When it comes to designing for mobile apps and websites, your design is only as great as its functionality. While beautiful UI is important, it’s critical for your designs to be useful.
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A lot of thought and consideration goes into deciding what your new website domain name will be. Whether it’s a cooking blog or an eCommerce website you want to be sure to pick the perfect domain name and extension that will entice visitors, be easy to find, and resonate with your target audience. Even once you determine what you want your domain name to be, you still have to check to see which domain extensions are available and which extension will best suit your website’s purpose and audience.
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You have a project and you know you need some design, but you’re not sure where to begin. Do you do it all at once, how do you start? What does the process look like?! Don’t get overwhelmed, we successfully assist people in the design process every day. Here’s a quick walkthrough on where to start and how the design process works.
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Welcome to 2017 everyone! The new year is a great time in business to reevaluate your business strategies and get a sound game plan in place for the new year. This is true for every aspect of business, but especially when considering planning for a new marketing strategy. In today’s innovative marketing-scape there are new tools and tactics at our disposal. Marketing tools that we predict will be front-runners in reaching your targeted audiences includes: image/visual content sharing, video marketing, infographics, and social media usage.
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When explaining our design process to a client, I often find myself having to pause at the wireframing stage and explain what wireframing is. It’s not the coolest part of designing a product, but I find it the most valuable step in the process. By dedicating time to mapping out the user experience and wireframing the project, a designer can focus more time later on being creative and lessen the amount of interruptions due to UX confusion.
What is a Wireframe?
If you’re building a house, you wouldn’t pick the color of the walls first, would you? Consider the same approach to designing a product. The wireframe is the foundation and structure of your project, and it can come in various forms and deliverables.
How Does Wireframing Work?
My team likes to begin the old fashioned way, with a white board and a dry-erase marker. We’ll spend time sketching out the flow of the design and identifying all the places our users can explore from screen-to-screen. By displaying our thinking on a white board, we can ask each other questions, identify the best user experience, and discover places where innovation is practical. I recommend pulling a developer into this conversation. An expert in code can keep you in check with how practical your user experience is, and how much time should be estimated for your design.
Remember if the foundation and UX of your app is broken, the beautiful design you create later will not fix it. It’s important to catch your mistakes here so your end product can be the best it can be.
Keep your wireframes simple. These sketches should be very lo-fi. In the wireframing process you’ll see lots of boxes and arrows, save the pretty design stuff for your hi-fi mockups.
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Looking Back and Moving Forward
The trends in the app and web design world are continually changing. To wrap up the year, we want to take a moment to look back at what we have learned, and move forward into evolving design in the coming year. Let’s take a look at a few of the bigger changes that took place this year:
If you are involved in marketing, strategy, sales, or other client facing portions of your company then you’ve probably heard of the term buyer persona. But what exactly is a buyer persona? How does your buyer persona impact your business? How well do you know Small-Business Steve and Entrepreneur Eileen?
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With quick deadlines, new products, and the convenience of technology - it’s easy as a designer to forget about the importance of a pencil and sketch pad. Before you dive straight into design tools like Illustrator or Xd, think of classic principles. These extra steps will open the door to more creativity and help you find more satisfaction in your work.
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Despite our previous blogs on language, content, and color - may you never forget the importance of your logo. Keeping your company’s logo fresh and relevant is vital to branding success. If you’re looking to redesign your company’s logo, we recommend keeping the essence of your existing logo for consistency. After all, this is one way people recognize you.
More isn’t always better. When it comes to UX testing, 5 is the golden number of testers to aim for according to Invision, a popular UX testing and prototyping tool and the Nielsen Norman Group, a consultant in the UX field.
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