Process

Every project is different – it’s one of the things we enjoy most about our work. To go from ‘problem’ to ‘solution’, you must reach some key milestones. We’ve mapped these out to add consistency and repeatability to the quality of the outcomes, not the outcomes themselves.

Our process has three key phases.

Define

Defining the project and problem

Every project starts by building a shared vision of the outcomes we’re trying to create and how we will work together to make them come to life. We then deepen our understanding of the business and customer problems at hand by engaging with stakeholders and users and by looking into technical constraints and opportunities. 

  • Design thinking workshops

  • Qualitative and quantitative research

  • Digital strategy creation

  • Technical auditing

  • Service Blueprints

  • Customer research

  • Data strategy

Solve

Exploring and validating solutions

Every project balances conflicting needs. Complexity and simplicity. Size and detail. Clarity and brevity. We prototype and test ideas that seek to find the happy middle ground between these needs and balance impact and effect against investment and effort. We iterate through rounds of rapid ideation and testing to quickly find the solutions that stick.

  • Experience design

  • Interaction design

  • Information architecture

  • Data visualisation

  • Content design

  • Rapid prototyping

  • User testing

  • Proof of concept

  • Technical scoping

Deliver

Delivering the final product

Once we’ve nailed the solutions that need building, we move into high-resolution design work for specifying the look and feel of the final user interface. While that’s going on, our technical team sets up everything they need for a successful build, including our own infrastructure and integrations with critical pieces of technology. We keep decision-makers close during the build phase as we find opportunities to improve the final experience. When it’s time to ship, we collaborate closely with our partners to test the final product before sending it out into the world and measuring its impact through analytics.

  • UI design specification

  • Content creation

  • Front-end development

  • Back-end development

  • Integration and API development

  • Testing and refinement

  • Search engine optimisation

  • Hosting and support

Better partnerships make better projects

We have a healthy dissatisfaction for the traditional client-supplier relationship, and our team is structured to reflect that. The people doing the work show up to meetings and work directly with our partners. This reduces the time to make decisions, improves the quality of those decisions, and gets us closer to the rhythm of each organisation we work with.

We are a registered digital supplier on the All-of-Government (AOG) Web Services Panel and the NZ Government Marketplace (under Kernl Digital Limited T/A Octave).