Build it and they might come

Unless you’ve got God whispering in your ear, or a bunch of the ghosts of dead baseball players telling you what to do, you may want to get some strategy and design advice before starting your next project.

Over the years, I have seen the benefits time and time again of upfront strategic analysis and design thinking. What you want may not be what your users need, and that’s the reason why so many projects/products fail—not actually validating work with the people that will be using it.

Before embarking on a new project, it’s essential to understand your customers, your business, and your market. Kevin Costner took a risk in Field of Dreams, but not a particularly calculated one. He put it all on the line for his prophetic ghosts, but it could have just as easily gone the other way.

Our primary focus at SilverStripe has long been designing and building websites, but more recently, our customers have been presenting us with unique and often complex problems, with no clear pathway to a solution. This has led to us taking a new approach.

Building on our years of experience delivering digital projects, we now support our customers from the beginning, to uncover and clearly articulate problems before designing and delivering the best solution.

We combine design thinking methodology (empathise > define > ideate > prototype > test) with Agile practices to create an iterative, user-centred approach to problem solving. Prototyping is key, along with a simple but often overlooked skill—listening to our clients.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.

― IDEO.org

Initial discovery can involve a relatively casual conversation, and depending on the project, lead into more structured, interactive workshops. Exploratory research sets the stage, and more specific research helps us hone strategy and design planning.

Alongside our upfront research and strategy consultancy, in response to our customers’ needs, we’ve expanded our design offering to include more than UX and UI. We now work with our clients on their brands to produce visual identities, print collateral, iconography, and much more.

Keen to learn more?

To give you a taste of our new approach to customer solutions, we’ve wrapped up our Strategy & Design services into a new brochure! You’ll find a detailed, end-to-end view of our process, and how we can work with you when you’re in need of a solution. If you're keen to learn more, you can download the brochure now.

We'd love to discuss your project. Contact us to get started with our Strategy & Design services.