A great design cannot be started without a lot of questions, the answers and the resulting plan of action. Each campany is different, different people, different plans and different goals.
These meeting and planning sessions help to understand the purpose of the project, the people involved and the measurable goals and outcomes.
Be it ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’ or ‘Not Re-inventing the Wheel’, research is an integral part of the design process. It provides direction and drive, but also saves countless hours of trial and error experimentation.
Competitor and peer research, collecting user research and visual research such as moodboards are all part of this process.
Ideas must be tested, and it is better that they are tested early, fail early and are iterated quickly so that quality time can be spent designing and building only the ideas that work.
The interface being designed is very rarely going to be used by either the designer, or the client, but rather users who are always and will always be unpredictable.
It is important to test with real users to find out if the design solutions chosen actually work with the people who will be using them every day.
Once ideas have been tested and solutions decided upon, the system must be able to be built. An understanding of current web technologies, their pros, cons, limitations and flexibilities allows for the correct technical solution to be chosen to fit the design solution.
Design is never finished, a web site is never 'done', it can always be improved on. The more information that is gained from users, the more small incremental changes can be made and measured to try and make the site perform as optimaly as possible.
