Doing things the right way is much more rewarding
We do the right thing
Define & UX Design
Needs Assessment Stage
Our design and research methods help our clients to shape product vision, uncover opportunities and make well-grounded decisions. We define product strategy and make sure we’re ready to take the step from idea to development.
Timeline: 2-6 weeks

01Business Objectives Discovery
Business objectives discovery is an essential step to understand what business stakeholders would actually like to achieve online. This involves a mix of inspiration and elicitation of information through questionnaires, interviews and workshops.
Deliverables:
- Project Scope
- UX Project time plan
02Product Vision and Business Model Hypothesis
Successful products stand on a strong vision. There are various types of research providing diverse data that helps us to shape project concept, clear up a picture of users needs and goals, as well as implementation strategy. We formulate business model hypothesis by means of 3 questions: what: problem; who: customer; and how: product/market.
Deliverables:
- Brief market overview (market conditions)
- Competitors audit
- Product business requirements
- Business model
- Design directions
- Basic technical requirements
03Information Architecture
IA makes it easy to visualize the basic structure and navigation. All product vision data is collected, organized and used as a groundwork for generating personas, user cases, storyboards, scenarios of interaction with the product as a Customer Journey Map and requirements-related documents.
Deliverables:
- Flow Chart
- Personas
- User Scenarios
- Preliminary Сustomer Journey Map
- Functional Structure (Mindmap)
- Technical Requirements for a product

06Wireframing & Prototyping
Wireframes are carefully crafted blueprint, which is true-to-size and incorporates the highest level of details of final product flow. Interactive prototype is a simulation of the navigation and features, derived from wireframes. It is built to refine design decisions and validate the product before development.
Deliverables:
- High-fidelity wireframes
- Final user flow
- Interactive prototype
07Usability testing
It is one-to-one interview research where user is asked to perform a series of tasks in a prototype or a product. Usability testing allows to validate and collect feedback about flows, design and features.
Deliverables:
- Survey data
- List of suggestions for possible changes
- Updated prototype
08Focus Group Survey
A group of people are proposed to use the prototype and discuss a specific topic or question. This method lets us learn about users' feelings, opinions and various aspects of how well product solves the problem. We use the results to course-correct initial hypothesis, uncover user insights and reveal points of growth.
Deliverables:
- Survey data
- List of suggestions for possible changes
- Updated prototype
Build & Test
MVP Development Stage
We design and develop fully functional product based on defined strategy. MVP aims to check hypothesis and idea efficiency, search points of growth and reduce risks related to budget and time.
Timeline: 1-7 months
02Visual Design
Graphic interface is a visual language of a product. Interface impacts on people’s emotions and impressions while they interact with it. High-end design derives from product idea and explicitly uncovers it for users. Interrelation between technological capabilities and design solutions is crucial. While designing we pick methods of visual communication, consider applicable technology and proceed with building friendly and comfortable user experience.
Deliverables:
- Moodboard
- Visual Key Mockups
- Typography System
- Color Scheme
- Screens Mockups
- Screens Specification
- Assets
- Layouts
03Interaction Design. Animation
Interaction Design defines the product structure revolving around user behavior. Everything from a button to a link should create meaningful relationships between people and the products. Animation should not only be functional but also help to create delightful and memorable user experience. So we are aimed to build an interaction system and user environment that feel friendly, learnable and useful.
Deliverables:
- UI behavior demo files
- Interaction demo files
- Final Interactive Prototype
05Methodology
Our development process is iterative so all works are performed with the continuous analysis of results and adjustment of previous sprints. Project development goes through Plan-Protype-Test-Adjust iterative cycle. Most of the time we rely on Agile (Scrum) methodology for T&M contracts. In case of fixed-price project we apply Waterfall with Agile elements. The latter one contains such elements of Agile development as: planning and implementing work by sprints, daily team meetings, demos and retrospective as well as scheduling builds delivery and relevant reports. What comes from Waterfall is that we estimate and fix budget step by step after completion of each stage including issues that team and client decided to change during this stage.
06Web development
We constantly monitor technical progress in development area and strive to apply up-to-date solutions. After trying out a number of web languages, we came up with Ruby as our main preference for server-side and API development. It has great security feature, it is scalable and products written in Ruby are stable and easy to maintain. Besides Ruby on Rails we use simpler solutions like Padrino or Sinatra if necessary. In cases project requires a tighter client-server interaction we resort to Meteor.js framework and React.js, which has Node.js in its core.
Web client-side (code that is run in web browsers):
- HTML 5: we prefer either Slim or Jade as HTML wrappers, Foundation framework is used for fast prototyping and markups.
- CSS 3: usually powered by Sass.
- Javascript: we tend to use Node.js, Coffeescript, React.js, Underscore and JQuery, Meteor.js
07Mobile Development
We only build native mobile applications with no third-party compromise. One of the benefits of going native is an ability of tools to adapt a product to the latest Google and Apple updates instantly. We design iOS applications based on iOS Human Interface Guidelines and consider terms required to pass App Store review. For iOS apps we use Xcode, Swift, and Objective-C. Android applications are built in Java and follow Material Design guidelines, looking properly on a wide range of devices.
08Databases
For saving and storing data correctly we usually use PostgreSQL. In recent years a movement called NoSQL has gained popularity and we support this tendency. If there are projects with Meteor.js usage or quite complicated relational data structure, then we use MongoDB as the leading NoSQL technology. Redis is another great solution for storing transient, high quantity read/write data such as activity feeds, tags, background jobs, sessions, tokens and counters.
Evolve
Improvement of existing product
We discover new opportunities for growth and elevate businesses by helping clients understand users and as a result expand a customer base.
We work with end-users in terms of quantity and intensity of interactions by analyzing real feedbacks and insights. Our practices are based on Customer Development and Lean Startup principles. By applying to Customer Development we ask questions "what to do and why", while Lean Startup instructs us "how to do it". These processes aimed to reduce expenses where they do not have a positive impact on target audience. After receiving the first real data, we envisage two scenarios of further work with current version of the product:
02Product concept review (partial or pivot)
Startups that create innovative projects and new markets constantly need to change the direction of the work to find the right way. If something goes wrong after the completion of the next iteration and product release, the company makes a pivot — a sharp turn and begins moving in a new direction, which sometimes even means complete restart of the project. It is a fairly common situation when MVP, which aims to check hypotheses, does not achieve desired results on the first run. In such cases, there comes a need to revise assumptions or ways of solving user problems. We comply feedbacks, metrics and other info we got and start defining the problem and ways of solving it.