The Digital Surface
It’s what the eye sees. No matter where it is cast. The surface. It may be the glassy top of the ocean. Or the grassy ground underfoot. It may be the brilliant facets on a diamond or the rough-cut face of a mountainside.
Or the very screen you’re staring at right now – the Digital Surface.
You’ve heard the saying, beauty is only skin deep. But beauty, we know, can come from deeper down, beneath the skin. Just as the surface of an ocean can be shaped by what is happening in the atmosphere high above. The point is: what you see is influenced by what happens above and below.
It’s the same with what you see on the Digital Surface. From vibrant and intuitive website interfaces and motion graphics to logos and banner ads – all of these have come to life because of what goes on below and what goes on above.
Dive under for a second.
Below the Digital Surface
It’s down here that we figure out how to make your digital project achieve the results your business demands. It’s where we discover the low-down on the people who will be interacting with your digital asset – the end users. Who are they? What do they want from your website? How do they think about the products and services you are selling? What are their habits online?
Whether a customers or staff, the end user sits at the centre of everything we do.
We dig deep to unearth the granular detail – using techniques such as user profiling and persona creation, functional requirements specification, site auditing and prototyping. We find out all we need to know about your users and the business requirements of your project.
We then use the intelligence gathered to build the best solution for your business. This is where much of the technical, "back end" work is done to deliver the functional requirements of your project. It may be a new process to manage products, an eCommerce system that better tracks orders, or an eMarketing strategy that leverages your user database in a more targeted way. It may be a smarter way of letting your customers know of new products and services, or it may be a more productive, stress-free way for staff to enter data.
Along the way, we get under the skin – in a nice way – of the people who will use your website. We produce storyboards and prototypes. We test and refine, test and refine and test and refine some more, until we get it right for your business and your users.
Let’s go up.
Above the Digital Surface
Up here, we use what we gather below to create the user experience – from information architecture and wireframing to interface screen design and HTML prototyping. Sometimes referred to as the “front end”, this is the place where creative ideas and strong visual communication design come together based on practical, real user needs
We apply the gloss to the surface.
Taking a user-centred approach, we thoroughly test our interface designs and workflows. From complex Web2.0 community based projects and search tools, to eCommerce and product management systems, right through to banner ads and interactive presentation tools.
Can shoppers successfully navigate the website to place an order? How easy is it to find information about a product? And then turn it into a sale? How logical are the steps for staff to locate internal policy documents?
We set users tasks that test how they interact with each element on the site and feed this research back into the design via our “test and refine process”. Once we have a clear picture of what works our design team adds the finishing touches to deliver your business a striking, highly usable online presence.
Meanwhile on the Digital Surface …
This is where more and more of us spend our time. It’s where we increasingly choose to work, play, buy and sell. What we see on the surface, how we think about it and use it are becoming crucial for any business with an online presence.
So if your business is visible on the Digital Surface, it makes a lot of sense to pay attention to what is going on above and below. And that’s where surfacemedia comes in. Taking care of business both above and below the surface is what we do.