User-Tested Website Prototype
The Prototyping stage is where we shift the attention to your customers. It allows us to solve big problems and validate new ideas in just 5 days. Prototyping happens in a collaborative environment designed to challenge preconceptions. The end result is an interactive, user-tested prototype that gives you a more focused brief than the traditional documentation.
Solve big problems in fast-paced workshops
After we help you assemble a team of experts during The Foundation, we’re ready to get hands-on as a unit. Our Web Design Sprint is a modified version of Google’s design sprint, which was used to build Gmail and products across many successful brands like Red Bull. We’ve used it for many clients and it works like a charm for websites.
With unique perspectives across our team and yours, the group is well-equipped to solve your biggest challenges. The process is extremely fun and productive. We set out a big goal for your company, identify problems, frame them as opportunities and sketch ideas to find solutions.
Our focus is on your customers
During Prototyping, our attention is focused on your customers. We learn more about their typical interaction with your business and discover their problems and needs. User-testing is a vital part of the process and we start it as early as possible. Designing a website in a silo of an agency just doesn’t cut it.
The process saves money early on and ensures the website works for the end-users. Web design and development are expensive and testing a finished product makes it more difficult to address the issues. We get it out of the way before web development kicks off.
Working software over documentation
The outcome of this phase is an interactive, user-tested prototype. We encourage clients to invest in a second iteration of the Web Design Sprint to make educated choices about the feedback from user tests, but after the first week we already have:
- Real, validated copy in the prototype – no placeholders
- Mapped out at least one critical user journey
- A layout of core pages designed for optimal User Experience
- The scope of several interactions, often including animations
- A complete set of key features
This puts us way ahead of any technical scope documentation. The prototype is a great foundation for a web designer. In some cases, we can even develop it as a Minimum Viable Product to get your new website to the market as soon as possible.
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We doubled leads generated from our website in the first month of launch.
Luciana, Marketing Director at Courier Exchange
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I appreciate the user feedback and their agile approach to web design and development. I really liked website workshops with them.
Justyna, Chief of Staff at Repositive
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With other web design agencies, we would’ve had limited testing, but with NerdCow, from day two, we were doing user testing.
Mario, Director at Leftover Currency
Frequent questions about prototyping
Do we need to do any research upfront?
The Sprint Book will have you convinced that you can jump straight into workshops without having conducted any research. While this is certainly possible, we like to do just enough research to ease everyone into a design sprint. We precede the Prototyping phase with the 1-week long Foundation that provides us with all the necessary insight into your company, competition, customers and more. In light of that, and to answer the questions, you don’t need to do any extra research on your end to work with us. It all comes as a part of the package.
How do you avoid a ‘designed by committee’ solution?
While a design sprint is a collaborative undertaking, it comes with a rigid framework that allows everybody to contribute without compromising on the outcome. As a team we collectively vote on the best way forward, however, it’s a decision-maker’s role to approve of that route or redirect it. For example, when we individually sketch a website prototype and vote on the best features, the decision-maker picks one sketch that will get validated by the users. Furthermore, the prototype is just that – a blueprint for the actual website. The UI/UX design happens in the next phase (the Production) and is handled by our in-house design team. Also, during the production of the said website, we only communicate with the person in charge of the project in your team.
How do you find people to test the website prototype with?
Based on what we learned during the Foundation as well as the first day of a design sprint, we launch a campaign to recruit users matching the agreed target audience. We use various platforms to search for participants e.g. userinterviews.com or hellopingpong.com. However, there are times when our client provides their own testers from the pool of customers. That’s perfectly fine, too!
How do user tests look like?
We conduct moderated user tests online via Google Meet. Each participant shares their screen while browsing through the website prototype built in Figma. The role of the workshop facilitator is to make the interviewee comfortable and to ask open-ended questions as the session progresses. In the meantime, the rest of the team spectates the conversation and writes down observations that often relate to emotions or behavioural patterns. These comments eventually become the feedback that we address in the iteration sprint to improve the prototype.
The next step – agile development
When we have the prototype ready and validated by your target audience, we start the production phase. We are an agile design agency, which means that we focus on continual delivery. The process is flexible and encourages change. Weekly review meetings allow us to quickly respond to new requirements.
