Discovery & Design
With nearly a decade of experience, the Jackrabbit team of experts will work with you to create a custom digital solution that meets your and your users needs.
Our Discovery & Design Process
Although the process of developing a digital product is unique to each client, our team builds from the foundation of our collective experience, agile principles, and lean development philosophies in order to deliver digital products affordably and efficiently. Despite the custom nature of developing software, all our projects have a few common steps, the first of which is Discovery.
Learn more about what that means below:
Technical Research
Our end goal with technical research is to identify the most cost effective and scalable solution to meet your needs.
Whether we inherit an existing app or website, or start from scratch, our team takes the time to carefully consider common technologies used in the industry, third party app solutions, and architecture for certain feature requests. If you have pre-existing technology, whether partial or complete, we’ll do a technological archaeology of sorts to explore and understand existing systems. Once we are familiar with your architecture and codebase, we’ll determine if it is more efficient to either build upon your pre-existing technology, or begin from scratch.
Business Logic
In this step, we determine the business logic for the digital solution which will inform design and user experience.
We’ll consult with you to understand your business model and industry in order to best advise you and tailor your digital product to suit your business needs. This can include but is not limited to pricing structures, payment methods, and target user groups.
Product Requirements
By building a product roadmap, we can be transparent with our clients and efficient in our progress.
Once we agree on architecture, requirements, and business logic, we’ll develop the roadmap. A roadmap is essentially a product backlog, or tiers of requirements that are comprised of iterative releases, starting with a Minimum Viable Product (includes only the most essential features of the digital product), Version 2 (some additional nice-to-have features), Version 3, and so on. This method of iterative development provides cost efficiency for our clients, while the product backlog gives the client transparency into our team’s progress within the development process.
Technologies We Use
Product Backlog: JIRA
Prototyping & Design: InVision, Sketch App
Design
Once research, business logic, and product requirements are determined, our expert designers can begin sketching what the website, web app, or mobile app will actually look like. During this phase you see your vision take shape.
Learn more about the design process below:
UX Design
User-Experience (UX) Design refers to the process by which we’ll optimize design for a great experience for your end-users. We begin by rapidly iterating on wireframes (essentially rough sketches of the product) so that we can ensure we’re capturing both the correct user journey through the application as well as adhering to your vision. Wireframes also act as a blueprint that shows the hierarchical structure, intended navigation, allocation of space, and functionality and behaviors of an application. They provide the framework for the UI Design.
UI Design
Once the UX is mapped out and we feel confident about the user's journey, we will add the look and feel of the product to the UX design. The User-Interface (UI) Design is what most people think of when they consider the visual appearance of an app - the colors, logos, fonts, etc. UI Design gives the digital product the personality it needs to stand out to customers and make it unique to your brand.
UX Design Sample
Here are a few screens showing wireframes for user-experience flow
UI Design Sample
Here are a few screens showing user-interface design and branding
Design Prototype and Investment
A final product of the design phase is a clickable prototype that will allow you to get valuable stakeholder feedback before we actually start building the app, saving you money in the long run. We’ll incorporate this important feedback before spending resources on developing features that ultimately won’t be used. You may choose to pause the development process here in order to go out and do further testing in the market or get additional investment to build out the remainder of your digital product with the complete feature sets that you're looking for. We find that these initial Design & Discovery phases are what make our projects run so efficiently. They allow us to uncover issues early which saves a lot of time and resources later on in the development of the product.
Let’s Make Your Idea Reality
We deliver value to partners through mobile strategy expertise, user-centered design, and lean methodology. Take a look around our work portfolio and drop us a line, we’d love to chat.