Research & Planning to make sure your Website, App, or Web Application is built right the 1st time.
Once the Needs Analysis phase is complete, we can begin the Research and Planning phase. This phase, carried out before starting straight into production, is essential to understanding what is going to make your project a success; success for your customers and success for your business needs. This phase involves a much lower level of detail and planning where the production phase is scoped to align with your business requirements. From a User Experience perspective, we take the time to gather all the relevant information to plan each screen of the product. Each screen is considered with functions and actions in mind and is then designed with a focus on specific User Flows. These screens are validated by the users and key stakeholders. The development team then create detailed documents that outline the proposed System Architecture and screen by screen actions in a Software Requirement Specification.
Software Requirement Specifications
Once we have created a Needs Analysis Document, we set about defining the project in detail. Typically the UX team will have produced a Low-Fidelity Wireframe defining the User interface structure in line with the Business and User Needs. This wireframe, and the Technical Needs document, form the starting point for the development team to define the product.
System Architecture
As part of the SRS process, the Development team creates a System Architecture diagram. This outlines the infrastructure to house, run, secure, and backup the technology stack to be created. While planning this technology stack, we include provisioning for scalability, future developments and possible compliance requirements.
User Personas
During the User Experience stage of a project, Armour’s UX team meet with your users or customers to understand their needs, frustrations, desires and wants. We interview a range of users to get a broad picture; typically ranging in level of experience or domain knowledge. From these interviews, we summarise our findings by creating fictional characters (Personas) to represent your potential users. The purpose of this is to gather all the nuggets of information from your users, and to keep the resulting personas in mind throughout the entire design process.
User Flows
Our UX team create a set of specific tasks that Users are required complete. The User will set about completing these required tasks. While they are doing this, they tell the interviews how they are feeling, what they see, what they are thinking, and generally verbally and non-verbally express how they find the process.
Low-Fidelity Wireframing
The Low-Fidelity Wireframe has a massive impact on the entire project, with potential cost savings in future design phases and development of the product. The idea of creating a wireframe is to catch design and process flaws early in the process. Catching them later in the project has exponential cost implications.
