Everything You Need To Know About Low Fidelity Prototypes
Prototyping is an essential part of the digital product development process. It allows you to test your product with users…
Last updated: 09th Apr 2024
User Experience (UX)Our insight-led approach to user experience helps you create websites and applications that encourage better engagement with your audience.
In an environment where digital is more important to our connection with each other than ever before, user experience design plays a vital role. We as organisations have a responsibility to the people using our products and reading our content, to help make the experience of interacting with you as effortless, considered and inclusive as possible.
Partnering with our experienced UX design agency – our team of designers and researchers who are dedicated to creating effortless experiences – means you can achieve the level of UX greatness that renders our efforts almost invisible (in a good way).
The goal of UX design could be described simply as “engage more people.” The reality is… understanding what your customer experience means to your users, and what they’re really looking for, is a big deal. It requires more detailed conversation with many potential avenues.
Creating a user experience is an engaging, visual and enjoyable task, but there are big benefits to investing in a UX design service provider. We’ve outlined some of the proven benefits here for you that only a UX agency can provide.
We engaged Illustrate Digital to support us with the build of a new Hodge Bank website. Throughout the project, the team have proven themselves to be knowledgeable, creative, adaptable and committed in completing the project. They’ve demonstrated real value by going above and beyond the scope of the work, supporting and educating us throughout the project. We would recommend Illustrate Digital to anybody looking for expertise in the digital space.Nathan Harrington, Brand Manager, Hodge Bank
UX design is the process of researching, planning and creating designs and prototypes to help understand how visitors will travel through and interact with your website or application. It allows us to understand and explore the best possible approach to solving a problem, rather than rushing to create a solution to the problem.
UX is a skilled and highly sought-after approach to making digital experiences easier to use. The goal of UX design is to make users feel more comfortable, safe and ultimately more engaged and eager to interact with you and your product or content.
The practice of UX design covers a number of different areas, which can include: user research, competitor analysis, design prototyping, user testing and final delivery of user interface designs.
It takes the traditional idea of ‘website design’ and shifts the focus towards something that’s useful for people to use, rather than just something that’s nice to look at.
You’re probably familiar with the idea of “begin with the end in mind.” With UX design this is exactly what we’re doing, setting out on the process of getting to a better end destination. An important aspect of this is setting some key metrics and goals at the start, ambitions that we’re all aiming to achieve as a benefit of the process.
These metrics could be an increase in sales, a lower cost-per-acquisition from Google Ads, a higher number of sign-ups, or a number of other ways to measure the impact of your improved UX. But what’s important is that you do get something out of it, and that more importantly your website/app visitors are more engaged and enjoy their digital experience with you.
The impact to your business is shown in the way people interact with you, how much more engaged they are with your content and ultimately how it impacts your revenue and profitability.
Good user experience can mean the difference between your customers gliding their way through a sign-up process, versus getting frustrated and calling you for help. Or worse, unconsidered UX could result in people leaving your platform and doing business somewhere else entirely.
The time needed to carry out a UX design project all depends on what you’re looking to get out of it. There are many areas that can be covered as part of the process, all of which can help make a brilliantly natural digital experience.
Before anything else it’s important for us to understand your business strategy, its goals and the wider customer experience you offer as a brand. Beyond this, we can get started on one, or any number of areas of UX design.
If we focus on the full user interface designs then the process can be as little as one month.
If we’re conducting market research, testing prototypes, writing user stories for an engineering team to follow and delivering the final user interface designs, then the process can be anything from two to six months.
Ultimately, it all depends on two things: how big your website/application is going to be and how much research and testing is required to validate our beliefs about your audience.
The process of improving a website experience doesn’t have to always start from nothing, nor does it always mean you need to replace an entire website to see greater return. In fact, quite often brands work with us to help evaluate, benchmark and improve their existing experience.
The beauty of UX design is that it focuses on improved usability and accessibility of a website experience. There are several key UX principles that together, when done right, can make for a smooth and enjoyable experience for your visitors. Evaluating your existing experience can be a great way to understand how to achieve better interactions with the people using your website, without turning everything completely upside down. After all, the content, learnings and improvements you’ve already made to-date are worth something!
Absolutely! When working with Illustrate Digital you get to benefit from both of our core competencies: UX design and platform engineering. This means you can work with us to design, build and deploy your website or web application from start to finish.
We believe strongly in the importance of excellence and doing things well. This means you can be really confident that, whilst we’re always keen to stretch ourselves and take on a challenge, we’re not going to bite off more than we can chew. We’re excellent at UX design and WordPress engineering and we like it that way.
Working with us as your UX design agency to complete a full website project has some great benefits. The main benefit is that your designers and engineers will be completely in sync with technical requirements. It makes the build process really nice and smooth and paves the way for a frictionless experience.
It’s true that not every project is made equal, and so the approach our UX designers take in creating the best user experience for your brand will be personal to your requirements. Still, we thought it would be good to outline the main areas of our UX design process and what you can expect when collaborating with us.
Insight is a powerful tool of UX and UI design. Conducting proper research about your marketplace, benchmarking against your competitors and analysing your existing data are a few of the skills we employ at the beginning of the discovery process.
When decisions are backed by research, they inspire confidence, both for us and for the senior teams you likely report back to.
Let’s take the time to learn the needs and behaviours of your users before we get creative. Our track record has proven that strong UX research and analysis drives strong results.
Begin with the end in mind. It’s a good motto for success in digital marketing and digital product design alike. Using our research and our collective expertise, we’re in a great position to get strategic and set a course for success.
Using our UX design services means that we work together with you to answer important questions and lay down a roadmap for your UX design. This planning informs us of the architecture, content types and ‘blocks’ that will come together to form your final website experience.
Design is the part of the UX and UI process that everyone is pretty familiar with. We begin to see visual examples of everything we’ve planned for to this point and you have the opportunity to test them out interactively.
For most projects we complete UI design, including prototyping, for quick testing and a good opportunity to make improvements to layout and structure.
Finally it’s about getting visual and applying your brand guidelines. It’s the exciting opportunity to apply our ideas for style, animation and everything that will make your experience truly unique.
Prototyping is an essential part of the digital product development process. It allows you to test your product with users…
Last updated: 09th Apr 2024
User Experience (UX)A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. High…
Last updated: 09th Apr 2024
User Experience (UX)A UX (user experience) design agency is a company that specialises in creating positive user experiences for digital products and…
Last updated: 09th Apr 2024
User Experience (UX)