Eolution Digital

Research

Keeping in line with the Design thinking model by Stanford design the first step was to empathise with the users. A competitor analysis was conducted to gain an understanding of what users expect when using similar sites. This analysis along with desk research helped to create a sitemap to illustrate features and information architecture of the website. An affinity diagram followed and helped to gain further insight of the functionalities necessary.

Site Map

The sitemap was created to help visualise the website and served as a guide when sketching and prototyping.

Persona and Branding

To further empathise with the target users, a persona was created based on data collected from the research stage. Personas help outline a user’s needs, expectations, wants, experiences and

Branding was created with the target user in mind as well as from the information collected from the desk research. It was important to focus on modernising the website brand so a mood board was created with this in mind. Blue was chosen as a primary colour for the website due to it communicating trust and security.

Changing logo layout

The idea with the logo revamp was to make it sleeker and easier to read. The colour white for “Evolution” was made red to portray boldness and inspiration.

Low-Fi Mockups

The first round of mockups were low fidelity using Miro, the online collaborative whiteboard. The sitemap served as the skeleton for the sketches. When designing I would refer to the Heuristic evaluation by the Nielsen Norman Group to ensure the design and user experience was consistent and user friendly.

Development

Evolution was built with WordPress and hosted with Tsohost. The site was first made on a subdomain and then migrated across to the main domain. Whilst building this website, it was important to keep in mind the stakeholders requests of modernised functions such as sliders, videos and graphics. It also has proven to elevate the user experience.

Adding all these new features to the website increased the HTTPS requests to each page. Website performance was a big factor regarding the SEO ranking. I made sure to only use the necessary plugins. I combined the CSS files, JavaScript files and HTML files to reduce the loading spend. All images were compressed on Ting png before uploading them and I used javascript asynchronously to load some objects on the site. Finally, I went through each page and checked if I could remove any necessary features to bring down the HTTPS requests.