The Process
Creating an app that’s “Simple” isn’t easy. We draw on years of mobile application experience to deliver award-winning mobile experiences, from consumer apps for start-ups to world-wide medical device makers. We safely guide you through the app design process to make sure you’re making the right choices, from ideation to deployment.
This process is the result of our learnings from building mobile solutions for our customers over the last decade and a half. Our method of building & launching mobile solutions favors experimentation, user feedback, and iterative design. We learn what works and discard what doesn’t, as quickly as possible. Creating value & eliminating waste in every process with the minimum amount of effort.
Discovery
Research is key to creating an informed user experience. However the research from users, competitors, and key stakeholders is probably the most overlooked phase of any project. During this phase we work together learning about all aspects of the proposed application to get everyone on the right path. We do this through competitor analysis, stakeholder interviews, surveys, content audits, user interviews, and heuristic reviews. Depending on the scope and scale of the project we dynamically determine which of these tools will provide the best return.
Prototyping
A large majority of our application creation time is spent in this iterative, design & validate phase to avoid building mobile solutions that nobody wants. During this time we rapidly create app experiences based on analysis from the discovery phase to gather user feedback and key stakeholder buy-in with low-fidelity, throw away mockups. Usually these consist of whiteboard or paper prototypes which can quickly be altered based on feedback from the team.
Once we have the general structure of the application down, the real fun begins. We start to build stuff, really awesome stuff. Workflows take shape, iconography is roughed in, screens are connected, and the application comes to life. These prototypes are interactive and semi-functioning, but are deliberately created in low-fidelity to delay any conversation related to graphic identity, branding or visual detail. We work extremely quick, prototyping and iterating on the design, learning from our successes and failures.
Design
At the same time we’re working on the high-fidelity UX design for your app, we’re also creating your app’s brand identity in many cases built around a central “Design System” that we’re either following, expanding upon, or creating for your organization for the first time. The combination of color, shape, texture, and type in a design system, all set the tone. Our talented user interface designers work with you to find the right balance, which can make all the difference in app adoption. During this phase the application is running on actual devices that you’re sharing with colleagues or investors. The application looks and feels like the real thing, yet not a single line of code has been written.
Build
We like to involve the development team in all phases of the process, working with the user experience designers from the beginning of the project. Developers bring a unique perspective that provides for a better overall experience, bringing in the unseen like connectivity, caching, and data modeling.
If you think you’ve seen this before, well, you’re right. It’s based on the design thinking structure championed by IDEO and Stanford’s d.school, refined by Google Ventures as well as our own learnings working with our clients.
A Few Visuals
These are photos of our past work. You can see how the process looks at each stage with these snapshots.
