Design & Build Phase
Turn ideas into a cohesive, relevant, and useful product
In the design and build phase, you’ll take everything you learned about your users, internal stakeholders, and project constraints, and design systems that balance them.
It can be tempting to jump right to solutions, but it’s important to slow down and measure every choice against both your prioritized list of user needs and the overall organizational goals for the project. Every design involves concessions, but it’s essential not to compromise the needs of your users, or build something that won’t work in practice.
You’ll use the red routes and user goals you identified in discovery and create wireframes for important pages, navigation menus, taxonomies, and functionalities. The core team (including all disciplines, not just graphic artists) brainstorms these sketches, working with stakeholders to develop ideas that will meet user needs and also work for their unit.
After refining your wireframes together, the Web Initiatives team brings the ideas to life using existing web templates, graphic design, and development, and populates them with real content. Once you have a working prototype staged, you can begin user testing to make sure what you’ve built works the way you intended.
Objectives
The purpose of the design and build phase is to:
- create a prototype that works for both internal and external users
- revise existing content and designs to meet the digital communications standards
- design a publishing system that the unit’s current staff can maintain successfully
- create guidelines that will help staff members keep content useful, usable, and relevant
The Team
This phase involves a core team that is small enough to move quickly and efficiently. It should include a few key stakeholders, the web team (designers, developers, user researchers, and content strategist), and the main departmental contact or service manager for this project.
Outputs
At the end of the design and build phase, you’ll have:
- well defined user flows
- functional designs with real content in the content management system (CMS) templates
- input and approvals from stakeholders and project team members
- a content audit
- search engine optimization (SEO) keyword research
- page tables
- content for new pages created by the revised architecture plan
- a roadmap planning the migration and editing of existing content