If your website is the home for your digital presence, user experience (UX) design is the floor plan, the structure, and the windows and doors. Everything that shapes how visitors experience and engage with you is defined by the blueprint that is UX design.
UX informs a web site’s design in the same way that the layout of a room informs furnishings — it all comes down to functionality. You need to understand what people want to find and where they expect to find it before you can even consider colours, fonts, and photos.
A strong UX design starts way before anything is put on paper, with research and data analysis. Understanding what your business goals are, who your audience is, and how people need to use your website are key pieces of information that will drive the first UX deliverables.
Our websites are designed to easily grow with your audience, business, and technology — without compromising the user experience or the structure. A solid UX foundation will help your site get results now and 20 years down the road.
We use prototyping to make it easier to focus on UX design elements: site structure, flow, and functionality. Prototyping involves building out a working model of a website with all of its design elements removed.
This process helps answer important questions before design.
- Does the menu structure and location follow a user’s mindset?
- How is related content linked?
- Where is key conversion content placed?
By working through a prototype, you get to fully test how your website will work without yet having to make decisions about the shape and colour of buttons, or having all of your team photos ready.
In action: UX design and prototyping
Our first deliverable on any web design project is an analytics and research report, which informs the next two: the content strategy and sitemap. These quickly flow into the first version of the prototype.