Design/UX

This episode we will be talking with Cristina Chumillas. Cristina comes from the design world and is passionate about front-end development. She works at Lullabot (though when we recorded this, she worked at Ymbra) and has been involved in the Drupal community for years, contributing with code, design and organizing events. Her contributions to Drupal Core are mainly focused on front-end, design and UX and nowadays is co-organizer of the Drupal Admin UI & JS Modernization Initiative and Drupal core UX maintainer.

Welcome back! In part 1 of this series, we covered the early stages of our design process including how we define challenges and immerse ourselves in a brand during Strategic Design Discovery, create Style Tiles to explore various aesthetic directions, and map user personas to conversion paths with wireframes.

Recently, The Guardian Insurance Company made the strategic business decision to start marketing and selling their products directly to consumers. While Guardian has been around for nearly 160 years (WOW!) most consumer experiences with their products stem from employer insurance coverage offerings.

Ever wonder how websites go from initial design to code? What steps and tools are involved? What are the common pitfalls and how can you avoid them? In this blog post, I will recap the process our designers and front-end developers take to when creating a new website design for our clients. Hopefully, this will give you a little more insight into Mediacurrent’s methodology and in turn help you develop a more robust workflow of your own.

Build the Foundation

Before design even begins, there are a few key items to set the project up for success:

Want to reach a broader audience? You are not alone! Outside of the digital space, savvy planning can ensure that a product or service is usable by as many humans as possible by removing barriers and creating intuitive tools and welcoming spaces. Although websites offer a virtual rather than a physical experience, there is much to be learned from environmental design.

Your brand colors make a big emotional impact, but how do they appear to site visitors who are partially sighted, color blind, or faced with environmental factors that decrease visibility? Color and contrast levels are crucial to communication, and for the accessibility-minded designer, getting these details just right is a key element for a successful project.

Slideshows, sliders, carousels: no matter what you call them, in terms of web design they are just evil. Do a quick Google search and you will see that most frontend developers and UX/UI designers can agree on this point and have been talking about it for years. But why do we still constantly see them? Part of the issue is that slideshows, especially in the hero region, are so ubiquitous that many clients see them as necessary and keep asking for them. They have essentially become a “home page standard.”