UI/UX Design Services to Elevate your Business

Step 1: Research

During the research stage, we will work with you to identify specific goals, project requirements, and style guides that will inform our design thinking.

Our clients come to us with either a clear vision in mind: we’ll assign the right people to make their precise vision a reality; or simply a rough idea: our award-winning team has experience with what works/doesn’t and can mock-up and pitch options that we could pursue from scratch.

At this stage, we’ll be looking to absorb your brand, learning everything about your products/services and goals for future growth. We’ll discuss your targets for:

• Capturing the attention of your target market
• Conversion rate
• Website Traffic
• Accessibility
• Branding (or rebranding) and visual identity
• Brand story and messaging
• Cross-channel opportunities to generate leads and engagement
• Core USPs and preferred calls to action (CTAs)

With these goals in mind, we will then determine the scope of the project, factoring in how many pages and features will be required along with a clear delivery timeline.

Our team of graphic designers will gather data and other useful insights to inform their design process. Although all research will be tailored to your specific design project, the UX and UI aspects will differ slightly.

UX designers will be focused on the functionality of the end product, reviewing components such as usability, HCI, or human-computer interaction, accessibility, structuring and what makes the most effective navigation. Through the analysis of trends and patterns, the UX designer can develop user personas and build a picture of the potential users who are likely of who is likely to be using the end product and their needs.

While the user experience is also crucial to the research conducted by the UI designers, their focus is on the overall concept, aesthetic design, target group and interaction. For both elements of digital design, the expectations of the user and an understanding of user behaviour are paramount.

We’ll also use competitor research to find website features that align with the initial concept, using these as a guide to creating a better UI design solution and an enhanced user experience for your audience.

Step 2: Design

Once we have agreed on an initial concept, it’s time to get designing!

The first step of the design phase is to create a sitemap of the website’s overall structure, taking into account the organisation and content of the web pages and how they relate to each other. Wireframes will then be created to dictate the design elements of each page. We’ll also help you decide the main services to promote and which specific features to integrate.

Sitemaps will not only ensure that your website is user-friendly from a functional perspective, but are also critical from an SEO perspective. Essentially, there are two types of sitemaps: visual and XML. The former showcases the various sections of your website while the latter is for a search engine to crawl and digest your website’s content.

As a leading Manchester-based SEO agency, our team will create your sitemap, ensuring it is fully optimised for maximum performance.

When it comes to designing the visual elements of your website, our team follows established design standards whilst ensuring your branding guidelines are fulfilled and that user satisfaction is at the heart of the project. We’ll select colour palettes that compliment your brand and an eye-catching accent colour for important features, such as calls-to-action, buttons and hyperlinks. Throughout the creative process, consistency is key and we will ensure everything from the layout to fonts and styles is sleek and uniform.

Choosing a colour palette for a website is a lot more complicated than you may think, and it’s not just about looking pretty. Colour plays an important role in influencing a user’s impression of your brand and psychologically impacting the way they interact with your website. In a nutshell, you want to select colours that represent your brand while also triggering an emotional response from your target customers – get it right and you’ll reap the rewards.

We understand that the design stage is critical to the success of any web project. Our team will keep you informed at every step of the process, with regular project updates in weekly calls, emails and/or face-to-face meetings – whatever works for you!

You will have complete project visibility and will see the designs at multiple stages, starting with the homepage and followed by any bespoke internal pages.

Communication is our number one priority, and our clients benefit from a dedicated project manager who acts as a bridge between them and our Development team. This is a collaborative process and we want to make sure that the website is fully signed off from a design perspective before we move on to the build & testing phase.

Step 3: Build & Testing

Once you are happy with the design, our team of expert developers will take the design mockup and build a fully-functioning, interactive and user-friendly website – with your goals in mind.

At Embryo, we understand that each brand is unique and our bespoke and flexible approach to web development means that your website can fulfil your individual requirements, as well as maximise customer satisfaction and boost your business’s growth.

We achieve this by integrating CMS systems and adapting them for each project. We predominantly develop our websites with WordPress which, based on PHP, offers an open-source and continuously improving platform to ensure all user testing scenarios are covered.

Have a bespoke web feature in mind? Our talented team is able to build pretty much any kind of tool you need, from calculators to responsive questionnaires.

Content creation

Content creation is another important aspect of the web development process, establishing your brand’s message and representing your product or service in an engaging way. Our team of content marketing experts specialises in producing well-crafted, creative and SEO-optimised content that aligns with your brand’s TOV and captures the attention of your target audience.

Combining effective content marketing with key visual elements, our team will also ensure that the typographic hierarchy of each webpage is both reader-focused and optimal for SEO performance. Your website’s content should be organised in an easily digestible way, with headings and subheadings HTML coded. This will ensure the content is user-friendly and, once live, boost search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website.

Before launch, we’ll test your website’s performance on various different devices, checking and double-checking that each interface and function is working perfectly and is suitable for use.

User experience services play a critical role in this stage of the software development process. Our priority is to ensure the final product is easy to use, accessible and ranks on Google.

First up… User Experience (UX) Design

UX design, or User Experience design, is a human-first approach to product design practices. Breaking this down, the ‘user experience’ aspect refers to a user’s interaction with a product or service.

A UX designer is focused primarily on the user, ensuring that they can successfully use your product/service (or simply your website) with as much ease as possible. As the job title makes clear, their goal is to optimise how the user experiences your offering.

The role of the UX designer is to conduct the necessary user research, including task analysis within a user flow, along with usability testing, to understand how the user feels when interacting with your product/services. The aim is to create a simple, efficient and enjoyable experience by considering as many aspects of the customer experience during the development stage.

At Embryo, we apply UX best practices to our website builds. In this way, we build sites that customers can navigate better, meaning there are fewer obstacles to them converting from casual browsers to paying customers.

During both development and site review, we’ll test:

• Is the experience straightforward or clunky?
• Does the user interaction feel intuitive or is it confusing?
• Is the customer journey seamless or disjointed?
• Is the user able to complete their desired tasks easily or is it a struggle?

User testing is a critical stage before any website (or product/service) launch – a process in which real users test the interface and functions of a website or mobile application.

The test is performed under realistic conditions to get accurate results, and user feedback will highlight whether the website is fit for purpose or needs final tweaks before officially going live.

Now, to Compare… User Interface (UI) Design

UI design, or User Interface design, relates to the overall look or style of a product. In other words, it focuses on the aesthetic design of an app or website and involves the creation of various visual touchpoints in the customer journey. Based on the principles of usability and likeability, the aim of the game is to produce user interfaces that are captivating and easy to use.

Whether it’s a website or mobile app design, the UI design process may include the design or selection of:

• Typography
• Colour palettes
• Buttons
• Unique imagery
• Audio components
• Animation

UI designers, therefore, look after the visual design aspect of a digital product and are responsible for making design decisions that align with your business requirements as well as ticking all the boxes for user experience.

Beyond the visuals, technical considerations also play a role in UI optimisation.

Responsive design is a major player here. In a world where the mobile reigns supreme, ensuring your website responds to various screen sizes while maintaining a high-quality image is critical to a positive user experience. With it almost being an even split – that’s 50.48% of web traffic coming from mobile devices – it’s surprising how many business owners don’t check to see whether their website plays nicely across different devices.

With desktop computers, laptops, tablets and mobile phones being available in many different dimensions, the key is flexibility. Our Design team uses flexible layouts, images, and CSS (cascading style sheet) to ensure your website perfectly fits any screen.

At Embryo, we place great importance on both UX and UI to deliver an exceptional final product that is aesthetically appealing, user-friendly, communicates your brand values and captures your brand’s image.

Looking to redesign your website or, just getting started, build a new one from scratch with an expert web design team at the helm? Let’s talk.