Our development skills are also recognized by Microsoft as a Silver Partner and Cloud Solution Provider for Azure and in the testimony of clients for whom we have implemented successful solutions.
We all know how important first impressions are. Your website, often, is a visitor’s first encounter with your company and your brand. You want to be certain your website is engaging, easy to navigate and gives the visitor immediate value through an excellent user experience. Pretty pages do not automatically make for a great visitor experience.
At Visus, our 4D Process for website design is an applied discipline for how we develop a website, a process we use whether that’s building a website from scratch or rebuilding using an existing platform. Our 4D Process approaches website design strategically and holistically, ensuring your website communicates and engages your customer audience effectively and efficiently. It involves much more than just graphics design.
Our 4D Process for website design includes the following:
- Audience Identification and Persona Development
- User Journey Mapping
- Competitive Analysis
- Interactive wireframe development for all main pages of the new website
- Graphic design mockups of key pages
- Specification documentation, including workflows and business rules
- Analysis of any special functionality or integration with current systems
The Visus 4D Process ensures your website will be built to your specifications, that it will meet the needs of your business, all while delivering to your visitors an engaging, effective experience. And your website will be delivered on time, on budget, and incorporate best practices for website development.
UX/UI
Visus was founded on the principal of fusing great user experiences with programming. Today’s users demand excellent experiences. There are many websites and applications that are well programmed and look good, but if the user experience is sub-standard users will not return to use the website.
- User Experience is paramount and is the foundation of any website and must be well thought out.
- From time spent identifying personas to mapping journeys to asking the right questions to find the right answers, upfront work ensures a successful result.
- The more time you spend on UX the better your product will be.
- Every element on a page must be justified and add value to the user.
- Workflows must be well designed to reduce clicks and make information easily accessible.
- Information must be well laid out to make it easy to find on a page and in a logical order.
- During UX, ideas are outlined and challenged to make sure they provide value for the end user. Ideas are then formed into interactive wireframes which are then tested with users to receive their feedback. Flushing out ideas using wireframes is much more efficient and cost effective for prototyping than programming which is an expensive endeavor.
With a proper user experience, the user interface can then be designed and created to be appealing and world class, all while incorporating the latest design elements to make a website contemporary and effective.
At Visus we believe strongly that creating a great user experience is essential to having a successful website. Today’s website users demand an excellent website experience. And while there are many websites and applications that are well programmed and attractive, often the user experience is sub-standard, which results in high bounce rates, meaning users leave prematurely. This failure to effectively engage your users reduces or even eliminates the effectiveness of your website and reduces your opportunity to grow your business.
A positive user experience is fundamental to having a successful website. That requires UX/UI to be thoroughly integrated within the website development process, that every element on a page is justified and adds value to the user.
During Visus’ UX/UI process, ideas and concepts are identified and then tested to ensure they provide value for the end user. These ideas are then transformed into interactive wireframes that are then tested with users to gain feedback for possible enhancements and improvements. Gaining user insights during the UX/UI process using these interactive wireframes is how Visus ensures a more efficient and cost-effective prototyping process prior to programming.
Web Development
With website design completed, efficient development and programming become crucial. In website development, Visus matches Internet and industry best practices with years of experience, thus making certain your website not only performs as designed but is easy to manage and maintain. Visus often works with websites that look nice on the surface. But, if a common element needs to be changed or modified, that element must be updated in every location throughout the website. A properly developed website should leverage current technology and enable centralized updating and changes. That makes for efficiency of management time, ease of use, and effective QA practices.
Portals
Web portals deliver on the promise of an enterprise-wide solution and are an excellent way to increase user engagement. While most often applied to B2B companies, portals provide users with real-time access to information about their account, including order history, pending orders, access to a knowledge base, opening and tracking of service tickets and much more.
User data is usually stored in large back office systems like an Oracle ERP, an accounting system, an industry specific system, or other back office systems. Through the use of APIs or automated data imports, a portal gives your company a way to surface user-related data for them to view, interact with and to create new transactions which the portal can then push back into your back office systems.
A portal provides real-time access to user information from anywhere and strengthens that user’s experience with your business. And because of the self-service nature of a portal, it can have a positive impact on your company’s bottom line by reducing customer service costs. At Visus, we have designed and developed many portals. If your company doesn’t have a portal yet, give us a call today and let us help you determine if a portal is right for you.
Applications
Web applications are some of the most powerful products on the Internet today. Web applications are highly versatile and require only an Internet connection to access and a browser to run. One of the earliest, most successful examples of web applications is Salesforce. They heralded the ‘no software to install’ movement, with users only needing their computer to use a full-fledged and powerful application. And one of the biggest benefits of web applications is that users get the latest version every time they access the web application.
Web applications can be transformative both for companies and organizations. Off-the-shelf software is usually designed as a one-size-fits-all solution. And this is not always the best solution given most companies have their own processes and metrics for running their business. And off-the-shelf software usually requires companies conform to the way the software functions, rather than the other way around. And finally, when everyone in the same industry uses the same off-the-shelf software to run part of their business, you lose any competitive advantage the solution might have provided. With a web application from Visus the software is tailored to your company’s processes and way of doing business. This maximizes productivity for your team and providing an advantage over your competitors. Finally, custom web applications become an asset on a company’s balance sheet adding to the value of your company.
Workflow
Workflow is a vital aspect during UX/UI planning that determines how a user gets from one place to the next with the minimal number of clicks. Workflow is the magic that takes place behind the scenes to make a user’s experience outstanding. It is also crucial to ensuring your own in-house team is able to manage and support your website when making changes, updates or modifications.