UX and Design
Electric Citizen greatly values the power of design in communicating to your audience. Our team has years of experience as designers, from print work and branding to over a decade of designing for the Web.
We believe in human-centered design that is thoughtful and effective in supporting your content. What this means is letting your target audience drive decisions, and not simply following the latest technology or trend.
UX and design tasks include:
- Wireframes
- Design direction
- Page mockups
- Prototypes
- Style guide
Great User Experience
Our user experience work builds off the discovery and strategy work from stage one. Knowing our goals, site menus, technical requirements and content strategy, we begin to visualize the outcomes.
Wireframes are produced for key landing pages, establishing content hierarchy and messaging for your site’s most important sections. Following feedback and wireframe approval, we move to design – often the most exciting, subjective and emotional part of any project.
Design Direction
While old-school design may have presented 2-3 homepage concepts for the client to review, our approach is something more modern and effective.
Based on the concept of mood board and style tiles, we prepare a series of stylized components, fonts and color choices. This design direction board should reflect existing branding, site goals and target audience. Once the client agrees on the overall look and feel, we have the basis for our design system.
Page mockups of our wireframes then follows, and the finished mockups become the basis for site theming and prototypes. A digital style guide captures the various elements of our new design system, and serves as a guideline for site editors to follow as they add or edit future content. The end result is a consistent, professionally designed website that matches the goals and audience we defined during planning.
Branding and Identity
Electric Citizen greatly values the power of design in communicating to your target audience. Our team has years of experience as designers, from print work and branding to over a decade of designing for the Web.
We have worked with many branding guidelines over the years, and will work to fully understand and interpret your brand to the Web. If your brand is only defined for print, we will work with you to define a set of online standards.
Accessibility
While not required by law (yet) for every organization, we believe all websites should be as accessible as possible.
WCAG 2.1 is the current standard for web accessibility. Understanding the requirements helps us make decisions early in the design process that will affect accessibility, such as the structure of a site navigation, the font and color choices of a design, and the choice of content and media to present. We review designs for potential problems such as color contrast and font legibility before presenting design work to you.
As we build a website, our team includes core accessibility functionality such as site navigation that can be used without a mouse or trackpad. Our websites also offer tools that encourage behavior of site editors to maintain such accessibility. For example, alternative text (ALT text) is required on any and all images uploaded to the site.
Before completing the project, we can train and educate the clients in the ways that their site meets accessibility guidelines, and highlight the key ways in which a site editor could unintentionally break the site’s accessibility through future edits to the site and site content. We are happy to share our knowledge of tools for testing WCAG compliance.
Mobile-First, Responsive Design
Our team embraces a mobile-first approach to all our projects, meaning the design and features of every website are built starting on the smallest handheld devices, expanding in features and design as screen-size increases. This ensures a strong foundation to every site, for all users, and not a site that simply takes things away from mobile users.