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The design and development phase of a digital transformation project sees our team taking the discovery report from the research stage into development. Here, you’ll quickly start to see key areas such as the user interface design, user workflows and technology choices coming together.

Working closely with you, the client, we’ll prioritise product features based on actual end-user behaviour until we’ve honed them down to a brief that constitutes a minimum viable product (MVP). This approach (which is part of the Agile methodology) aims to deploy a working product rapidly, allowing us to start learning from user interactions with the product as quickly as possible so that we can fold that learning into any ongoing dev work.

The typical time frame for a digital design and development phase is between two and five months, depending on the project scale. This phase ordinarily includes a tight team made up of a project manager and a group of designers and developers, plus one or two members of your project team to be actively engaged in our fortnightly demo and review sessions.

One of our key principles is that our digital design and development team collaboratively review progress with clients, typically on a fortnightly basis. We’ve found that this approach of close communication and transparency reliably shortens the product delivery time, and maintains project focus.

Working in this way allows us to release smaller sets of features, which we continually test, meaning we find and fix bugs early, rather than en masse at the end of a project.

As a project progresses and features are added, you’ll begin to see the product transition towards a fully working MVP. Components within this phase typically include:

• Information architecture – Planning and organisation of your product’s data and information hierarchy

• User interface design – Creating an attractive, engaging and user-centric UI system that makes navigation and operation simple

• User experience design – Enhancing user satisfaction and engagement through close attention to all UX elements, including usability, accessibility and delivering value to the end user.

• Performance optimisation – Making sure that the technical specification is delivering upon demand, on all devices

• Agile development and engineering – An iterative approach to development that ensures the outcome is fit for purpose

• Database planning and architecture – Optimising your solution to ensure technical performance, scalability and cost efficiency

At the end of the digital design and development phase, the structural and functional mechanics of the product will be in place. You’ll have seen a rapid transition from an MVP prototype to a fully working product that is now ready for rollout and contact with end-users.

It’s at this stage – once the product is in the hands of end-users, using all the app’s features in a real-world context – that we get an understanding of the direction in which the product should develop further, and this leads us into the start of the next phase – the continuous improvement and support phase.