The third stage of working together ‘The AVAMAE Way’ is focused on the user’s journey. Before we build anything, before a single line of code is written, we invest time in understanding, developing and refining the UX.
We don’t just lock ourselves away in a dark room and come out and deliver a fait accompli. We work collaboratively with you and shape the design with your feedback.
Scoping it Out
We will have already discussed and agreed your design requirements with you at the proposal stage and everything will be clearly detailed in the proposal. If we’re designing software, we can work with your existing branding or create new branding in collaboration with you.
We’re not one of those agencies that gets uppity about working with other branding and marketing agencies either. We embrace collaboration across the board. It gets better results and faster.
Talking Design
Next, it’s time for your dedicated designer to meet with you and talk about your ideas. Your AVAMAE designer will listen and get a feel for the type of things you like and the things you don’t. You’ll be surprised just how much input you’ll be encouraged to give. Everything from your imagery and style preferences – if you’ve any examples of sites you like, then we want to see them.
Once everyone is happy and we’ve a good feel for what you want, we’ll go away and start creating our initial design ideas.
First Reveal
The first thing you’ll see is a small number of screens in three different designs in a presentation workshop. This is the start of the design process. We’ll give you time to absorb them and then listen intently to your feedback. We value your comments – positive and negative – and we’ll then discuss your thoughts and give you ours on best practice in design.
InVision
During the design phase, we use a tool called InVision to help realise our vision by creating prototypes. We’ll share these prototypes with you remotely using the InVision platform. We’ll also host a series of workshops sessions with you to collaborate effectively and finalise the UX before starting any build. Why do we do it this way? Because it allows you to experience how the site will function before we write any code. So, usability is nailed down before dev begins.
Design Tweaks
Our initial designs will be refined according to your feedback and our conversations. We then produce a single design that is exactly what you want.
All Systems Go
Once the design’s been given the green light our UX designers will create a full prototype using InVision. This enables you to experience every possible user journey that visitors might take.
We break prototypes down into sets of screens. Each screen mimics how a finished site or app will function. Click a button on the prototype and it’ll take you where the final live site would. Once we’ve created every screen needed in the chosen design, we’ll send you a link to view them where you can annotate your feedback, too.
Tickling Prototype
We’ll then review your feedback and comments, then tweak the prototype. If there’s a suggestion that won’t work in terms of design, we’ll explain why and put forward an alternative solution.
This is a key stage. Before you sign anything off, we want you to be 100% happy that the prototype matches what we collectively agreed in the proposal and user stories. If it doesn’t, now is the time to say as the prototype forms the template for our engineers to use to create your final software.
Sign-Offs
One of our internal testing team will check the prototype against the user stories in the agreed proposal. We’ll complete a User Acceptance Testing spreadsheet and will approve each user story individually. If something can’t be signed off, it will be noted. To save time, wherever possible, we’ll sign-off each module as it’s designed then pass it to you for client sign-off. Examine each module closely and check everything we said we would do has been done. Any issues or queries? Let us know and we’ll quickly resolve them.
Once every module is approved that is final sign-off for the design and prototype stage. We won’t start any build until there’s full sign-off of the design. Any delays in signing off may impact on the project delivery date. It’s important because sign-off and full agreement at this stage ensures everyone is happy and it cuts down on time-consuming amends during the build.
Let’s Talk
So, that’s design ‘The AVAMAE Way’. It’s a carefully designed process that speeds up projects and minimizes mistakes at build stage. Got a project in mind? Simply call +44 (0) 20 7509 6992 or email robert.mcewan@avamae.co.uk and we can meet for a chat.
