World-Class Product Design
For Enterprise-Grade Software
To design and build intuitive software, we first need to understand your business drivers, stakeholder objectives, and user goals.
In order to kickoff a software development project that requires new functionality or an entirely new approach, we propose baselining techniques and related frameworks understand your users, their heuristics, and how design thinking can inform solutions in your specific domain. We accomplish this through User Experience Research (UXR).
We work closely with you to uncover value and pain points in your current state. Work with us to realize the benefits of UXR:
UXR
- De-Risk Your Investment Prior to Development
- Uncover Pain Points in Current State
- Provide a Space for Ideas and Initiatives
- Work with Our Expert Team of Researchers
&
Build The Right Thing
Build The Thing Right.
Baselining
To baseline means to establish a point of reference to measure future performance or improvements against. Baselining is done through collection of quantitative or qualitative data gathering, stakeholder/subject matter expert interviews, and discovery sessions, as detailed below.
Our aim is to understand your industry, business model, unique selling propositions, users’ heuristics, and the current state of your product platform or business software. By taking copious notes, asking pertinent questions, and finding clarity through discovery, we can make informed decisions regarding UX/UI. This is how smart software is built.
Building smart software requires understanding your users on a visceral level to ideate on their behalf.
Data Gathering
UXR requires the collection of quantitative or qualitative data that support assumptions and hypotheses regarding your users and their behaviors. It’s imperative that we relate ourselves to the wants and needs of your end-users; research uncovers who that person is, the context in which they use your software, and what they require from us for a cohesive user experience.
For existing software where our team is tasked with creating smarter flows, one of the best sources of quantitative data comes from analytics and user profiling. Knowing which users were on which pages and for how long can go a long way towards understanding their needs and creating workable solutions that keep them in the forefront.
Stakeholder Interviews
We prepare questions relative to your product, platform, or application, if applicable. If you are in need of software that hasn’t been built yet, our stakeholder interview questions may be more in the vein of goals or drivers behind wanting to build vs. buy or the technical requirements behind the initial build vs. maintenance. We ask pertinent questions to get to the root of change:
What is the business problem and the value in solving it?
How do you measure success through analytics?
Where are your users experiencing frustrations?
What teams will be impacted by the work?
How can we effectively integrate with your existing teams?
Discovery Sessions
We take the time to align with your stakeholders and users through virtual or physical discovery sessions where we meet uncover the goals, requirements, work justification, points of contact, and other pertinent user flows or journeys that need to be optimized. We accomplish this through preparing questions and poring through existing datasets or documentation.
During discovery, we get a real sense for how to best engage with your company and how to make an impact on your product and bottom line.
Articulation
After the research has been conducted, our team presents the outcomes of the completed work. We’ll review recommended next steps, continuing with a focus on de-risking. Solutions are delivered in a hierarchy map that ties decisions back to business goals, relative to the work completed in the previous steps through interviews, documentation, and testing.
UX is just the beginning.
We leverage our research to design intuitive software products your users will love.
We take great pride in our user interface designs and their ability to engage your users.
During or after our initial research phase, we work closely with your teams to design intuitive, bespoke software products relative to your needs.
Knowing your users well means we can design empathetic user flows, consult on information architecture and interactions, and align with the accessibility levels required from an accessibility perspective.
UI
- Increase user engagement, confidence, and retention
- Lower development and customer support costs
- Create responsive screen sizes including mobile
- Design for a variety of users and stakeholders
Scaffolding
We often suggest paper prototyping or rough sketches to paint ideas for product design in a freeform environment, devoid of distractions or best-practice influences (or artistic ability). Early sketches can turn into gray-box wireframes that help establish layout of text, components, and elements of the proposed page design.
In these early stages, we’re looking to get a sense of the work ahead, or overall effort associated with designing a new product or enhanced functionality. This is also a great time to introduce micro-copy or narrative-driven software to bring a sense of realism into the wireframes.
Design Systems
Creating reusable, extensible, and flexible design systems is arguably the most important part of the UI process and can be a boon for the continuation or handoff of paradigms once a project is complete. These systems dictate how components are designed, implemented in context, and used by users through prototypical interactions. Through this initial work, a shared language for designed assets is created that can carry throughout an application.
We work hand-in-hand with your existing brand to either adhere to an existing or chosen system, or create a new one based on your parameters. Our design team looks closely at typography, palette, and other global styles, relative to brand, that will be used on or with components.
Typically a design system will cover the basics of software design: buttons, icons, inputs, drop-downs, avatars, modals, etc. We get even more granular on bespoke components and provide the specs to create said components in a front-end environment. Lastly, we will hook up prototypical interactions through variants to showcase the use cases of components.
Information Architecture
Often getting lumped in with a typical user experience deliverable, information architecture (IA) sets the stage for how the pages or elements of an application flow together. From a high-level, it’s important to see that the user preferences page is linked to from the global settings page; what’s even more important is that the designer, developers, and ultimately the users understand the flow of the application.
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
Once the right pieces are in place for a lo-fi pass our design team works in an Agile process to design intuitive pages or functionality as requested by you, the client.
First, we start with a grid and initial page layout involving navigational components, context through breadcrumbs, typographic hierarchy, and placeholder elements such as text, images, or charts. We leverage the global design system to pull from pre-existing components and work through interactions to determine best practices.
In a lo-fi capacity there is value in time saved and minimal resources needed to lay out pages; there is less chance of being bogged down by minutiae. However, hi-fi design is a true-to-life representation that can inspire your customers or stakeholders to visualize new functionality that may not exist yet. There is value in both approaches, and typically lo-fi feeds into hi-fi by expressing the needs of the product from the workshops and user testing iterations it goes through.
High-Fidelity Prototypes
Prototypical interactions are set on a per-component or per-page basis. Components talk to each other via interactions from the user; clicks, hovers, mouse and keyboard events, etc. will signal that the end-user is trying to accomplish a task. Good software design will “get out of the way” and allow the user to interact with components in a clear manner, without overwhelming them with functionality.
There are plenty of different interactions that need to be considered during this stage and earlier in the process, from alert handling to display of overlays. Additionally, we detail out the animations of how pages or overlays will be presented and dismissed.
Once a clickable prototype is reviewed and accepted, our team delivers documentation, specs, or videos of the interactions that can be used in front-end development to make your product a reality. Our team is well-versed in software engineering and often works side-by-side to realize the software vision.
Our Guiding Principles