Product Design

Human-centered design workshops bring all our various design thinking and HCD tools together into one place. While they tend to vary by project and organization, they’re always an opportunity for us to co-create with clients. Journey mapping, stakeholder mapping, empathy mapping, research unpacking… All of the human-centered design activities are in play during these workshops. It’s during these workshops that we can hone in on the user journey and pinpoint friction, ultimately allowing us to hypothesize and begin imagining possible solutions.

UX design outlines what the experience is actually like for people using and interacting with a product. We use several essential tools to finetune and perfect the experience. Beginning with experience mapping and defining user requirements, we determine what the user journey looks like and start to add some structure to it. From there, we move on to user flows, information architecture, and wireframes to hone in on the details.

While user testing can be done at any stage of the product design and development process, we prefer to focus on it while building wireframes for two main reasons. One is speed. We’re able to adapt to change and iterate much more quickly if something isn’t working in the wireframe than we would if we were dealing with a full display layer. The second reason for testing during the wireframe stage is that we’re better able to test the experience itself rather than the users’ perception of the experience based on the visual layer.

UI design involves everything in the display layer of a product. It’s what users actually see and interact with. Colors, fonts, grid structure, UX writing… we design all of these elements into one cohesive design system. And we don’t just design things because they look nice. Every design decision we make is evidence-based and backed by thorough research to ensure that the UI is successful.

As part of the UI design system, we also pay thoughtful attention to how the various elements interact with one another. Small, micro-interactions elevate specific features within the product’s overall experience. We design them with intention and are considerate to keep them micro so as to not distract the user from the overall experience. Subtlety and minimalism is the key to successful micro-interactions.

A prototype of your product is an extremely useful tool in a number of ways. It can serve as a proof of concept that your idea is viable and worth moving forward. Prototypes also assist in showing investors what your product can do rather than simply telling them. Our prototypes take several different forms based on the needs of the client. In some cases, we’re building a clickable front-end only prototype with placeholder data to give an idea of the look and feel of the product. Other times, we work with the development team to build out a more robust prototype to really show what the product can do.