What is GUI design software?

GUI design software helps user experience (UX) designers and embedded systems developers create visual, auditory, and physical control elements that enable users to interact with their devices. Through the design process, these tools support UX experts in the creation of interface elements and behaviors that allow users to interact with products, combining aspects of human psychology, user research, design principles, and technology expertise. For developers, these tools provide an integrated development environment that supports the implementation of design elements and workflows on real hardware, including coding, testing, and performance optimization. For modern user interfaces, GUI design software that supports designers and developers working together to create vivid, graphics-rich elements is better able to achieve the smartphone-like experiences that consumers crave.

Why use Crank’s GUI design software?

Crank Storyboard is built by a team of embedded experts that understand the importance of UX design and development and trusted by major household brands across multiple industries. Storyboard helps product teams to iterate around application design and enhance UX with ease, resulting in sophisticated GUIs that deliver exceptional user experiences.

Why is GUI design software useful?

GUI design software supports the creation of rich, vivid, and intuitive UX without having to manually develop code for every element or perform extensive integration activities on the target hardware. These software tools also reduce the time and effort required for release by supporting designers and developers working together to create GUIs fast without compromising design integrity or performance optimization.

How do you design a GUI?

The GUI design process uses research and testing to drive design decisions that match user needs and expectations. Through problem definition, ideation, and prototyping in tools such as Photoshop and Sketch, GUI designs are refined to the point where they can be implemented in code. For embedded systems, GUI design software such as Crank Storyboard supports the development, testing, and deployment of applications on the target hardware, ensuring an alignment between design intent and the realities of platform features and performance.

Embedded GUI Design Tools & Software

User and future friendly embedded GUI design solutions

The goal of embedded GUI design is to create an interface that is intuitive, clean, and helps your product stand out from the competition. Design elements are more effective if they are given thoughtful touches that align with the end users interests and needs.

Having the right GUI design tools at your disposal is critical to ensuring an optimized user experience, on anything from a wide-spread consumer device to an extremely niche medical tool. Dedicated platforms such as Crank Software’s Storyboard enable the bespoke construction of future-friendly designs, ensuring you have a highly marketable and effective GUI.

Designing compelling elements

Creating a compelling embedded GUI demands diving beneath the surface level, getting to know your target demographic, and comparing against older designs to see where there is room for improvement.

Using tools such as Storyboard can help you refine your focus further while harnessing the GPU and CPU processing power required for high-resolution 2D and 3D graphical elements. Using Storyboard you can even start with a digital sketch created in the design tool of your choice, export as needed, and create a compelling animated GUI in just a few clicks.

Watch UX Best Practices Webinar ▸

Testing and validation is critical

Whether compiling a proof of concept or prepping a prototype for launch, you shouldn’t hesitate to test and validate the performance of every single element. This process of elimination keeps code cleaner and helps to minimize bug-fixing complications down the road. This is especially important when developing for touch; a customer experience that converts demands thorough optimization. Testing and validation within Storyboard is ideal for fine tuning performance tweaks and drastically shortening development delays.

Learn more about testing and validation ▸

Best practices for your next GUI design

We partnered with our friends at Fresh Consulting to bring you the top 10 best practices to keep in mind when designing a graphical user interface. While end consumers expectations are constantly changing and evolving, there are some key pieces that will ensure your design delivers a positive ROI while also meeting strict deadlines.

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Own the design

Imagine the possibilities if a designer is able to focus on what they do best: pure design.

Storyboard's unique parallel workflow environment allows designers to be focused on perfecting their artwork, while their developer partners continue to work at the same time, on the code and system integration of their unique design. This collaborative environment encourages designers to design to their best while enabling the developers with artwork to validate and perfect at the same time. The result is a faster-time-to-market, without ever having compromised design integrity.

By opting for graphical user interface design tools such as Storyboard, you can shorten lead times and get your creation live sooner, all without sacrificing quality assurance. Today’s embedded GUI design tools are markedly user-friendly, feature-rich, and ready for even your most experimental plans.

See companies already design with Storyboard ▸

Embedded GUI design success story

For our luxury automotive and motorhome client, the demand for modern and rich embedded GUI meant finding a tool that was easily adaptable by team members, fit into their current work processes, and helped them get their client projects to market faster.

The challenge? Our client had done nothing with graphics let alone graphical clusters. That’s where our custom GUI design team was able to step in.

Read Case Study ▸

FAQs

What is GUI design software?

GUI design software helps user experience (UX) designers and embedded systems developers create visual, auditory, and physical control elements that enable users to interact with their devices.

Through the design process, these tools support UX experts in the creation of interface elements and behaviors that allow users to interact with products, combining aspects of human psychology, user research, design principles, and technology expertise. For developers, these tools provide an integrated development environment that supports the implementation of design elements and workflows on real hardware, including coding, testing, and performance optimization.

For modern user interfaces, GUI design software that supports designers and developers working together to create vivid, graphics-rich elements is better able to achieve the smartphone-like experiences that consumers crave.
Why is GUI design software useful?

GUI design software supports the creation of rich, vivid, and intuitive UX without having to manually develop code for every element or perform extensive integration activities on the target hardware. These software tools also reduce the time and effort required for release by supporting designers and developers working together to create GUIs fast without compromising design integrity or performance optimization.

Why use Crank’s GUI design software?

Crank Storyboard is built by a team of embedded experts that understand the importance of UX design and development and trusted by major household brands across multiple industries. Storyboard helps product teams to iterate around application design and enhance UX with ease, resulting in sophisticated GUIs that deliver exceptional user experiences.
How do you design a GUI?

The GUI design process uses research and testing to drive design decisions that match user needs and expectations. Through problem definition, ideation, and prototyping in tools such as Photoshop and Sketch, GUI designs are refined to the point where they can be implemented in code. For embedded systems, GUI design software such as Crank Storyboard supports the development, testing, and deployment of applications on the target hardware, ensuring an alignment between design intent and the realities of platform features and performance.

Embedded GUI Development Software

Storyboard’s collaborative environment encourages embedded GUI designers to create their best while enabling the developers with artwork to validate and perfect at the same time.