At G.1440, we believe in starting with the user. G.1440 approaches every web site design by adhering to User-Centered Design principles and practices. User-centered design is a methodology that concentrates on product design and development from user, user goal and user interaction perspectives. Its goal is to provide easy-to-use, desirable applications. Outlined below are the steps that we take to ensure that we are meeting the user’s needs and helping users to accomplish goals through our design work.
CREATIVE BRIEF
G.1440 issues a creative brief to every client. It is a simple questionnaire that is designed to help elicit responses from the client to help in the discovery, analysis, and strategic planning of each project. We ask that all major project stakeholders complete the brief because doing so can help surface differences of opinion and help us to present a unified and commonly agreed upon strategy for the project.
KICKOFF MEETING
We always start a project with a kickoff meeting to review the statement of work, the project’s goals, and make sure that everyone involved in the project understands each person’s role. This meeting also serves as a chance to review competitor sites and talk about design goals.
STRATEGY DEFINITION AND COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Some clients prefer to have us document the results of the kickoff meeting and write up a formal strategy document for the project. This can include a competitive analysis that documents the pros and cons of any competitor’s web site.
PERSONA DEVELOPMENT
Users have goals when visiting a site. When designing a web site, we try to accommodate those goals through clear and concise navigation imagery that will communicate ideas to the user, and textual areas that will reinforce those ideas.Personas are a tool used for designing and planning web sites. They are character sketches that are meant to represent the kinds of users we anticipate coming to a web site.The job of personas is to give the team a common frame of reference when making decisions about what a web site should offer:
- By attaching a name and a face to our users, they become more real to both the client and the design team
- By describing their current life situation, we can empathize and understand the goals of our users
- By identifying our business objectives, we can offer our users products and services that complement their needs
- By thinking of our users as real people, we can avoid attributing our desires and goals to them (Instead of stating “I think the web site should do this,” we can say “Tom, the loyal customer needs to find this information”…)
Finally, personas are based on research. It is always our preference to interview actual users to collect raw data concerning real users’ goals, frustrations, opinions, preferences, and ideas regarding a new web site. This allows us to put real findings into personas. For some clients, this is not a possibility. In such cases, G.1440 will create ad hoc personas that still present a great deal of value for the client and our design team in trying to visualize and design for prospective users.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Taking into account the business goals outlined by the creative brief, G.1440 will propose a revised or brand new information architecture. We believe in defining and planning how we structure the information presented on a web site up front to guarantee a better user experience. Completion of this task helps plan for flexibility in terms of future phases and changes that need to be made to a web site as well.
WIREFRAMES
Especially on web sites that are data intensive or have layout challenges (for example, how to display products in a search results format or how to display products in a categorized approach), G.1440 recommends wireframing pages. The advantage of this exercise is that it takes the emotion out of the page layouts and helps the team focus on page real estate and how that can accommodate user goals. We encourage clients to consider doing usability testing at this stage with paper prototypes (or basic, navigable html prototypes). If something is clearly working (or not working), identifying these issues early on saves time and money before moving on to design comps.
DESIGN COMPS
Once approval for the wireframes has been received, we move on to skinning them. G.1440 designs all comps in PhotoShop. Static JPEGs are posted on our design extranet for review and approval.
USABILITY TESTING
If testing was not performed in the Wireframing stage, we definitely recommend it at this point. G.1440 has worked with Blue Bear, LLC and Human Factors International in the past on various projects. Usability testing can be performed on static comps. Following testing, revisions can be made to the comps and the comps can be re-tested. Or, we can move on to building the designs in XHTML.
WEB STANDARDS
G.1440 recommends always building sites to the latest technology. We adhere to Web Standards (XHTML 1.0 Transitional, using CSS for layout and reserving tables for tabular data) when building out web sites. This helps future-proof your site, makes it easier to change the appearance over time, and keeps the page size smaller.