While our designers come from a multi-discipline background of print, branding, and marketing, SolutionStream designers set themselves apart from traditional graphic design agencies as the experts in user experience and interactive design.
SolutionStream designers span the gap between marketing and backend development. They walk you through the design process step by step from project planning and flow mapping to the wireframing of your concepts…ultimately creating beautiful and user-friendly designs.
Our designers collaborate with the developers continually ensuring process and system consistency--start to finish. From simple brochure websites to complex systems and applications, our designers create powerful visuals and interfaces that make you more competitive.
Services Include
- User Interface Design
- iPhone and Other Mobile App Design
- Web Design
- Graphic Design
- Brand and Logo Development
- Flash Animation
- xHTML/HTML5/CSS
Our Method
Every client is different and has different needs. We are more than happy to adjust to whatever your process is and fill in the gaps as needed. However, if you're not sure where to start, here is our typical 4-step method to ensure your creative project is a success.
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This is where we find out all about you and your big idea. Understanding your objectives is crucial to being able to meet them. We'll define things like:
• Who will be using your site/application?
• What type of things appeal to them?
• What goals do you hope to achieve?
• What is your brand presence?
• What functionality do you want? -
Rushing into development without a clear plan of how things will actually work carries a great deal of risk. It results in miscommunication, missed deadlines, and many unforeseen gaps in process steps or overlooked problems that cost time and money. To avoid these problems, we strongly encourage building a "Site Map" or "Process Flow" of your project, then moving to "Wireframing" the key pages.
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Now that we have an educated plan, we can move into creating a great user experience design, tailor made for your needs.
Since we took some extra time in the first two steps, typically the design phase goes much more smoothly.
Because our designers are well versed in the interactive world, you get much more than just a "pretty picture." All things are considered, from ease of use to how it will be integrated into development. -
Once we are all set with our plan and design, the design is then converted to an appropriate format for the development team: xHTML/HTML5/CSS, Flash, or XAML.
We then work with development teams as the project is put in to production making sure the design is seamlessly integrated into the project.
Prototyping
For more complex projects, we highly recommend creating a static prototype of the project.
What is a prototype?
The prototype, while not fully functional or dynamic, is "clickable" to users; they can click on links and be taken to the appropriate pages and processes almost as they would in the live application or website.
Why create a prototype?
While some projects may not be large enough to warrant this step, prototypes are extremely useful in getting valuable user feedback BEFORE any backend code has been written. Quick tweaks to the user experience at this stage are much easier and more cost-effective than waiting until AFTER it's been put into production.
Prototypes are valuable for both the client and the developers. For the client, they allow aspects of the user experience and flow to be previewed that are less apparent when reviewing a simple collection of mockups. For developers, they greatly aid understanding of elements on the page and how they will need to function. For both groups, a prototype helps with finding any "missing gaps" in the process that would otherwise not be discovered until the development phase.
Many clients keep their prototypes for "demo" purposes when actual live data may be too sensitive or unavailable. Clients also use prototypes as a "Proof of Concept" to secure more funding.
