Ever stumble onto a website that makes no sense? You lose your way, you can’t find basic info like a phone number, you don’t even understand what the business is in business to do? Well – these sites all suffer from a lack of successful UI/UX.
- UI / User Interface Design Planning and design of the visuals, presentation and interactivity of a site or app.
- UX / User Experience Design Determining the most effective design to make sure your users have a pleasant experience while using your site or app.
The success of any complex design project depends on creative thinking, thoughtful strategic planning, and expedient execution. This is where UI/UX comes in, and this is what we employ when starting any website or app project.
UI/UX consists of 3 main phases
We start all website projects with organization. We map out all pages and posts to give an overview of all the kinds of pages we will be building, and the kind of functionality needed for each.
We organize this map into a graphic representation referred to as a sitemap. A sitemap can be done in outline form if your site is mostly linear in work flow, or for a more complex project, a flow chart style works better.
Next step is to give careful thought to how these pages relate to each other and how they can be organized to make intuitive sense to a user as they experience your site. We cull the pages that are not needed, add sections and pages as needed to improve the user experience, and add next steps so that there are no dead ends. Menu titles are often created at this point too. This is no time for cutesy or clever – you want menus that make instant sense to the viewer.
Now that the large picture has been organized with the completed sitemap, it’s time to organize the pages themselves. We do this by building wireframes. The term wireframe refers to a visual site layout using only boxes, lines and tags – and happens prior to designing the site. A wireframe can include just a couple pages for a simple site, or can work through the logistics of a very complex site with multiple workflows happening at once.
Determining the most intuitive route from A to B in your site’s work flow, or from A to Z as the case may be, is based on data and research as well as common sense. There are new studies published every day about trends in site usage and navigation, and we make it our business to keep up to date with this research. We then apply those ideas to the planning of your site to determine how to set up your site to best speak to your audience and in turn help you reach your marketing goals for the site.
This phase is especially important when planning a complex site with multi-level functionality and actionable goals. But it’s useful for any size site to make sure that all concepts and ideas are thought through before spending time on design.
The site map and the wireframes are the building blocks upon which the site is designed. The design employs the information set up in these two phases and adds your company’s brand graphics, palette and fonts, images and illustrations, plus effective messaging to make the most of the work done in the planning stages.
The design is created using what we learn from you about your brand and your audience, as well as information we have learned through research, design trends and standards. We do not believe in following every trend, but we do think it’s paramount to know what is happening in the industry, to learn from the experiences of others, and to employ trends that make sense for your business. We also believe that a lot that makes your site design stand out is to be relatable to your specific audience. We would design an entirely different site for a preschool vs a university – even though they’re both schools.