Creating a Digital Landscape

Discovery

Identify goals + objectives
Uncover user traits + needs
Define metrics for success
Determine project specifications

Strategy

Conduct user research to understand and empathize with audiences
Flush out user personas
Walk clients through UX Journey Maps
Present strategy along with low fidelity wireframes

Once we’ve clearly defined your organization’s goals, objectives, and audience, we research and develop personas. In order to fully understand how to get users to reach a goal, we employ user experience design (or UX design). UX design is a broad, juxtaposition of art and science that treats audiences as active participants in a brand’s ecosystem. We map out mentalities of key audiences, put ourselves in their shoes, and think through what steps need to be taken to convert, contact, buy, sign up, etc. This helps to architect the site, tool, or experience we’re building. The final strategic step is to brew a fresh pot of coffee and start building low fidelity wireframes, usually somewhere on our 800+ square feet of whiteboards covering the office.

Design

Build High Fidelity Wireframes
Define Concept Scaffolding for All Templates
Design Initial Layouts
Design and Present Final Layouts

Now that we have a whiteboard fully of slightly unintelligable handwriting and lines constructing our UX journey maps and wireframes, our designers can jump back on the computer and mock up higher fidelity wireframes, usually in Sketch. Every single design decision from this point on is made based on the foundation defined by the strategic UX work. Why did we pick that font, color, alignment, layout, framework, etc? It’s the best decision to get your users to where you want them to go next. After high fidelity wires, we jump into visual designs, creating an aesthetic representation of the content and story. These designs are then presented for signoff before transitioning the project to the development team.

Development

Review all Functionality and Specs with Design Team
Create a Datamap for Top Level Front End Development
Build Out Backend Functionality
Setup a Staging Environment for Client Review

VBTK’s team of developers work collaboratively with the designers to bring your designs to life. We build everything responsively, meaning it will look and work great on any device – mobile phones, tablet, and desktop computers. We use the latest dev techniques, internally developed responsive code patterns, existing frameworks, and a just enough dark magic to deliver high quality front end development.

Implementation

Client Training and Review
Quality Assurance and Cross-Browser Testing
Hosting Setup and Asset Launch

Depending on your situation, you’ll probably need our help setting up the environment where your digital asset will live after the development is finalized. Whether its transferring a website to an in-house server, finding a domain for a new brand, or working on-site to install a digital experience, we can handle it.

Support

Continued Quality Assurance Testing
Answering the Phone for All of Your Questions

With a website, we offer 30 days of support after launch to make sure and bugs or questions are taken care of. There’s always that one guy who opens the site in a version of Internet Explorer from 1999 who thinks the site is broken. We’ll work with you to make sure your new site is always looking beautiful, in every browser (or delicately tell you to think about upgrading your browser…). With tools, there is usually ongoing support and changes that continue, especially as you begin to use it and realize other capacities it could expand to include. We’re more than happy to draw up an ongoing agreement to continue iterating and building with you. In fact, most of our clients become long-term partners, engaging us on multiple projects – because we get to know your organization so well during our discovery and strategy phases, it’s easy for us to plug in and help solve problems with you down the road.