Introducing the Jungle Guide: CreateApe's Ultimate UI/UX Design Strategy

Let’s face it…You NEED a UI/UX Design Strategy to create a digital product in this day and age. You don’t want to invest time and money on a project that didn’t have a chance.

A UI/UX design strategy is an essential bridge between your business and the end-user. Without validation from the right people, you’ll find your business caught in a loop of misguided designs, frustrated users, and disappointing results.

Our UX design strategy blog discusses the value of UX for both the business and the user. We also point out the components that make a strategy successful. But, if you’re still not sure where to start, aren’t confident in your research skills, or just too busy, we’ve got you covered.

CreateApe’s Jungle Guide is all the power of UX in a single document. Whether you’re a startup bringing a new digital product to market or an established company needing a redesign, we’ll give you all the tools and insights you need to make your project a success!

Behold The CreateApe Jungle Guide!

• Research
• User Interviews
• UX/UI Evaluation
• Product Solutions
• Development Solutions
• Full Project Estimates

Why do You Need a UI/UX Design Strategy?

We hope this isn’t news to anyone, but there’s a lot of risk in running a business—especially in the digital space where there’s a lot of competition.

An effective digital product has three things behind it: research, feasibility testing, and business strategy. Without these things, your investment is one big guessing game. You need a solid base of qualitative and quantitative metrics to create solutions that actually work.

Getting the big picture of what you’re up against will help you shape your business strategy, but how exactly do you find that out?

When you get a Jungle Guide from CreateApe, you get a team of design industry vets that’ll know what to do. We’ll know what to research, what questions to ask your users, and how to take those metrics and build a viable digital product.

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What We’ll Figure Out for You

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What do You Get in the Jungle Guide?

The Jungle Guide is here to protect you and your business from the pitfalls of poor planning. We’re also here to help you come up with ideas and prepare you for any curveballs we may encounter along the way.

Jungle Guide Contents

• Research:
  You would never write a paper without hours of research to support your hypothesis. So why create a website without that foundation?
  
  The Jungle Guide takes care of the preliminary research for you. Whether we’re brainstorming or reviewing analytics, we make our decisions based on evidence (either from case studies with measurable KPIs from our own past projects).
  
  We start by establishing all the important stuff (Who is the company? What do they do? Who are their stakeholders? Who’s their biggest competition, etc.) Then, we dig a little deeper to discover business opportunities and suggest new ideas to bolster the brand.
  

• User Interviews:
  UX is about more than just turning a profit (although it never hurts). It’s about creating long-lasting value for the business through positive experiences. Making that good first impression is everything so the brand can keep growing and improving on its digital products.
  
  The user is at the core of everything we do, so we go straight to the source of what makes or breaks the business. Their honest feedback, good or bad, tells us everything we need to know about making the product work for them. We also talk with internal stakeholders to ensure we’re supporting the business as much as the user.
  
  We do our most valuable research here by finding out who exactly the user is, what they want to do, and how we can help them accomplish their goals. Then we take their feedback and use it to guide us through the project and validate design decisions.
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• UX/UI Evaluation:
  Our research and interview findings guide our heuristic evaluation as a whole. They help us figure out what to fix on an existing product or how to fill a market gap with a new product. 
  
  With an existing digital product, our goal is to bring the major design problems to the surface. The business needs to put themselves into their user’s shoes and empathize with their frustrations related to the product. We also pick out quick fixes to improve the experience piece by piece. 
  
  With a new product, we show our clients how they can get ahead of their competition from the user’s point of view. We help them decide what features will help them stand out and how to tackle the large-scale project.

• Product/Development Solutions:
  Here’s where UI/UX design strategy comes in. Our product design and development solutions in the Jungle Guide lay out specific actions for the business to take in order to improve their user experience.
  
  This usually begins with us breaking down the project piece by piece. We take our ideas from brainstorming sessions with the client and determine what will work best based on the user’s feedback. Then, we propose our recommendations and break down how they’ll help the user.
  
  We also take a look at the web development solutions that will make the final product function as it should. This includes evaluating the code quality, site speed, and platform integrity—or choosing the right framework for a new product.

• Full Project Estimates:
  Once our UI/UX design strategy is in place, the only thing left to do is map out our timeline. We’ll break down how long it’ll take us to complete each part of the project. Since the Jungle Guide takes care of the initial research and evaluation, we show the client how long the actual design and development process will take.
  
  We start by picking out the low-hanging fruit—or small tasks that can be fixed and implemented quickly. Then we provide a low and high-range estimate of how long each phase of the project will take. This gives our clients a good idea of when the final product will launch and how involved they’ll be throughout the project.

Is it the Same for Every Project?

Well…yes and no. We need to get the full picture of you, your brand, and your market. We look at the same things in every Jungle Guide, but on a different scale depending on the project. Every project is different, so we adjust our hours to accommodate project size.

• 1st Tier: Small-scale projects (informational sites, landing pages, etc.)

• 2nd Tier: Complex websites (e-commerce sites, web applications, etc.)

• 3rd Tier: Complex, large-scale projects (software, native applications, etc.)

How Does This Help My Business?

UI/UX design strategy might seem like a big investment of time and money, but creating an excellent experience right out the gate is more than worth it. The word about digital products gets around quickly, and a strong first impression will give you a better starting point for new services and features down the line.

You may also think that your business doesn’t need the Jungle Guide because you haven’t heard any negative feedback from your users. But in this case, what our clients don’t know could potentially hurt their business. 

In fact, only 1 out of 26 customers complain about bad UX according to this blog from uxcam.com. 91% of unsatisfied users will just leave instead of leaving negative feedback.

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The same blog also shows that 13% of users will tell 15 or more people about a bad experience, versus the 72% of users that will tell 6 or more people about a good experience. The user may be more reluctant to give negative feedback to the business, but they’ll be less shy talking to their friends and family about it. 

We’re here to help you impress that 72% instead of unknowingly driving away the 13%. Our client’s success is our success, and our goal is to establish positive, long-term relationships. The best way we can do that is by fostering a strong client-user relationship.

What Happens After the Jungle Guide?

You have two options after we give you your Jungle Guide. You can have us take care of the rest of the project, or you can take it to your internal design team and use it to guide them throughout the project!

We have a team of 40+ designers, developers, and project managers that can turn our UX design strategy into a fully-functional product. We also have visual designers and content creators who will make the product look and sound as good as the user experience.

But if you’d rather have your internal design team, we’re happy to provide our UX insight so they can work their magic. You can call on CreateApe any time your business needs an all-in-one resource for user experience.

Get a Jungle Guide Today

Your market is a jungle, with tons of twists, turns, and hazards along the way. But with CreateApe’s Jungle Guide, you don’t have to go it alone!

Our combination of research and UI/UX design strategy will show you everything you need to know about the end-user and how to create solutions to keep them coming back for more. Bring us your idea and we’ll show you how to be the king of your jungle.

Need a Jungle Guide? Begin your expedition here!

Want to see our apes in action? Download a sample Jungle Guide below.

andros Jungle GuideDownload