The move from working with a design team to working with tech development.
Have you ever used a really beautiful app or website, that was rubbish? It looked amazing, had lovely UI elements, big imagery, but was a nightmare to use. How long did you keep using it before you got frustrated and navigated away? Probably not more than a couple of minutes.
This is due to a disconnect. Designers making something beautiful, getting you excited about it, making it, and then your users hate it. You invest time in endless revisions, getting everything pixel perfect and on-brand, only to have poor engagement, high bounce rates, and little to no ROI.
Design agencies will use terms like UX and User Centered Design. This rarely goes beyond wireframes, and how many agencies have actually run a focus group with your customers? – my point exactly.
Design is much more than fancy visuals and nice UI. Design is about how users engage with the experience you have created for them. We should be designing for users first and foremost, not brands.
This is where I pivoted my thinking.
Approaching creativity with tech first, rather than visual design, means we are forced to have to understand the user or customer before we do anything. What are they trying to achieve, what are their goals, and what are their current pain-points?
We develop the solution to the problem, and THEN add visual design to ‘brand’ the user experience.
Most importantly, we have done ALL of this work BEFORE starting any code!
We have an ideation session with you to understand your business. From this, we map your business objectives to tech and digital.
We create userflows that illustrate our understanding of your business, and our proposed solution to meet your objectives. This is where the ideation happens. This is where we have our back-and-forth (instead of the visual design stage) to make sure the solution is perfect. This is where the value to your customers (and ultimately your ROI) comes from.
Wireframes and UI come next, followed by visual design. All we are doing here is “skinning” the solution, meaning we can focus on visuals and brand identity rather than trying to solve everything at once.
By the time we get to development and coding, we know EXACTLY what we are building. We aren’t building things that aren’t going to work, or are untested. At this point, we will all be confident about what the deliverables are. “That’s not what I expected” or “This really important feaure is missing” aren’t things we hear anymore. All features have been defined up-front, with a clear customer centric business-case for each.
If you are embarking on a new project, and want to get it right first time, talk to me.