Thousands of articles have been written and as many webinars have been recorded, but the same reasonable question that concerns novice specialists is: "So what exactly should I do? In this material, I will show you what actions you need to take to create a design project aimed at solving business problems.
At the moment I am engaged in the development of startup in the field of logistics and recently my main task (in addition to testing weekly releases) was to create a corporate website. In order not to go far from the topic, I will choose the transport sphere, or rather - the service site for a premium taxi.
Design process
There are many variations of possible design processes on the Internet, so I will focus on the classical variant, which I use myself:
Immersion in the task
- Research
- Thinking scenarios
- Creating a framework
- Search for visual style
- Layout design
Before I begin, I want to note that the design process is not a strict sequence of actions. It is quite possible that you will have to return to the previous stages several times, and maybe some stages are mixed up with each other at all.
Focus on the described process, but do not be a hostage.
1) Immersion in the task or on what the business earns
The first thing to do is to understand how the client's business earns money. Taxis earn on commissions from each shipment, so the design should lead the user to create an order.
I immediately came up with the idea of putting up a taxi order form on the first screen of the site. Thanks to this, the site will be not only an information portal but also a full-fledged service.
As you can see, trying to understand the customer's business, ideas will come to mind. Immediately fix them, otherwise, you will forget. When thinking about the structure of the site, they are very useful to you. In the current project, we use Confluence. For small projects, I would choose Apple Notes or something like that.
But wait a minute. How often do we order a taxi from the site? Perhaps we should not focus on ordering a taxi online, but on downloading an application? Hmm, good question. Let's put our ideas in the notes and continue to study business.
The best way to understand the business is to contact the customer. In addition to the fact that you will save a lot of time, you will be able to involve the client in the process of work, showing that the final result is not the result of immediate inspiration, but a combination of the right visual style and business logic.
The result of the stage:
You need to understand clearly how the customer's business earns and what key activities you need to take on the user. In our case, the task is to convince the visitor to download the application.
2) Research and analysis of competitors
This stage is easiest, to begin with, the study of competitors, and then connect to it similar in mechanics services.
Let's think about the mechanics of ordering a taxi. Firstly, we have a person who wants to move from one place to another. Secondly, we have a driver who is ready to perform this task. What services work according to a similar logic?
I think of Airbnb, where one person wants to rent an apartment and the other is ready to rent it out. Or freelance resources such as UpWork, where the customer needs to do some work and needs an artist to do it.
And, of course, you need to see the websites of direct competitors: Gett, Yandex, Taxi, Citimobil, InDriver, and of course Wheely.
While browsing these sites, try to note similar and different details. For example, Wheely offers to download the application by sending SMS to the phone number, and Yandex.
There is one more detail that I come across on the second project in a row. As we said, we have two types of users - a passenger and a driver. For both roles, we need a separate page, as their involvement will go through different channels. In this case, who should we give the main page to? Or maybe you should make one divorcee?
Having analyzed popular services, I noticed one detail. Almost all companies with similar mechanics, give the main page for those users who pay money.
The result of the stage:
You have analyzed 5+ similar services and wrote out what entities are used by your competitors. Ideally, you should walk through the key scenario in each service to separate the good ideas from those that cause difficulties.
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Read on in the next section...Part 2
