gap right now is an ability to create a component library to make it easy to design complex systems. It gives me a level of interactivity that no other tool can, while also allowing me to distribute those prototypes to anyone with a laptop, buuutttt… it doesn’t integrate with any 3rd party frameworks, meaning that everything I do is throw-away or just usable for proof of concepts.
I think that webflow would be the ideal interface to be able to mess with external frameworks and have it be a part of my workflow. If they could enable a feature set like this: https://compositor.io/lab/ alongside their other features, I’d be over the moon.
That being said, their current CMS setup would not be sufficient for this type of work, as I’d want to be able to do more than the collection lists and collection pages currently allow. Things like complex picklists, with conditional logic, and the ability for users to input information that can be easily stored in a database are missing.
I’m not sure I can see the current Webflow use case being able to live side-by-side with a Webflow designed for application development or for UX or systems design. Sure, some of the functionality would be the same, but in my mind, the user who would want to use Webflow for making great websites, and the user who wants to be a able to actually build an app are distinct from one another.