Website Design and Discovery

When necessary, complex user experiences or processes will be visually documented in user flow diagrams to assist stakeholders in visualizing multi-step interactions of intricate processes and ensuring that every step is accounted for.

User needs statements summarize the needs of users and why those needs are important. An example of a user needs statement for a bank could be: 

As a small business owner, I want to learn about business loans to grow my company.

User personas represent the users who will be using your site. More than just demographics, the user personas may include goals, pain points, personality, and motivations of specific types of users.

The Project Brief documents the scope of the overall project, the high-level goals, the people who are involved among all parties, the timeline, budget, milestones, and possible risks. It also captures the vision and design goals, the audiences, the challenges, and competitors. The project brief gets all stakeholders on the same page and informs all the steps that follow.

Stakeholder interviews assist us in understanding and documenting project requirements, goals, audiences, and the criteria for measuring success.

The technical architecture document includes relevant technical requirements and integrations, which the solution calls for.

The information architecture outlines the organization of site content and includes a sitemap and a content outline. A sitemap visually represents the site’s pages, focusing on the hierarchy among those pages. A content outline, also known as a content inventory, is a high-level list of content intended for the site.

Since there is often an existing website being replaced, it is essential to conduct a thorough site audit to identify what content should be included in the new site and to ensure that all existing content has been reviewed.

Once the discovery and design deliverables are approved, they are handed off to the implementation team. Thanks to the work completed during the discovery and design phases, both time and budget are saved during the site's implementation. Most importantly, the discovery and design process ensures that the final site meets the needs of its users.

Once comps are approved, we create a design system that gives marketers and website content managers a UI Toolkit that includes styles and reusable components. The UI Toolkit serves as a guide for building and maintaining pages. The UI Toolkit also includes our standard library of design blocks as well as any custom design blocks that your project requires. The result is a complete library of design blocks reflecting your custom style, colors, and fonts that allow for rapid web page development in Sitefinity.

Design comps show everything a user can expect to see on one or more site pages. We use design blocks that are based on the Bootstrap Library to generate comps that have the look, color, and fonts from the style tile. This approach considers site implementation during the design phase, which improves the efficiency of implementation.

The style tile is an intermediate step between the direction and documentation gathered in the previous steps and the design comps that are coming. The style tile saves budget and time by capturing the right identity and emotions—including look, colors, style, and fonts—before moving on to generating the design comps.