Brian Tepfenhart | Product Designer

Brand Strategy, UX Design

Polyas Responsive Website

Corporate site and brand development.

UI design by Katharina Winter

Background

Polyas is an online-voting start-up which already has over 3 million users and is a market-leader for online voting systems.

They came to us looking to establish their online presence in preparation for the successful launch of their product. Simultaneously they sought a new front-end for their voting platform (separate project).

Opportunities

carte blanche to create the brand
Polyas is unique in their market
we will also design the product

Challenges

carte blanch to create the brand
final product had not yet been designed
Content was provided after project completion

Platforms

desktop

tablet

mobile

Time

3 weeks

Competency

ux design

brand strategy

motion design

Software

Illustrator
Photoshop
After Effects

My Process

Definition

Meet with project stakeholders to set objectives, milestones, and success metrics. Establish clear business & user goals.

Research

Learn about the company and product, analyze competitors, and conduct brand research.

Documentation & Ideation

Summarize & present research findings to illustrate the website strategy.

Design

Sketch and review wireframes for all platforms.

Create digital wireframes.

Create motion guides for development.

Production

Deliver final files and assets for UI design and development.

Provide assistance with UI design & development as well as assist the client team.

Optimisation

Analyze, learn, & improve the process.

Definition,
Research,
Documentation

Develop a Strategy

What should the site be about? What should it accomplish?

I needed to present a plan of action that could help us identify what information we wanted to communicate to the user, what content we needed for that, and how it should be organized.

I focused on business and user goals and translated those into a content strategy.

Business Goals

educate users about the product
encourage signup & testing
establish trust, belief, credibility
encourage deeper engagement & dialogue
reveal the people behind the product
explain company values & history
educate users about the product
educate the users about online voting and its benefits

User Goals

understand the product
determine who the product is for
evaluate pricing options
learn about competitive advantages
try the product

Sitemap

Ideation

Rapidly Iterate with Pen & Paper

For me, it’s very important to start my design process with loose pen and paper sketches. I make sure to have plenty of materials available so that I’m comfortable changing, rearranging, and discarding components or entire pages as often as needed.

Then I’m able to get buy-in from the client and the team and to make important design decisions before touching the computer.

UX Design

Design digitally for all devices

Once I have a solid basis of paper prototypes, I turn to the computer to work through the finer details of every screen & state across every platform.

This creates a framework to assist the UI designer and developer and also allows for further testing.

Motion Design

Motion Matters

Some interactions and features are hard to explain with only static screens and the only way to really understand is to see them.

For navigation, scrolling behaviours, and the intro animation, I created a motion guide video to assist the developer and to explain the concepts to the client.

Production

Follow through with Implementation & Testing

It was important to maintain frequent contact with the developer and the client to guarantee a seamless and accurate implementation and to perform the necessary design QA.

Optimisation

Analyze, Learn, & Improve

The most challenging aspect to this project was creating a site without first having a finished product. As such, we had no available content and the strategy couldn’t be fully customized.

Looking back on this now, I would have advised that we switch the order of the two projects and develop the brand with the product instead of with the company site.

This would’ve allowed us to go into the site design process with a clearer idea of exactly what the product features are and how they function.

Since we didn’t have that information, we couldn’t push the design as much as we would have liked and everything had to be a little more generic. Still, the client was happy and we felt that we did our best with what was available.

Want to collaborate?

Let's Connect

business@briantepfenhart.com