Every successful project starts with a clear vision of what needs to be built. This phase helps us understand and clearly articulate your product’s high-level requirements. Goals are examined and itemized to prioritize both you and your end-user.

Purpose:

• Create high-level requirements for your product
• Define the product from the stakeholder’s point of view
• Clarify the user through survey and observation
• Understand the user’s needs
• Align and refine stakeholder wants and user needs
• Define user tasks for the product

We will drill down into our insights from Discovery to refine project requirements within your scope and timeframe. The more time we have, the more confidence we have in our recommendations. 

Once requirements are solidified, the product designer creates wireframes to communicate functionality and layout. For longer engagements a visual designer will move layouts from low- to high-fidelity user interface (UI) design.

Purpose

• Produce finely defined project requirements
• Create user flows based on product understanding
• Vet and refine user flows through stakeholder and developer engagement
• Develop product wireframes based on user flows
• Design user testing around product tasks
• Create testable prototypes based on wireframes
• Test the prototypes with real users with frequency
• Refine tasks, layouts and flows as we better understand how users interact with your product
• Repeat: Develop, Design, Create, Test, Refine

Decisions about the user interface’s visual aesthetic come into play after initial rounds of definition. Existing brand guidelines speed the visual process along. However, visual value is incremental and requires testing. With each repetition of Develop, Design, Create, Test and Refine, we use human-centered design to iterate on the visual aesthetic.

Purpose

• Develop mockups based on wireframes starting with low-fidelity, moving towards high-fidelity aesthetic design
• Create and vet a visual aesthetic with stakeholders and users
• Update testable prototypes to the fidelity of mockups
• Test the prototypes with real users with frequency
• Refine tasks, layouts and flows as we better understand how users will interact with your product
• Repeat: Develop, Design, Create, Test, Refine

Even when building upon the most complete documentation, style guides and prototypes, there’s always a chance for some uncertainty.  It’s why we offer product support contracts ranging from part-time to full-time engagements to support product functionality and UI in development.

A product support contract is especially important for clients who choose shorter definition engagements, giving the product designer time to define edge cases that arise in development. They can also flesh out interactions and components that didn’t get enough attention in earlier phases.

Purpose

• Time to work alongside a developer and respond to any questions or gaps
• Review the product in development and help maintain the product’s proposed vision

After development is complete and your product is ready to launch, we want to re-engage with users to conduct user testing. This is the ideal time to ensure all requirements are met and the application works as expected before you invest in a rollout.

Purpose

• User testing reports to highlighting successes and shortfalls
• Define recommendations for improvements
• Estimation to build future features