User Experience Design

User Experience Design focuses on people and relationships, tasks and actions to create the best possible experience for your current and potential users of your product or service. Here’s a list of several high level disciplines that we leverage to deliver your project.

Planning + Research

The planning phase allows us to prioritize the specifics of your goals for your project. We firmly believe that design research , often referred to as Business Anthropology, is the core discipline that informs all larger decision making for a given project’s strategy. In order to effectively prioritize and architect the content, we must first understand its current and potential impact on your users.

Mental Models

As mentioned briefly above this is where we figure out the habits of your target users when it comes to the context of what you want them to do with your product or service. It’s a bit of gap analysis to find out where there are opportunities to engage them with a product or service without expecting them to change their patterns; unless, of course, encouraging change is the goal.

Content Analysis

We look at what information you have available and where the remaining information is coming from. We use information to guide our decisions for structuring the content and the experience. To be clear and fair, we do not create content for you. We design the best possible experience around it and rely on you to provide the content.

Information Architecture

Information Architecture is when we define navigation and content layout throughout the website / application. This includes user workflow diagrams to indicate decision making landmarks and flow throughout the site architecture, while the wireframes visualize the layout of content across the site. These diagrams are used to confirm that all required content will be included and that the overall site organization is clear to users, while connecting the needs of users to your business goals.

Prototyping

It’s often at this stage where we prototype the interaction with the proposed wireframes. Typically we’ll use them as a paper prototype to put in front of clients and a small number of users to see how they would navigate the wireframes and what their reaction is to the page architecture. We ultimately look to find as many faulty assumptions and design errors early on in the design process in order to minimize backward steps as the designs reach a refined state and are implemented.

Interface Design

Once the UXD and prototyping is signed off we move into the visual interface design. We take guidance from the brand identity and move that into the look and feel of the interface itself, always testing the previous findings around user experience as we go. The layout may change at this point as we work through the design but the final product is always refined and polished for the development team to implement.