All human centered design starts with an understanding of users. Our team investigates and identifies user needs, wants and desires based on current market, solutions or scenarios and synthesise this into results that inform product design and development.

Research

Alongside investigation into users, our team define relevant business and human factors that typically influence product ideation and design. Key constraints or pain points are recorded and used to create personas that our client's can reference in determining early stage monetisation strategies or user acquisitions methods.

Our research also acts as the basis for creation or change of brand and in defining a set of problem statements or requirements that spur product or solution ideation.

Why is research important?

Identifies the Target User
Record the emotional and demographic perspective of your users.
Finds User Behaviours
Understand real world actions and processes your users go through.
Maps the Business
Start with a human centered business or monetisation strategy.
Scopes the Market
Validate your position through competitors and market understanding.

Key Deliverables

Interviews
One-on-one discussions with users. These enable aquisition of detailed information about a user's attitudes, desires, behaviours and experiences.
Surveying
A series of questions asked to multiple users that reinforce informal discussion or interviews findings across a larger response base. Surveys also help in collecting demographic and profiling information.
Personas
A collation of common demographic, behavioural and emotional information based on user interview and survey responses. Personas are a great way of identifying the nuances in a particular group of people and inform how a digital product or solution should be designed.
Card Sorting
Allows for grouping of information, defining taxonomy of terms or labels that match intuitive human response. Useful in planning out information architecture and a tone or voice that feels natural to users.

With an understand of key users behaviours and common traits and grouping through personas, we move on to making well informed decisions on how best to map human experience to business requirements through a set of collaborative workshops and precursory design briefings…

Ideation

We work collaboratively with our client’s and their users, ensuring key stakeholders and personas have the opportunity to express their ideas. We provide our client’s with a set of user maps that clearly collate and group the best idea’s. Our mapping work ensures a concise brief for visual designers and software developers is created that factors both user and business requirements.  

Our information architecture and workflow definition is tackled using a lean, human centered approach. Our team undertake rapid wireframing, providing client’s with a clickable, visual deliverable that ensures change or validating of information and user workflows is easy.

Part of our team ethos includes measuring twice and cutting once and pivoting when necessary so we find rapid wireframing to be an efficient and effective method over more traditional system schema documents or diagrams.

Why is ideation important?

Defines Architecture (IA)
Planned and organised information including content hierarchies, label schemes or navigation ensure users can easily access and use a digital offering.
Aligns Requirements
Ensuring everyone is aligned with the same vision for success and product goals based on collation of user and business requirements prevents any surprises.
Surfaces Key Features
Working with our client and their users directly in coming up with ideas, user tasks, user goals or solutions for key pain points optimises feature definition.
Defines Workflow
Considering and validating user journeys with our team, key stakeholders and target users through review of our interactive wireframes ensures flawless UX.

Key Deliverables

User Story Map
We run a moderated workshop with key client stakeholders and their user base to define user stories over a timeline including key tasks and goals. This map is then used to brainstorm and vote for ideas from our client and their users on how to best perform or achieve the defined tasks or goals.
User Scenario Map
All identified requirements and ideas are collated into a matrix that groups all user stories into "epics" and allows business and development to plan and prioritise the design or development of potential product or solution features.
Interactive Wireframes
Ensuring layout, key elements and all user journeys are visualised and validated through lowfi clickable screens that are rapidly created and updated through client review and feedback. Our wireframe production speed ensures we don’t need to spend time creating workflow or information architecture diagrams as distinct deliverables.
Feature Concepting
Connecting user stories with real world technologies or design patterns through quick visualisation of how a users tasks or goals may be achieved. Feature concepts convey a potential execution or method a product might take in a recognisable and simple way, enabling early stage user or business validation.

With the product ideation phase completed and a clear set of user workflows mapped out, we can confidently move forward with the all important visual phase of our process…

Design

We focus on creating unique, simple and enjoyable user-centred design experiences - ensuring your product or solution (whether business-critical or time sensitive) will leave a lasting impact on your core user base. Our penchant for designing intuitive, addictive user interactions and beautiful, memorable interfaces ensures users become hooked on your product for maximum retention.

We create flexible design systems, brand guidelines and interaction libraries for easy handoff to development teams and any other designers that might join the product lifecycle.

Why is UI or interaction design important?

Unites Brand & Product
Ensuring your brand is appropriate for your users and flexible enough for an ever changing product is key in staying memorable in a cluttered market.
Bring Product to Life
Unique interface styles, illustration and giving users surprise or delight moments make your product stand out from the crowd.
Defines Design System
Designing a well thought out system of interface components ensures your product will scale beautifully as new feature sets are added.
Hooks Your Users
Having addictive interaction design patterns generates repeated behaviours and habits with your users, ensuring healthy retention.

Key Deliverables

Minimum Viable Brand
We work with new businesses to define logo, typography, colour and iconography usage to create what we describe as a ‘Minimum Viable Brand.’ It’s a flexible brand designed to grow and develop as your product expands and assumptions about users are validated.
User Interface Prototype
All key screens and user flows set out by the ideation phase will be mocked up in a high fidelity clickable prototype with polished, pixel-perfect artwork and modern user interface patterns, all working in harmony with your brand.
Flexible Design System
With key user flows designed in high fidelity, we flesh out a design system covering all components that might be used in future screens and features. This system becomes your product bible and all developers and any future designers should follow it to the pixel to ensure a coherent user interface style.
Interaction Design
Adding custom interactions to your designs truly brings it to life and makes it addictive. We provide interaction designs unique to your product that are delightful, tactile and dev-ready so nothing is lost in translation between design and final production.

With a distinct brand and digital art direction applied through an interactive prototype and set of visual guidelines, we adapt our processes and roadmap to the technical teams requirements and handover our designs in their desired format so they can quickly begin development…

Build

We work collaboratively with a range of development partners or directly with our client’s internal team in identifying, estimating and delivering on technical requirements. Our human centered approach means we always identify the right technologies, services or development languages for users and strategic client requirements.  

Where required our team provide development operation and product management, ensuring adaptive planning and continuous improvement in an agile paradigm, managed through an iterative production methodologies.

How does Spruce build digital products?

Agile Methadologies
Ensuring you can pivot to meet shifting market, user or business requirements without wasting time or money on fixed scope and cost.
The Right Technologies
Choosing the right infrastructure, development languages and services ensures your offering is built efficiently and properly.
In House or Out
Building with the right technologies means finding the right people for the job, wether they are staff or specialised teams or contractors.
Cohesive Operations
Fit all the puzzle pieces together, ensuring your marketing, product and management efforts work cohesively and are done by the right people.

Key Deliverables

Minimum Viable Product
All core features and functionality are built through lean production, ensuring a minimum waste in time or money spent to get an offering into a saleable format that users or consumers can engage with.
Product Management
Ensure the user experience perspective we supply is properly benchmarked and considered against technical requirements and limitation and that both are based on clear goals in alignment with your business strategies.
Ongoing Development
Maintain or enhance an offering through ongoing developement and technical administration. Our team will work with you to identify where oboarding or utelisation of internal resources or staff can optmise the time and cost spent in maintaining your product or solution’s code base.
Hosting and Infrastructure
Host your code base and setup any services with our team directly or we can point you in the right direction so you and your staff have full control. We choose the right service offerings for your priorities, wether you need to scale or a cost effective setup.

With build commenced and stable release of features and functionality planned, we begin preparation for usability testing, organising in person recorded sessions with users to validate the design and build through real world interaction. Our testing phase of the process begins after build has started but often runs in parallel and plays a part in development pivots and reprioritisation…

Test

Efficient and learnable experiences come from memorable, desirable and credible interactions. Even with a well thought out set of features, great visual design and a well built system, these interactions can’t be assured as users are (almost always) human and experience the world through a subjective lens, often basing their behaviours on intuition or emotion as apposed to logic, knowledge or experience.   

Performing usability testing provides an understanding of the intuitive or emotional responses your users have as they interact with your product. Understanding these types of responses allows our team to redress your offering to ensure it provides required tasks in real world scenarios with your actual user base.

Why is testing important?

Recorded Response
Recorded user interactions and facial cues ensure behavioural psychology practice and analysis can be applied to identify or change key user tasks.
Understanding Intuition
Understanding the cause of behaviours based on knowledge gaps or confusion can easily be mitigated through design or feature redress.
Connecting Emotions
Catching and removing confusing or unexpected results from user behaviours will ensure they stay happy and stick with you.
Redressing Design
Usability testing provides real world validation without needing to risk your brand or products reputation through trial and error while in market.

Key Deliverables

Testing Planning
We plan out usability testing to ensure the right tasks and goals are tested and that your responses come from people with knowledge or experience that accurately reflects your wider user base.
Usability Testing Sessions
All planned user tasks and goals are recorded with individual users. We ensure interface interactions and facial cues are captured together so the connection between behaviour and emotion can be mapped and analysed.
Behavioural Analysis
We track responses against a set of markers taken from behavioural psychology methodologies that have been contextualised for system and user interface design and functionality validation. These markers are collated and graphed to identify common behavioural or emotional patterns.
Product Redress Report
All trends identified through our testing analyses are collated and summarised into a report that includes briefing on redress of design, system functionality or user requirements to ensure intuitive user behaviours are considered and catered for.

Work with us.

To chat to an account manager about your next project, see our credentials or just ask for advice, shoot us an email. We’d be glad to help.
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