Our Design Approach
Our philosophy to developing applications has always been to focus first and foremost on the users — understanding who are the users, what do they want to do and what's the best user experience we can design to help them accomplish their tasks and goals. We believe that this fanatical focus on the users and their activity is what yields user experience designs that are guaranteed to succeed.
We start by developing a deep understanding who are the users and what they want to do. This is the cornerstone for every subsequent design decision. The various user types are captured through user personas, developed in collaboration with the stakeholders. This helps the team appreciate the mindset of the users and how they would want to interact with the system. Next, user scenarios and story boards are developed as a means of analyzing the user activity and the tasks that the users undertake to acheive their goals. Armed with a deep undertanding of the user audience and the goals they need to accomplish, the design team collaborates with the client users to brainstorm creative ideas and design the user experience.
The user experience design results in the creation of a number of deliverables as we move toward finalizing the design. The information architecture defines the structure of the system so that content can be easily discovered and promotes usability. The wireframes help to get agreement around initial concepts and page layouts. The visual design mockups allow user to visualize how the application will appear once it’s completed and the interactive prototype of the key scenarios allow the interaction design to be validated and refined as its tested against the user scenarios and personas. Factoring in the learning of each review into the next iteration allows the solution to converge to a point where it meets the goal of providing value and allows the user to most effectively acheive their goals.
Once the design is finalized we create a style guide to ensure consistency in style execution by providing guidelines and solution examples.
The OpenCrowd Difference
Our design process is highly collaborative and adaptive with a team of design professionals working closely with clients to create innovative and effective user experiences. We bring to bear a fresh creative approach to generating not only visually appealing but also extremely effective designs that improve user effeciency and easy of use based upon solid research and analysis. Finally, our iterative design process allows client users to refine their needs and requirements and provide input based on something they can actually see and interact with.
