Hi, I’m Jade. I’ve been designing software for over 15 years in the medical, life sciences, fintech, and operations spaces for clients like Harvard University, Mayo Clinic, and Boeing.
I lead a fantastic team of designers here at unosquare and am passionate about holistic team leadership and about creating intuitive, beautiful products that begin with discovery and design.
Plan Ahead
In physical architecture, one would never dare begin construction on a building without a fully fleshed-out set of drawings and plans that have been iterated on until client stakeholders, design and construction teams were as confident as they could be about the success of the build. Every anticipated detail, down to the light switch, would be designed on paper before a single shovel ever hit the ground.
Discovery is Everything
The process always began with discovery of a full set of requirements for the build. Let’s take a commercial building as an example. At the highest level, before beginning design, the design team had to understand things like:
- What’s the purpose of the building?
- How will the building be interacting with the site (i.e., soil composition, proximity to roads, entry points, existing infrastructure)?
- What are the kinds of main spaces people will be occupying?
- How will people need to move between spaces?
- What are the supporting spaces like kitchens, bathrooms, etc., and what is their optimal location?
Avoid Expensive Mistakes
If the General Contractor were to want to show up at the site on day one without blueprints and begin constructing a bathroom or a conference room without any idea of how the rest of the building were going to come together, we’d be hiring a new contractor.
Designing and building software ideally is no different. Though there is an initial upfront cost and effort in discovery and design, the results are hopefully by this time in this article clearly worth the price.
Blueprint your UX Design
The first step is to gather the requirements for the entire application at a high level and to truly understand all of the potential influences such as the tech stack that will be used. The types of users will be identified as well as where they will spend time in the app and how they will want to interact with the app. Then, we try to understand the kinds of tasks and flows that these users will be performing using the software, without implying any UI elements. This then informs the design of an ideal UX architecture. The UX architecture is in essence a blueprint/map of all the screens, and a flow diagram of how users will navigate between them.
Precision by Prototyping
Once the site blueprint is created, detailed wireframes and prototypes can quickly be produced and iterated on. UI/UX design has become supported by incredible tools like Figma that allow for rapid iterative design and prototyping. This means that we can have an entire set of UI/UX drawings for a piece of software with incredibly detailed plans – down to the light switch – before building. We can even understand how users will move throughout the digital “space” through prototyping. We can get our prototypes to simulate user flows with such realism that it can be difficult to tell the difference between our prototypes and actual code.
The beauty of this process is that we can take a prototype of a full user flow to a room full of stakeholders that has taken only a couple of weeks to create and get feedback that can be incorporated almost real-time. By the time we hand the designs over to development to be built, we have a very good idea of how the product will look, feel, and flow with feedback from real users.
Build as you Design
Once the full design blueprint has been created via UX architecture and the first main flows designed, prototyped, and locked, development can begin. We don’t need to wait until the entire piece of software has been designed. Our design strategy is modular, meaning that the components that we design and use for the first main flows are ideally reused throughout the software. This allows for construction to occur in a modular fashion in building blocks, and development can reuse those blocks throughout the application. This benefit is threefold. First, it saves time and money on development. Second, it saves time and money on design as designers can similarly create components in Figma and reuse them. Finally, it creates a consistent and more intuitive user experience where users don’t need to learn a new set of tools or way of doing things for each work area that they are in.
How unosquare can Help
Our Design and Development teams specialize in iterative design processes that ensure your project is properly thought out, planned and designed before “a single shovel hits the ground”. Our modular design strategy helps you optimize costs, accelerate development and create a seamless, intuitive user experience. Whether you’re at the blueprint stage or much further along, our expert teams can jump in and get you where you need to go.
Ready to Bring Your Project to Life? Speak to our experts today to take your project from blueprint to reality.
