Aureus Media Design
Exceeding Expectations.
We are a comprehensive media design and development company built upon the idea that you know your company better than anyone else ever will. Imagine if you could get potential customers to feel a connection with your company emotionally just by looking at your website. Does your current website do that? Or is it falling short?
Sometimes the fix isn’t a complete overhaul, but rather the implementation of specifically engaging graphics and a clearer message. People believe they have the ability to assume correctly what a business does and decide if they need the services they assume are offered, then decide on whether your business is the best choice to deliver those services. These people base these assumptions and decisions upon the initial impression they receive visually from the graphics and layout of your website.
Seeking to breathe new life into the traditional design and architecture of websites and Social Media Campaigns, we firmly believe that no matter how interesting and beautiful a website or social media campaign may be, if they are not functional in presenting the information in an easy-to-access format and compelling enough to get the user to follow your call to action, it provides a great disservice to the owner and the user. Simply put, we strive for excellence in both – graphically rich and engaging websites and compelling Social Media campaigns.
We approach the problem of Creative Design by dividing the process into Four Design Phases:
- Information Design
- Interaction Design
- Presentation Design
- Evolution & Redesign
It is handy to think of the four phases as a series of steps, but in practice, designers keep all four phases in mind throughout the design process.
INFORMATION DESIGN
Information Design & Structure
What are you trying to do? This is the most basic question about your Web site. Its answer involves what information or experience you want to convey and the various audiences you expect to serve. The primary results of Information Design are the Project Plan and the Information Structure.
Interaction Design
How will it work? Interaction Design addresses the degree of control the Web site visitor has, how she becomes oriented to the site, how she’ll navigate and the usability of the site. Interaction Design concludes with the production of a Storyboard of the site.
Presentation Design
How should it look? Presentation Design addresses the style and appearance of the site, how pages will be laid out and what common elements of structure, control, and media will be used throughout the site to give it coherence and consistency. The results of Presentation Design are the Functional Prototype and Design Guidelines.
EVOLUTION & REDESIGN
Perhaps the most striking difference between publishing a Web site and publishing nearly any other type of product is that all the cost is involved in design and implementation. There is no production cost…page accesses are free. That means that change is cheap. And that means that change is mandatory: the competition will be changing, so must you.
The purpose of Information Design is to articulate what you are trying to do, for whom and what you will need to accomplish those goals. Information Design results in a Project Plan and the Information Structure.
Project Goals
What is this project about? Is it preliminary to selling a full-blown project to management, or is this the project itself? Will your Web site be an information reference providing access to information in depth? Are you trying to create a community of users? If so, interaction among them is most important.
Will the site exist to create an experience for the visitors? Or are you building a site in order to generate visitors of a certain demographic profile which can be used as an advertising venue?
How will your site create value for your organization? Will you be selling ads? Merchandising products? Will you require membership fees or entry fees? Or will the site exist for marketing, public relations or customer support purposes?
How will you know if your site is successful?
AUDIENCE GOALS
Who is the expected audience? What are their demographic characteristics? What kind of equipment will they use: high-end computers? low bandwidth network connections? Most importantly, what is their goals? Why would they come to your site? Why would they come back?
Keep in mind that most Web sites serve several audiences. A typical corporate site, for example, serves customers, prospects, investors, potential employees, the news media, the local community, and possibly others.
Content Inventory
Once you’ve articulated what you want to do, examine how you’ll do it. What materials will be required? Of those, what do you have? What work needs to be done on them and what will it cost? What materials will be required that you don’t have? How will you get them? What work needs to be done on them? What will it cost? Beyond dollar costs, how much effort will be required and how long will it take?
Information Structure
How will you organize all this stuff in the Content Inventory? What organizing principles will best fit the material and be most effective for the site visitors? Categorical? Clustered? Sequenced? Alphabetical? Numerical? Temporal? Spatial? Narrative? Should the site support multiple views into the information? What implications do the organizing principles have on use?
CONTENT ANALYSIS
Are you meeting your goals? Content Analysis is the creation of a matrix of project goals vs. site features. Are all the goals supported? Do any features exist without supporting important goals?
Implementation Decisions
How will you make this site work? Is it straightforward Web pages or does it involve scripts, pages created on demand, Java applets, special data type viewers, databases or secure transactions? Do you have the expertise for these technologies or do you know where to get it?
Project Plan
The result of all this is the Project Plan: the first-pass enumeration of tasks, a schedule of when they will be performed, by whom and at what cost. More tasks will be added to the Project Plan during Interaction Design and Presentation Design. The purpose of Interaction Design is to articulate how the site will work.
User Control
A few Web sites are like watching a movie: once the show begins the visitor’s only option is to watch or leave. The vast majority of sites give visitors more control than that: they determine which links to follow, at what pace. Some provide even more control than that: interaction among visitors, manipulation of objects like shopping carts and products for purchase. A few sites give visitors a great deal of control: visitors are actors in a virtual reality space with other people and even empowered to change the space if they wish. What degree of control will visitors have over your site?
ORIENTATION
How will you orient your visitors to the site? This largely depends on how the content is organized. Hierarchical or categorical organizations correspond to a table of contents. Spatial organization corresponds to a map. Introductory text may be helpful. If a metaphor can be devised that implies functionality and operation, it can be one of the most effective ways of making a complex system accessible to a new or casual visitor. Commonly used metaphors in computing are the desktop and office metaphors, but the best metaphors will have a close correspondence with the tasks or information that the site supports. And poorly chosen metaphors can cause problems: are there conflicts between the content and the metaphor or does the metaphor create expectations that the site cannot meet?
Navigation
Most navigation on Web sites is done through linked text or graphics. This approach fits well with information structured categorically, hierarchically or relationally. Information structured spatially corresponds to maps with active hot spots. These are common approaches to Web site navigation. Another approach, orthogonal to these, is a search facility that pulls up pages based on content. Another is pages generated from a database on the basis of query parameters. The right approach depends on the information and the assumptions that visitors are likely to bring to the site.
Behavior
Basic Web sites present static pages connected to one another through a series of links. Newer technologies such as scripting languages and Java applets provide the opportunity for pages to become active programs that react to the visitor’s actions (it now becomes appropriate to think of the visitor as a “user” or “agent”. She is no longer passive.) These sites may be more oriented to producing an experience rather than simply presenting the information. What would be design flaws in conventional sites might be featured on these sites: surprises, getting lost, imposed obstacles and challenges. The addition of programming to Web pages is likely to change the nature of what we know of as the Web.
USABILITY
A little user testing often reveals a great deal about bad assumptions. As the Interaction Design takes shape, there begins to be enough detail available to start exercising the design with prospective users. Is the content coverage about right? Is the information organized in an appropriate way? Do these prospective users seem to know how to use the site to find what they’re looking for? How much user testing should be done? None is too little. When new prospective users contribute a few new insights, you’ve probably tested enough.
Storyboard
A storyboard is the integration of content and functionality. What’s going to be there? Where and how will changes occur? The stylistic elements of the Storyboard are approximate and the layout of pages is approximate. But the Storyboard provides a first glimpse of the scope of the site and how it will work.
Visual Theme & Style
Now that you’ve articulated what the site will cover and how it will work, it’s time to decide how it will look. The green marble and brass conservative look of money? The extreme rad look of Gen Xers? Something cute for kids? Techno? Warm and nostalgic? Something conveying futuristic technology or conservative reliability?
The site should have some visual coherence. Even very large sites representing diverse corporations need some coherence in their Web site in exactly the same way and for the same reasons that they work to build and manage a unified corporate identity with control of logos, slogans and other design elements in print.
PAGE LAYOUTS
How will pages be laid out? Headers and footers, each with navigation buttons? Navigation links in the left column? Should navigation be separated from content with frames so each can scroll independently? How will you deal with screen sizes varying from 640×480 to 1024×768 and larger? Will graphics be repeated so they can be cached by the browser, thus improving response time? Speaking of graphics, how much will you permit yourself to use, knowing the implications in download time?
Structural Elements
How will the pages be put together? One of the most valuable aspects of the layout is defining a grid. All pages are laid out within the constraints of the grid. Two common grid designs are three columns and six columns. Columns may be combined, say into a 1/3 – 2/3 layout (as this page is).
Grids are usually implemented either with tables or frames. Headers containing a logo, page title, and a navigation button bar are also very common. These are the type of structural elements on which pages are constructed.
Control Elements
Buttons, links, clickable image maps, active form widgets…by providing consistent appearance, behavior, and placement of these elements, visitors can more quickly master how to use your site. Then they are more likely to focus on the content: the real value of the site.
Media Elements
Text and graphics have been part of the Web since the first graphical browser was introduced in 1993. Today, these are commonly augmented by simple animations and increasingly, with audio and video. These media elements may be part of the content or may simply be part of the presentation in support of the content. Will the pages contain background images or colors? Does the background make a strong statement or support other elements? Does it interfere with any elements, especially text?
FUNCTIONAL PROTOTYPE
Put it all together. With Web sites, there often is little distinction between a Functional Prototype and an implementation. The Functional Prototype is a working version of the site. It may be incomplete, elements and placement may be rough, but it gives a good look at what the site will include, how it will work and how it will look. It can be used. Design errors, oversights, and missed opportunities can be recognized and rectified before committing to full-scale implementation. In many projects, the Functional Prototype is simply a carefully chosen subset of the full implementation.
We now have a fairly complete view of what will be required to complete the Web site. The new tasks and required resources identified in Presentation Design must be integrated into the Project Plan.
GUIDELINES & DOCUMENTS
Many Web sites are implemented by large distributed teams. For large corporate sites, for example, the overall design is worked out by a core team. That team then produces a Guidelines Document (very often an online document) augmented with downloadable page templates and design elements. The design document details the hard and fast rules that must be obeyed, the guidelines and any suggestions the design team may have. The downloadable elements make it easy for the implementers distributed throughout a company to “do the right thing.”
This is also the time to ensure that people and systems will be ready to take responsibility for the site when it goes online. Comments will start coming in. Have individuals been identified to respond? Do they know what kinds of response and how timely response will be required? Will the site include discussions? Have moderators been identified? Are appropriateness and legal responsibility clear?
Change is relatively easy on Web sites and they are generally expected to do so. A Web site is like a blend between publishing a book and a newspaper. Static reference information is often expected to be there but news and fresh new material bring visitors back. Also keep in mind that the Web site need not stand alone–it is most effective when enhanced with e-mail mailing lists, discussion groups and references to it in print ads, business cards, etc.
In addition to evolving content, many Web sites change their Presentation Design from time to time. Anticipating this in the design and implementation can make these changes much easier and less expensive. Special tags and comments can be placed throughout the implementation which will allow global replacement of design elements throughout the entire site.
For more information, please contact STEVEN MARC TRIER (Founding Partner), or STEVEN FOREST, (Partner) at 406 382 9323, Monday through Friday, 9-5pm (MST).
ABOUT | SOLUTIONS | PORTFOLIO | STRATEGY | DESIGN | CONTENT
SEARCH | BRAND | SOCIAL | EVENTS | FAQ