Our Design Process
Understanding Your Business
- Business History
Building anything with "on the surface" knowledge will get you an end product that's just ok. We aim for exceptional. Your return on investment is important to us, so we delve into understanding your business and its challenges at a much deeper level. How did it start? Why did it start? What are the pain points? What keeps your management team up at night? What has worked? What hasn't worked? Every detail that helps us understand your perspective goes a long way to help us facilitate your digital success.
- Digital Vision
When you think of your ideal digital presence, something comes to mind. We want to understand what that is. Whether it's a strategy you've seen another business implement or just your version of online success, understanding what your benchmarks are gives us an initial direction. Don't worry if you've never thought about this, we'll work it out together. Our expertise in the digital landscape and our research team converge to provide solutions that are truly unique.
- Ideal Audience
This is what it's all about, your audience. Who are they? Are there multiple audiences you provide your services or products to? A great deal of this knowledge may be tacit for you. You know it because you've been doing it for a long time, and this is extremely helpful for us. What we'll add to that is some explicit knowledge from data, as we test hypotheses and run discovery campaigns. This data then informs your decisions for capturing even more marketshare.
- Sales
And here we are! The second thing it's all about, the sales (unless you're a Non-Profit). What are your sales channel(s) and how have they been performing? What are your plans for improving them? Gathering this information is critical to project success as these eventually feed into project benchmarks. We ensure that there is always a direct correlation between our efforts and your bottom line. Focusing on the pieces that impact sales upfront helps build momentum for progressing through the entire roadmap. Small wins inevitably lead to big wins.
Two-Week Deep Dive
An extremely important part of our process is our two-week Deep Dive. Expect to be asked a lot of questions from our team during this period. Our researchers immerse themselves while trying to understand the challenges of your industry and consume whatever knowledge they can garner on your specific business model, location, cultural proximity etc. Then in collaboration with our digital experts we begin developing long-term and short-term digital strategies.
Strategy Artifacts
- Digital Roadmap
Our Digital Roadmap artifact documents the basis of our strategies and gives context for all initial decisions. Our approach is to define thorougly, but loosely and iterate quickly as we acquire more knowledge during the course of a build. At the beginning of a build there are a lot of hypotheses that need to be validated. Documenting our strategies clearly means our initial trajectory will most likely yield favorable results even before our hypotheses are validated with data. As we gain further insight during the course of the build we adapt and modify this artifact to reflect the new findings. All technologies selected, infrastructure, projected timelines and project risks are included here.
- Discovery Campaign
Our Discovery Campaign artifact outlines the first of many campaigns to gather information about your current or prospective audience. The focus of this campaign is validating some of our inital hypotheses about your audience. During our deep dive session we formulate several hypotheses which need to be validated. Validating, refining and building on these hypotheses are a key part of moving your business along the roadmap to achieving your digital goals.
Content-First Approach
Content is the backbone of the Digital Age and we put immense focus on the content that will eventually be the substance of our builds. Your content isn't always ready for the digital world, sometimes it may be too verbose or maybe you don't have it yet. We assist you with shaping your content based on your audience(s) to ensure your digital presence is both intentional and effective. With our approach, Content Development leads both our Design and Code Development. Your final product is highly customized to the content that you disseminate, creating an experience that feels well thought out and has a logical flow.
Design Artifacts
- Low-Fidelity
Wireframes These are the building blocks of the user interfaces we eventually design. We call them "thoughts on paper". These aren't meant to showcase any design whatsoever but instead focuses our thoughts on functionality and logically creating the user's movement through the build.
- High-Fidelity
Mockups These are a few notches up from wireframes. At this point, the look and feel is in full swing. This is what your final product will look like. Every detail of our designs can be traced back to the Roadmap Strategy artifact and our current knowledge of your target audience. Colors are selected based on color theory, shapes are selected to invoke a feel that is consistent with your messaging etc. We design every detail intentionally.
- Interactive
Prototypes This is the icing on the cake! Interactivity plays a massive role in how digital experiences are interpreted. They're the difference between a good UI and a great UI. To ensure that the feel of entire experience is intentional we add interactivity to your mockups so have a comprehensive understanding of the feel of the UI before any code is written.