Our process begins by working with you to establish your target audience to ensure all design decisions are informed and appropriate to fulfil the user needs.
User experience (UX) relates to the overall impression and experience that a user has when using a product or service.
In terms of websites, this goes further than the user journey as it relates to the overall look and feel of the site and how appealing it is to the user.
As an example, a user may visit a site and quickly find what they’re looking for or complete a transaction (though clear CTAs), however the overall appearance of the site might be cluttered, outdated, and/or un-responsive (making use on mobile or tablet very difficult).
For this reason, user experience plays a crucial role in the design process as a successful website needs to be both simple to use and visually engaging; with the following elements considered as part of our design process:
- Product research: we’ll spend time researching your industry and opportunities, in order to ascertain what your competitors are doing and how you stand out from them.
- Page layout: once complete, the product research will ultimately determine how content is prioritised on each of the pages on the site – ensuring key content is near the top, prompts (such as pointer arrows) feature throughout, and clear footer links at the bottom.
- Personas and scenarios: the designers will work closely with you to ascertain the personas of your users as well as their behaviours and goals – including likely scenarios of how each would use the site.
- Information architecture: the structure of the site will typically be determined by the user journey mapping stage, however this will then be implemented and tested alongside the other visual elements to ensure everything is working as expected.
- Wireframes: the initial wireframes will be built upon as part of the user experience phase, with the designers starting to apply visual elements such as logos, imagery, and colour palette in order to give a representative impression of how the pages will look and function.
- Prototyping: creation of a working prototype of the website, allowing both internal and external users to fully test and feedback on the experience.
- Adaptability: all of our websites are built to be responsive (and therefore compatible with desktop, tablet and mobile) as standard.
For more information, please take a look at our Elmore Court case study.