European Design Awards - Silver

Red Dot Design Award

Elsevier

Dashboard

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Product screencast

Discover & define

Creating stakeholder involvement and mapping stakeholder needs is a key objective in this project. In this workshop, together with stakeholders, we craft the design brief and explore the prerequisites needed in a workshop based on the ‘design thinking’ methodology. In our workshops we rapidly digest and draw out ideas that surface in the project team using various brainstorming and concepting techniques.

Strategy workshops

In a workshop setting we gather input from various people from within the organisation. In the context of the project, stakeholders share their views, challenges and desires. Workshops create support for change through shared vision of outcome and increased ownership.

Stakeholder workshops

The goal of quantitative research is to investigate the characteristics, behavior and trends of a large group of people. Questionnaires and surveys can be used to gain insights and make substantiated decisions.

Quantitative user research

Qualitative research helps us understand the target audience and their domain, context and daily practice. By performing in-person or remote interviews, we can discover patterns of behavior amongst users and potential users of a product, and explore their underlying needs and wishes. The insights gathered during the interviews can be captured in personas; descriptions of possible users that will serve as a reflection tool to test our concept.

Qualitative research

An expert review is a systematic analysis of your product, aimed at finding the most important areas of improvement and identifying opportunities for further development. During the review, we look at issues that break the experience: incorrect data display, possible bugs, very unclear interaction, visualization mistakes, etc. All issues are prioritized (high, medium, low) and summarized in a set of primary and secondary conclusions. Improvements are documented and can be included in a roadmap for further product development.

Expert review

During benchmark and analysis, we look at products, systems and platforms with related or similar purposes. This helps us to learn from the solutions applied there. Above all, we study the various patterns of interactivity and use cases for the project. From there we translate insights into an analysis of strengths and opportunities of the existing implementation and researched solutions.

Competitor analysis & benchmarking

Data driven projects require early understanding of your data and data processes. This is why we thoroughly examine the available data from existing solutions and reports to identify the possible uses to distill key insights for end users. Having this knowledge at an early stage in the process increases the value our designs can provide by presenting relevant information in the right way and at the correct moment in the users' workflow.

Data inventory

Ideate & prototype

In a collaborative session with our client, we conceptualize the designs and narratives. Participants are given design elements or creative materials in order to construct their ideal experience in a concrete way. To express what matters to them most and why.

We examine different levels – such as attention triggers – during deep dives, and explore how the deliverables can be used. This creates a strong connection between visuals through tone of voice, subject perspective and visual language.

Ideation sessions

Every element of your positioning and service or product strategy should create a focused meaningful and differentiated idea in the minds of your target audience. This enforces your stance in the most effective way possible. Using our positioning framework, we pinpoint this differentiation and leverage it to your benefit.

Working from the identified strategic business goals, needs and ambitions, we create meaningful strategies to better position a product or service. We define the strategy in key values, the design principles that the solution should adhere to. Through our means-end analysis we define the values, consequences and attributes. Then these can be turned into meaningful designs and tangible qualities in a concept design.

Creative strategy & positioning

In the concept design, our UI/UX and visual designers take the design brief, creative strategy and ideas, and synthesize these into detailed concept directions. The concepts show a holistic design approach for the overall product. They provide insight into the overarching conceptual idea as well as features such as user interaction and experience, mental models, navigational structures, visual style and narratives.

Concept design & visualization

Together with our client we identify the available and required data, and examine the ways that we can aggregate, parse, filter and analyze it. Data driven projects require early understanding of the data parameters, which are crucial to the entire design process. In the analysis we identify the possibilities that the data offers in terms of a meaningful project experience and narrative.

Data analysis & storytelling

During the ideation phase we test our conceived concepts. We share an approximation of a product or service that captures the key essence – the value proposition – of a new concept or product, to determine if it meets the needs of the target audience. This can be done in a one-on-one setting or with larger numbers of participants, in person or online. Concept validation provides valuable early feedback on the design, without going through a full (and costly) development process.

Concept testing

To decide on what to work on, all elements of the concept and their technical implementations are translated into small coherent parts called user stories. These describe from a user's perspective what the expected behavior and experience is. All user stories are then prioritized in a roadmap that provides all stakeholders with an overview of the current prioritization of features.

These user stories and roadmap will inform our sprint planning for phase 3. To allow for iterative development these priorities will be revisited throughout phase 3.

Roadmap strategy

Refine & deliver

Design documentation serves as a common ground between us, our client and possibly other third parties. Typically, our design documentation is split up into two parts:

First, the design rationale behind the concept and strategic thinking, and how these translate into design elements throughout;

Second, a design style guide that further describes design elements from a functional level such as typography, color use, grid layout, etc.

Style guide & design rationale

UI/UX design plays a crucial role in providing development with the necessary input. In the concept design many details are left unspecified, because they need to be designed before they can be developed. For a more complex product, wireframes are broken down into components, behaviors are designed and iterated upon individually.

UI/UX design

In the ideation phase, visual design focuses on the overall look and feel. During production, we design all aspects of the project in detail. Assets are designed as deconstructed elements such as additional pages or screens, user interface elements like buttons and icons, system states and transitions. All assets and changes are captured in the lean design style guide, a reference point for development now and in the future.

Visual design

The design is developed and implemented in accordance with a specific set of technical requirements. Front-end development translates the UI/UX and visual designs into working code for the web. By combining mark-up (HTML), style (CSS) and programming (JavaScript), the front-end serves the user interface to the user. Code is optimally written to work cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device. The code communicates with the back-end/server to retrieve data. All user interaction takes place at the front-end. This has a high impact on the overall user experience in regards to usability, affordance, portability and speed.

Front-end development

We plan how different technical components will come together to form the application. This includes data sources, libraries, development setup, testing cycles, deployment and integration. This activity is preferably part of sprint 0 in our agile workflow. This makes the development process more effective and helps communication between all stakeholders.

Technical design

We prefer our front-end developments to be stand-alone components that are not intrinsically tied to one system. By isolating our code from direct interaction with the web server or back-end we both standardize the interaction, which is good from a code quality perspective, and separate security concerns across domains. This makes it much more manageable than the average integrated solution (i.e. client-side and server-side). All communication between our front-end and other systems routes via a so-called API (Application Program Interface). The server-side implementation of this API can be developed by us, by you or by a third-party such as our integration partners.

API specification

Short for Development and Operations, DevOps is a set of practices that automates the process between software development and IT teams. We automate these processes so we can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. In essence, it’s about setting up critical infrastructure for the development team.

DevOps

Support & validate

After the launch of a product or service it is valuable to keep track of usage analytics such as Google Analytics. We analyze the usage data and distill insights into user flows, important or overseen features, and identify issues from a technical or user experience early on. Insights inform decisions on what parts to improve or further develop.

Usage analysis

We provide maintenance and service level agreements for our project if required. Activities focus maintenance to both the server and application, security updates and browser update support optimization.

Maintenance

We offer support by regularly reviewing the designs or product updates. This way, we ensure that new features are in line with the product vision. At times, we can also help to update the product roadmap or refine the product vision based on progressive insights.

Design support & art direction

Building a product or service is only one layer of the story: we make an effort to help people become users of the outcome work. We support our client’s team or other stakeholders by preparing them for dealing with potential changes in the interface. Ultimately, high user adoption is our aim.

The challenge

Value delivered

Phases and toolkit items used

Discover & define

Ideate & prototype

Refine & deliver

Support & validate

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