Micro frontends are a growing trend in 2020, with a recent study revealing that 24 percent of developers have used them. Micro frontends enable your organization to take a microservice-like approach to your frontend, replacing the traditional frontend monolith approach.

By breaking up the frontend into MFEs, you enable your organization to more effectively innovate and improve your brand’s online experience. And as you improve UX, you improve customer satisfaction and retention.

Here are 3 specific ways that micro frontends enable your teams to deliver better UX.

1. Micro frontends allow an individual team to focus on one aspect of the user experience.

With micro frontends, you can give ownership over a particular feature or aspect of the user experience to an independent team. And once you assemble a team with members who have collective end-to-end expertise, you can then empower that team with end-to-end power to make decisions and implement their strategy.

Rather than having one frontend team that manages the entire user experience, micro frontends allow one single team to zero in on a key function and do focused research and experimentation. So instead of having one team that’s focused on many different aspects of the user experience, you have many teams that are each focused on one or a few.

This kind of concentrated effort enables a greater sense of creativity in each aspect of your brand’s online experience, ensuring that every part of your app or site has been thought through meticulously--addressing every point of friction in your UX and app performance.

2. Micro frontends allow for a more iterative approach to updates.

Part and parcel of the independence of cross-functional teams is their ability to take their ideas and put them into action without needing to simultaneously update other parts of the site or app.

With a monolithic structure, your team may have great ideas about how to improve a particular aspect of the UX but have to wait for other aspects of the frontend to be updated so that the entire frontend can be upgraded at once. In this system, your entire team needs to tightly coordinate to make sure all the updates happen at the same time, forcing some teams to sit on an update while others rush to get theirs out the door before they’re fully confident in its effectiveness in connecting with a user.

This monolithic process can become incredibly unwieldy, particularly as you seek to scale and grow the size and number of your teams. Everything bottlenecks at the frontend. But with micro frontends, your teams can release an update to their feature at the speed of their ideas and their ability to implement them, and they can determine their own sprints to release.

The ability to release updates iteratively and independently while minimizing the risk of breaking other parts of your site enables your teams to focus on releasing the kinds of updates that will create the biggest gains for your UX--rather than focusing on the kinds of releases that are simply safe or feasible.

3. Micro frontends force you to define a specific vision for your brand’s UX.

The added independence of individual teams can lead to UX chaos if your organization’s leadership isn’t ensuring that your company has clearly defined brand standards and that all your teams fully understand and adhere to them. When teams are completely independent to the point that they operate as organizations unto themselves, your UX (as well as your business) will quickly become a mess.

However, this challenge is an opportunity to strengthen your overall UX/UI standards and to define them more clearly. A consistent experience is a better experience, and you will have to think strategically about how to get and keep all your teams on the same page.

With micro frontends, you’ll be forced to think intentionally about how they speak to one another, along with the teams that built them. This is something that should be a part of managing your development teams anyway, but the need for coordination and open communication becomes more evident in a situation where you’re using micro frontends.

This added need for intentionality, should you rise to it, will greatly benefit the quality of your applications, as well as your organizational culture.

Build modern UX using micro frontends on Kubernetes with Entando.

When release cycles take months instead of weeks, your business is left unable to deliver modern online experiences. Development bottlenecks slow your ability to make application updates, keeping you from iterating and innovating. And outdated or clunky UX keeps you from winning customers over and retaining them.

So that’s why we created a platform to help you get your ideas to market faster.

Entando is the leading micro frontend platform for building enterprise web apps on Kubernetes. We want to change the way enterprises think about building their apps, sites, and portals in order to innovate more quickly.

With Entando, you can leverage customized blueprints to quickly create micro frontends and assemble them onto a single page. Then reuse UI/UX components across multiple projects via the Entando Component Repository, saving money and increasing development speed. Scale quickly and effectively with Entando’s custom Kubernetes operator, automating the deployment of scalable, self-healing applications.

Entando is open source with available enterprise support. Begin developing on the platform today, and get a quote to see how our Professional Services team can help your enterprise build better apps, sites, and portals--faster.