Why?
For us, we always start and end with the following question: What do you want and need your digital presence to do?
We like to help people to make the digital space more useful. It needs to work for them and their objectives. Those objectives might be linked to revenue growth, retention and loyalty, awareness or simply qualification to support a business development process.
Unlike Berners-Lee, who is quoted as saying: “Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don’t care as much about attractive sites and pretty design”, we believe design thinking is crucial to making functionality come alive. Only then do we achieve a truly great user-experience and a great product.
In the world of traditional product design, take Dyson. The assembly and the daily use of all those little coloured connections are pleasing moments for customers. They’re the intuitive little ‘Ah yes’ moments. The physical clicks mirror the mental clicks, as everything slots into place nicely. These are the moments which always accompany the use of pleasurable things, even though the task it is designed to do may not be that pleasurable. Dyson has created a best-in-class user experience through their product design, aesthetics, functionality and ultimately desirability. The holy grail.
We believe digital is no different, whether that’s an app, a website, or whatever the UI; so we try to ask ourselves ‘how are we able to build our clients the perfect digital product?’.
There is an abundance of digital themes with often excellent pre-defined user journeys, iconography and design styles. Tempting, but will they deliver the product our client requires? Yes and no.
Customisation of existing themes and modules – or designing and coding new ones to deliver specific client functionality – allows us to take the best-in-class and make them better whilst not having to compromise the end product. Ultimately, we are able to save our clients time, and get them the product they need.
And if we get it right we hope to have a few users saying to themselves ‘…ah yes’.
