Working Together: Design
User journey, sorted! Wireframes, tick! Next, was the really fun bit, the design! After two drafts, user feedback and some tweaking, we had the website we had dreamt of!
The designers from Digital Wonderlab did a wonderful job but it was no easy feat. We worked together to ensure it was spot on for our users. Here are 3 things The Carers’ Centre and Digital Wonderlab learned about the process:
- Do your homework
Before UX Specialist, Laura, passed the wireframes to the designers, she found out what we wanted from the design. We got together to talk about the pros and cons of our current website, and what we wanted to achieve with the new website. Modern, uncomplicated and welcoming came up time and again! We realised these were details that we liked in other websites such as Mobilise, who have a brilliantly clear website or the Children’s Society which feels bright and fresh.
In addition, we provided our brand guidelines, these detail everything from the fonts we use to the colour paletteto give a sense of how our current brand could be reflected.
Putting in the effort to provide good background information meant the designers started to get an idea of what we were looking for. We didn’t realise how key this was until we saw the first designs, which weren’t quite what we wanted. This prompted us to do more homework, to highlight more clearly what our priorities were and provide more examples of how our brand is used to guide the designers.
Stuart from Digital Wonderlab shows why this background work is important to him as a designer:
“Once the structure of the site has been established through the UX process, wireframes and testing, the design phase is often the part of the site creation process where it feels like it really begins to come to life, so engaging with the process at the right time can add real value.
Your website needs to reflect your organisation at its best,it could be the users’ first exposure to your offering, and/or a primary way they engage with your organisation. This means that it needs to be beautifully crafted and engaging, as well as cohesive with your existing brand — your organisation on its’ best day!
In addition to aesthetics, just as with the structure of the site established earlier in the process, the user interface design must also be tailored to the task in hand and be perfectly optimised for the end user. This practical side of the design process also extends to considerations such as ensuring that the design works well across different devices and screen sizes, ensuring it looks and works well for everybody.
While the expertise of the design team means that from a client perspective all of these things essentially happen in the background, if you do have any aesthetic preferences or considerations beyond your brand guidelines that are important to reflect in the site design, surfacing these early on ensures they can be factored these into the creative process, allowing us to get to your perfect site design quickly.”
2. Don’t be scared if you don’t like something!
As mentioned above, the first designs we were shown weren’t quite what we’d expected. They were definitely better than the previous site and they did deliver on a lot of what we wanted, but something just wasn’t quiteright. We decided to go away and have a think before feeding back to Digital Wonderlab. When we came back together to look at the design with fresh eyes, we began to see the little things which didn’t quite gel. This led us to consider more deeply how we normally implement our brand, and enabled us to go to Digital Wonderlab to explain our thoughts.
It’s a difficult conversation to have! We’d set up our partnership based on honesty, but it’s still easier to say you love something rather than that you’d like things changed. But, we had based our partnership on honesty and this project is a big investment for us. It was key that we felt it delivered what we wanted. Digital Wonderlab really responded to our thoughts and the second draft, though not vastly different, felt more like it reflected who we were and what we wanted people to feel from the site. We loved it!
“A collaborative approach and being able to have open and honest conversations are really important to us at Digital Wonderlab. We see ourselves as an extension of your team and as such we all share the same goal.
Flexibility is important and our creative team are highly experienced and well accustomed to working with clients at many different stages of their design journey — from having a full set of brand guidelines and clear ideas on how they expect the site to look, all the way to clients without a finalised name for their organisation yet (let alone a logo!) and all points in-between.
While this expertise allows us to help our clients with whatever design requirements they may have, in many cases they will have existing brand guidelines as well as some degree of input as to how they might need their site might look.
As the team did for The Carers’ Centre site, we often find it fruitful to have a conversation with the client about any expectations and preferences they have regarding the design beyond their brand guidelines. This is partly because if they do have any specific expectations, some of these can be somewhat unconscious, and by talking through preferences we can help to join the dots, finding the commonalities in materials being referenced and surfacing the main points we need to take on board. Such conversations needn’t be massively in-depth — rather than doing the job of a designer, the objective is simply for you to be able to effectively communicate to the design team anything that might help them do their magic.
As with the case with The Carers’ Centre project, minor tweaks can still be expected as part of any process, but by spending a little time getting to the core of what is important design-wise upfront we can get to the finished, approved design within fewer iterations. Client-side this has the benefit of fewer surprises and versions of the design requiring review, and soon gets us to a great website which works well for all stakeholders as well as the end user.” Stuart, Digital Wonderlab
3. Show people!
As with every other stage of this website design, we didn’t take our own word for whether it was right or not, we tested it! We showed it to our Carers’ Voice group; Speak Out Young Carers; our digital stakeholder panel and key staff members to see how they felt about it. The designs weren’t interactive, and we didn’t have the time or resource for in-depth user testing at this stage. However, we offered a space for people to tell us what they thought without telling them what we’d tried to do. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and one carer said (without prompting!) that she felt we had listened to her thoughts and she could see that in the design.
“We’re strong believers that testing always adds value at Digital Wonderlab, and it was really gratifying to hear that the designs for the Carers’ Centre site resonated so well with the various panels and groups of people who were kind enough to test and give feedback.” Stuart, Digital Wonderlab
Taking all this feedback on board, the design was able to move in to build and we were one step closer to the new site. Next up is the launch….!
