Website Discovery & Design with

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.

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.

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.