Website Discovery & Design with
site design and discovery with lodestar - logo

The LodestarTM discovery and design proprietary process is a culmination of twenty years of experience working with sophisticated brands around the world and more than a decade of working with Sitefinity CMS. It was created for today's digital experiences and is specifically tailored for building on the Progress Sitefinity CMS Platform

 

 

whiteboard with sticky notes for web design and discovery process

The Importance of Discovery and Design

Our formal discovery and design process will not only ensure that all website requirements and goals are considered before implementation begins, but it will almost certainly save on budget if all the stakeholders are fully engaged in the process. Learn more about the importance of discovery and design


Process and Deliverables

While we don't reveal the recipe for the secret sauce, we can tell you that the process is divided into three phases, each with its own steps and deliverables. Each step builds on the preceding steps, culminating in a design and UI Toolkit that perfectly aligns with your brand as well as the Sitefinity platform.

astronaut secret sauce of web design and discovery

Our Three-Phase Approach 

process and deliverables of a web design and discovery

Lodestar Highlights

Researching

When necessary, complex user experiences or processes will be visually documented into user flow diagrams to help stakeholders visualize any multi-step interactions of complex processes to ensure that every step has been accounted for.

User needs statements summarize the needs of users and why that need is 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 so that I can 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 help us to understand and document project requirements, goals, audiences, and how success will be measured.

Planning

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

The information architecture documents the organization of site content and includes a sitemap and a content outline. A sitemap visually documents the site’s pages with an emphasis on the hierarchy of those pages. A content outline, sometimes referred to as a content inventory, is a high-level list of content to be included on the site.

Because in most cases there is an existing website that is being replaced, it is important to do a thorough site audit to determine what content needs to be included in the new site and to make sure that all existing content has been considered.

Designing

Once the discovery and design deliverables are approved, the deliverables are handed off to the implementation team. Because of the work done in the discovery and design process, time and budget are saved during the implementation of the site. But most importantly, the discovery and design process ensures that the implemented site meets the needs of the site’s 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.

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