Our services

The design and development phase of a digital transformation project sees our team taking the discovery report created as part of the research & consultancy stage, into development. Here, you’ll quickly start to see key areas of the product, 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 tight 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 app or platform as quickly as possible so that we can fold that learning into any ongoing development work to expand the functionality of the product.

The typical time frame for a digital design and development phase is between two and five months, depending on the project scale and complexity. This phase ordinarily includes a small, focused project team made up of a project manager, a group of specialist 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, maintains project focus and ensures that the end product hits client expectations and needs.

Working in this way means that we release smaller sets of features regularly, 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 becoming 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

Towards 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 product mock-up and UX wireframes to a fully working MVP prototype that is now ready for contact with end-users, allowing us to get valuable feedback on the design and performance of the application.

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 could develop and improve further. This new user data will allow us to further refine and prioritise any remaining feature requests or user stories, developing a plan to continually develop and improve the product, based on user feedback and usage data.