our creative process : web design
design tools
Making the end-user experience intuitive is anything but simple. Information needs to be organized and presented in ways that will lead a visitor to your site through the steps you want them to take—in a fluid yet predictable manner. Knowing what you want visitors to do once they reach your site is a critical question, getting them to do it is the art and science of successful design.
The web is not passive but interactive; it requires the visitor to take action. That’s why attention to detail is so important. Beyond the overall look and feel of your web presence, the color or placement of a button or call to action, the location of a navigation element or the amount of white space surrounding a text area—what we call the user interface—are factors that can tilt results in your favor, increasing the likelihood that visitors to your site will see and do the things you want them to.
There is a famous statement on advertising often attributed to department store executive John Wannamaker that at least half of all advertising expenditures are wasted; if only one knew which half. Much the same could be said about any media investment. The point being that whatever you spend to create your web presence is wasted money if it fails to deliver.
The good news is that you don’t need to guess what will work, in addition to decades of experience, we have a variety of tools and techniques we employ to ensure your investment will pay off. While each project is unique, in the course of designing your site we may use some or all of the following to help our team and yours envision the final product:
Requirements Documents: These can include simple statements regarding functionality, such as ‘the site must provide an e-commerce component enabling online credit card transactions”, or may contain more elaborated specifications, use cases, flow charts or other tools that assist designers and engineers in understanding your needs. You or your designated staff who are the subject experts will be asked to participate in and review this material prior to the initiation of design.
Site Maps: Site maps are the equivalent of an organizational chart showing the pages and that will comprise your site and their inter-relationship to one another.
High Level Wireframes: These are schematic representations of a web page or site showing the location of functional, graphic and text elements and their relationships to one another.
Page Mocks: These are typically full color static renderings of a site or page. We may create one or many versions–particularly in early stages of user testing.
Prototypes: Sometimes we’ll make simple prototypes. People use the web in very different ways just as they do other media. Some folks are browsers, some want lots of detailed information, others like to compare. User testing often leads to useful discoveries. We may find that we need to create several different ways to view or organize your site to meet the needs of a range of visitors you want to attract. If you have an existing site we may want to do A/B testing to see—in real time—how current users of your site react to changes. A small investment of time and effort at this stage can have a big payoff, increasing use, purchasing or leads by significant margins.
User Testing: We don’t rely just on our own experience which is considerable, we test in the field by bringing mocks and/or prototypes to prospective users—users that are typical of the demographics and audience you are trying to reach. We’ll ask questions, monitor eye movement, mouse activity and other factors to see what people look at, what they click on, and how they respond. A few hours in the field at one or more stages in the design process often help us refine a design so that you get reliable results.
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