The Design Process

Our design process is outlined below. Taking time for upfront planning allows your goals to be met in a timely and relaxed manor.

Discovery

The first step is to gather information about what you want to accomplish with the website. Who is going to be looking at your website and what are their needs? What specific types of information — text,drawings, photographs, movies, audio — should be presented. How should those pieces of information be organized? What should the site feel like?

Visualization

Conceptual exploration and brainstorming define this part of the design process. Low-fidelity sketches help set out the various design possibilities. Perhaps several different approaches are worked on simultaneously. These low-fidelity sketches are displayed as "wire frames" with no color. They outline the logical structure of the site but do not indicate the look and feel of the site.

Development

We start by choosing one or more of the schematic designs developed above and adding enough detail to produce a paper prototype. We use this paper prototype to test our ideas about information content and site navigation. We can test potential website users by sitting them down in front of the paper prototype and have them "browse" the website by pointing at the paper "pages". Paper prototyping allows us to get quick feedback from users while the design is still literally "on the drawing board." Next we start by choosing one of the schematic designs developed above and adding more detail to it. An overall "art direction" is picked and applied to the schematic design. High-fidelity paper drawings are produced in the intended colors and shapes. This is transfered to a development website.

Testing

Testing the website with actual users and listening to their concerns results in a highly functional and natural feeling website.

Deployment

After final adjustments are made the site is made live.

Evaluation

After using the live website for a while we gather feedback on what works and give a direction for possible future development.