Importance of the Back-end for UX
When building a user interface such as an app, we always talk about the User Experience which we believe is key to ensuring usage — our metric to measure success.
In fact if you take a look at our product design process below, we focus on User Roles and Use Cases and then designing the interaction but don’t explicitly mention the back-end or technology at all.
This doesn’t mean the technology isn’t important, it just reflects that the technology is a choice that comes after conceptualising and designing the experience we want to create. Naturally the User Experience is related to how the user interacts using an app but the back-end enables this.
The back-end consists of the server which hosts the database and the application. Here is where the application logic lies and where the front-end (a native iPhone app or the web browser for example) requests information and gets responses. This communication between the front-end and back-end is done through e.g. RESTful APIs as you may know.
An efficient, scalable and robust back-end enables us to focus on creating a great User Experience on the front-end side and not having to worry about the logic for each front-end interface as the “heavy-lifting” is done by the back-end.
How does the back-end affect the UX?
One thing that really matters to a user is that the interface is responsive (in terms of time).
Let’s say a user is a doctor in a small practice. Their patient was in the hospital and they want to ask a few questions to the hospital’s doctor so our doctor is using an iPhone app to find the hospital doctor and securely message another healthcare provider regarding a patient (HIPAA compliant).
Here is the constellation where we show the flow of the user interaction:-
All the information that is in the directory, the contacts the doctor has, all the messages are of course encrypted on the server so if the loading of the directory takes too long and the searching is not efficient the doctor will just ask someone to get the hospital doctor’s phone number to call them and not use the app.
The back-end responds to the iPhone app’s request to load the directory by serving up (paginated, meaning the response is in batches of say 50 doctors) the JSON response to the app which is then displayed to the user.
Imagine thousands of doctors doing this at the same time, you can guess that the back-end needs to keep being responsive and immediate even when it gets busy.
Choosing and configuring the most suitable back-end to the user needs is crucial to creating a great experience.
Trust your back-end developers to design the information architecture which is the best fit for your project and which technology stack they prefer, our back-end frameworks of choice are Rails and Phoenix.
