If you plan to outsource web design, you won’t need to familiarize yourself with the backend of your website but knowing what an effective process entails is valuable. Plus, it’s much easier to follow as the jargon is limited to easy-to-understand terms like journey mapping, customer personas, and wireframing.
The process of website design can look different from one agency to the next. However, one thing that designers can agree on is that you can’t just jump in and get developing immediately. Here’s a breakdown of how we do web design and turn an idea into a fully functional website.
The Importance of a Transparent Website Design Process
There’s no secret recipe to cooking up a design. Sharing the process that you follow is important for the sake of the clients and design team. Here’s why:
Direction: A clear website design process serves as a roadmap that all parties involved in the process can follow. It ensures the web designers and developers stay focused on the strategic goals without getting sidetracked by a design trend or subjective opinion. Not only does it keep the design team aligned with their client’s objectives, but it also ensures that the entire project is kept on track. With each step planned out in advance, it ensures nothing essential gets missed.
Cost-effectiveness: Web design agencies that operate within a clear structure can resolve potential roadblocks earlier to avoid unnecessary delays. Without a defined design process in place, it’s easier for mistakes to creep in which could leave developers with no other option but to redo the work, creating an unpleasant scenario that could drive up project costs higher than initially estimated.
Collaboration: Too many cooks might spoil the broth but the right number of website designers will come up with a tasteful design that’s functional and eye-catching and can convert casual browsers into buyers. With a transparent website design process in place, parties are given a framework for when they can share their inputs. Aside from encouraging various perspectives and ideas, it also creates alignment reducing miscommunication and disagreements. All parties stay in sync when they understand where they fit into the overall design process.
Quality control: Quality is a direct result of consistency. Transparent processes create repeatable workflows needed to maintain high standards.
Knowing the process is more information to process, but it reduces stress. Clients are more confident in partnering with you. They see you have an approach in place and that you know what you’re doing.
Our Proven Approach to the Web Design Process for Clients
At Duck Design, we don’t duck away from work. While we’re fast, we take the time to cover all the essential tasks using the following five-step web designing process:
1. Discovery and Research
We kick off our process with an intensive research phase. It’s a key stage during which we get to know our clients as well as their target audience and industry.
At the end of the day, your website needs to communicate your brand and offer all the functionality to fulfill both the needs of your business and its audience. It’s designed for your business, but used by your customers. For us to achieve this, we’ll engage with your leadership team to understand your priorities, value proposition, and needs of your target audiences.
This also serves as an opportunity for us to get our ducks in a row and ensure we’re on the same page when it comes to project goals, deliverables, and time frame.
We’ll also do a market analysis to gain insight which will help define your priorities further. By understanding what your competitors have created, we can make informed decisions regarding which features are truly essential.
Nearly 6 out of 10 (58%) customers will stop engaging with a brand if their competitor offered a better digital experience.
This exercise also lets us identify specific website design trends in your industry and best practices they follow.
Read Also: Best Web Design Practices for Captivating Website
That said, it’s never a matter of copying and pasting what works. Our market analysis digs deeper than identifying what generates results for others in your niche to uncover gaps that we can address.
Tell us your ideas
2. Journey Mapping and Personas
Many other website design agencies like to include customer journey mapping and persona development during the research phase. However, we feel that this exercise is crucial to create user-centered design that’s thoughtful and encourages conversion. That’s why we prefer to tackle it as a step on its own.
Let’s start with customer journey mapping. It’s a visual representation of all the touch points between your company and its customers. We use this to identify critical points and possible areas of friction, guiding our decisions on navigation, content hierarchy, and flow.
As not all website users follow the same journey, we’ll map the user experience for different types of users. This brings us to persona development.
Using market insights, our marketers and designers work together to create detailed personas. We look at basic demographics as well as pain points, needs, and beliefs that can impact their digital behavior and content preferences.
3. Information Architecture and Wireframes
Now that we know more about the information your target audience needs, we can prototype layouts to structure content in a logical, user-friendly way. Our designers create wireframes to visualize these layouts and test content placement to ensure intuitive user journeys.
Your customers come to your website to complete a certain goal. For some that’s to find more information, while others are ready to buy. This step allows us to find the best user path to let them complete their goal.
Wireframing also helps us to ensure consistency across web pages. While your web page composition will not be exactly the same from one page to the next, there still needs to be elements that tie them together. When website visitors navigate from, for example, your home page, to an individual product page, they should still be able to tell that they’re on the same brand’s website.
When it comes to this step of the process, we take an iterative approach. Considering that 34.6% of visitors will leave a website if it has a poor content structure, we guard against being content with our content structure on the first try. Our team typically conducts multiple rounds of internal feedback and refine the wireframes accordingly for clarity and usability.
Poor content structure is one of the top five reasons that could increase your bounce rate. About a third (34.6%) give this as the reason for leaving a website.
We also source feedback from stakeholders. Depending on the project, this can include users too.
4. High-fidelity Design and User Interface System Development
With the foundation established, we’re ready to craft polished visuals and prepare for development. As we assign a dedicated design team that includes an art director, you’ll also get all the other graphics needed to transform your wireframe into a website that you’ll want to frame and hang up on your wall.
A well-executed user interface (UI) can increase conversions by as much as 200%.
This step includes creating a user interface (UI) kit. Think of it as a set of visual communication guidelines.
Here, we’ll house reusable components, typography, suitable colors, and interaction guidelines. Like wireframing, it helps to ensure consistency across all pages and also streamlines the website development process.
After photos (40%), color is the top visual element consumers appreciate in website design.
5. Development and Launch
We’ve reached the end of the web design process when our team is ready to transition from design to development. We’ll use the UI kit that we designed in the previous step to ensure that your live website matches the design specifications.
We’ll also look at ways to improve the overall website performance and pay attention to technical details like optimizing your site for speed. In addition to optimizations, we’ll also test for bugs.
After testing and tweaking to incorporate your revision requests, we’re ready for launch.
How We Ensure Client Satisfaction at Every Stage
Whether you prefer to communicate via email or our messaging app or would like to set up a more formal virtual meeting, our team is flexible and available to ensure that you remain up to speed and satisfied at every stage. We also leverage top UX/UI design tools like Figma and popular project management platforms such as Trello to deliver design feedback timeously.
In fact, before the project starts we already start to ensure the best possible outcomes for your needs. We use the details about prospective clients’ design needs that they share on our online inquiry form to match them with the most qualified designer on our team for their specific job.
Then, at the start of the relationship, all new users also get custom onboarding. You’ll jump on a quick 30-minute call with our design team. During this call, we’ll take you through the ins and outs of the plan you’ve picked after which you’ll be ready to send us your first project.
Now that you got to know our team better, it’s time that we learn your brand.
As we believe that the website designing process works best when it takes a collaborative approach that makes room for reiterative refinements, we accommodate unlimited requests and revisions in all of our plans. It’s also one way that we strive to be a truly affordable web design agency.
Our designers will work on it every business day from 09:00 to 18:00 (GMT+2) and will typically deliver the first update the next business day. However, for complex design requests, we’ll generally need 48 hours.
To streamline this process, you’ll run all your design tasks through our design ops platform. You can also track the status of your project here and share feedback, one more way that we ensure client satisfaction at every stage.
Via our platform, you can also use live chat to communicate with your dedicated creative project manager (aka CPM) assigned to you at the beginning. It’s your CPM’s responsibility to ensure the rest of the design team understands your project and delivery is smooth.
Another way that we ensure client satisfaction is with our seven-day, money-back guarantee. If you feel after several design requests that we still don’t understand your needs, we’ll refund your initial membership fee.
We’re also currently busy rolling out several project planning features in beta to allow customers to see real-time status updates.
Website Designs That Captivate and Convert from Duck Design’s Experts!
Whether you need an Ecommerce landing page, a corporate website that reflects your branding, or an overdue website redesign, our web design services are as comprehensive as our approach. Plus, as we’re a design agency first and foremost our capabilities in related fields like UI/UX and brand identity elevate the results of your online home.
The multi-page website for Poke 23, a restaurant in Belgium, shows the extent of our web design services and skills. As a recognized website redesign agency, we analyzed the site and developed the most suitable new design for it.
Like the restaurant, our design team also knows how to combine different elements to set up an online store.
As explained earlier, we kick off projects with target audience research. In this case, the focus was on understanding the preferences of diners interested in food delivery and takeout specifically.
We embraced minimalism when designing a logo to increase brand recognition and let it fit in with their fresh ingredients. The website design reflected the same modern look, while the color palette that used bright pinks offered the same burst of energy than their bold, exotic flavors. The result—brand recognition within its target audience increased by 60%.
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This online store project we completed for Poke 23 also shows our technical skills. In addition to Figma, we also used a range of other sophisticated software including Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects.
To see just how well we understand brand design, you can check out the work that we’ve completed for Dark Fusion, a suite of tools created for the Bitcoin protocol via the Lightning Network. We were presented with the challenge of uniting different complex brands within a single ecosystem.
For the website design, we used clean lines and modern typography and used a combination of blues, greens, greys and black to to convey sophistication and build trustworthiness needed to attract the attention of investors. The result—Dark Fusion attracted 50% more new user reviews within the first three months after launch. What’s more, according to our SEO data, we anticipate that potential website visitors can grow by as much as 20,000 per year.
A crucial part of website design is UX strategy and design. Where we focused more on UI design for Poke 23 and Dark Fusion, the broad feature set of Wafee, a global fintech leader, meant that we needed to pay more attention to the user experience aspect to create an intuitive user journey.
The website we designed for them shows our ability to integrate user-centered design into our website design services as well as our technical execution to create a site that sets a benchmark in fintech UX design. Both sign-ups and business account inquiries increased with double-digit percentages, showcasing our ability to design polished corporate websites.
