UX/UI Design Services

Arguably the most important step in the process is performing user research and analysis. This is an integral step that requires us to think about our users. By using a combination of research methods to better understand our users, we are able to answer complex questions such as:

• Who are our users?
• Where are they from?
• How do they live?
• How will they use our product?

We then analyze the responses that we have received and utilize them to create a specific, tailored, and unique product, service, or website for those users.

Creating individual personas to better understand our consumers is a thing of the past. Today we create action-oriented user understanding artifacts that help us better analyze the behaviors, jobs, and representation metrics of a target group. Rather than creating a singular individual that we believe would be the ideal candidate for the product, we look at the intent of a group, which allows us to integrate the essential empathy directly into the design.

How will this target group use the product? What are the behaviors and interactions that are common between users and the way that they interact with the product?

By understanding these behaviors and interactions, we can understand and anticipate what will work and what won’t for a specific group.

When you understand a user’s jobs to be done, you understand what product or service they require to complete that job. This equates to several user needs that are unique to your target demographic and to the consumers that will be using your product or service.

This understanding helps us innovate, design, and integrate the perfect UI/UX design that will be ideal for your user for their jobs to be done.

This allows for user categorization into several distinct matrices such as:

• Role
• Country
• Language
• Seniority
• Geography

By identifying and organizing users this way, we can understand and identify the qualities that are most important and integral to our users’ experience.

The user scenario is a process of understanding exactly what steps a user will take when completing a task or “job to be done”. This helps to delve deep into what users may be thinking, feeling, or experiencing at each step of the process, and if we identify the scenarios which are most important to our users, we are able to define the set of product requirements most likely to lead to user success and satisfaction.

UX design starts rough – we don’t want to commit to a particular presentation until we’ve conceived, iterated, and validated our ideas. We create wireframes as a way to begin to imagine how a particular experience within an app or website might work for our users. We typically will create many, many versions of wireframes for each product experience we’re creating, and it’s common for us to add detail and refinement as we go. This process allows us to move through conceptual approaches as quickly as possible so that we can identify those that are potentially successful and eliminate those that aren’t.

We often begin prototyping while we are creating our wireframes so that we can start to create solutions to more complex experiences that span multiple screens. Whenever possible, we involve our users in testing these prototypes, even when our ideas are still rough. Early feedback helps us to identify solutions that will likely be the most successful in our final product design.

Until this point, the user experience, flow, and ease-of-use have been the most important features of development. The visual design phase allows us to begin to imagine how the finished product will look and function. Good UI design is much more than making sure a digital experience “looks good.” Successful UI design results in experiences that are highly usable, are accessible to users who may have sight or physical impairments, and are coherent within a larger brand or product experience.

Typically, we approach UI design as systems design. Yes, we need to make sure that this particular product experience is exceptional, but we also need to document our decisions to make sure that the product can be developed, maintained, and updated as easily as possible. With most of our UI design projects, we deliver style guides to help inform future design decisions that will be made about the product, whether or not we’re involved in that next project.

We’ve worked hand-in-hand with dev client teams for 20 years, and we know that building a strong design-product-development relationship starts before the handoff. By the time we’re finishing our designs, we’ll have met several times with the dev to share early concepts and gather feasibility feedback.

We often work with development teams to support a sprintly handoff cadence, where we deliver elements of the time in stages to support ongoing development. Other times, we make a traditional, waterfall-style handoff, where we deliver the entire completed design in one drop.

Either way, we work with our developers to determine the best mode of handoff. Modern design tools make it possible to facilitate this handoff with a bare minimum of formal specification, and so we deliver interactive specs in virtually all of our product design projects.

At Grand Studio, we let our success speak for itself. With 100% customer satisfaction in our post-project surveys, we have helped 15+ Fortune 500 companies and countless others better understand their customers and users.

This understanding has led to more intuitive projects, products, and services that better suit the unique needs of their customers and has drastically improved business outcomes.

Our team members are some of the most talented and innovative minds in the business, and we look forward to solving the challenges that your company may be facing.

We were in the vanguard of design studios creating some of the first, complex mobile products 15 years ago, and we’re still helping our clients to make complex consumer and professional-oriented apps.

In the last few years alone, we’ve helped some of the largest financial services, entertainment, and healthcare organizations in the US to design and update their web products. Grand Studio has the skill and experience to understand how to make complex web experiences understandable and even enjoyable for our client’s users.