UI/UX may sound like the name of the road you need to take the turnoff for to get to Eyjafjallajökull during your European holiday, but actually, it's an innovative new way of saying designing for computers. But you already knew that.
User Interface / User Experience is a discipline requiring experience, talent, and user-insight to do properly. What constitutes a good digital interface is changing annually, faster than almost any school of design has ever had to react, and therefore good UI designers and UX specialists are hard to find and worth holding onto when you do.
Our creative process for determining the UI/UX of a modern web, app, or screen-based experience comes with all the industry standard best practices you'd expect:
- Collaborative design discovery workshops - merge our subject matter expertise with your knowledge of your community
- User research and audience-driven methodology - capture what your users want, not just what John in Sales thinks
- Data and metrics - your intuition is only so good young Skywalker, let's use some real-world data to make decisions as well
- Responsive design - for multiple device types, screen resolutions, or front-ends as we call'em
- Component based-design - emerging as our favourite way to do UI/UX, why bother trying to go for a 'pixel perfect' design approach when your web/app requirements are just going to change anyway? We find the most sensible way to approach UI/UX these days is to assume that things will change, business needs evolve, and a good design system should accommodate change. With the component-based design, we design the components that build the pages, without needing a totally defined, set-in-stone definition of how each page actually has to look
- Wireframing - determine layouts before determining what colours they should be
- Iterative design process - fine-tuning as we go until we arrive on a set of UI/UX designs and insights that we're all happy implementing
- User testing - does it work?
- Sprint-by-sprint fine-tuning - a standard method for collaboratively tweaking UI/UX using an agile approach
- Interactive mock-ups - if the project or client requires it
- Full graphics mock-ups - because we all like to know how things are going to look before we sign off on them!
- Senior UI/UX designer review - make sure an experienced pro is contributing their expertise to your project
Being Melbourne-based creatives, we also throw in a dash of chaos, a smidgeon of the unexpected, half of cup of pure espresso, and a smattering of transcendental near-future paradigms.