Six Reasons Why Daitan’s Full Stack Approach to Design is Relevant to Your Projects and Business

Overview

It is common to come across incorrect or incomplete interpretations of the meaning of “design” and its benefits when applied in a software development context. Design is frequently perceived only as the efforts made to improve visual aesthetics in the user interface, but for Daitan design goes far beyond that. In this article, we will discuss six reasons why Daitan Design Services are relevant to your business.

At Daitan Design is Integral to Business Strategy

Design is a strategic tool for businesses. Many products might be built based on brilliant engineering solutions, but fail due to one simple reason: it was not conceived based upon user needs, desires and goals. Software that is focused only on engineering or business requirements and constraints, might have result in low relevance and high complaint levels, which leads to rework and unplanned expenses and a dissatisfied user.

Daitan Designers focus on visual, functional and conceptual aspects of the products, always advocating what is best for the users. Applying those efforts in a process close to engineers, stakeholders and clients, the designers’ goal is to make the product achieve the ideal balance between user needs, business constraints and implementation feasibility—from conception through maturity phases.

Fantastic work! Exactly what I had  in mind. It is ready  to show off to clients with a sleek user interface and nice user experience.

Financial Services, Secure Communications Company

We believe design relevance is in the conception of products that truly assist people in easily achieving their goals. By helping users achieve their goals, the business goals are also achieved. Therefore, by combining Daitan’s software engineering excellence with a process that considers the needs and goals of the users, we considerably enhance the product’s chances of  success.

Design is relevant to the creation of great products, happy users and business success

Daitan

Design is Not Only About Aesthetics…

Most important, design must be functional and serve a purpose. By applying design as a tool for addressing only the visual aesthetics of a product, we risk falling into an overly subjective analysis—considering that what is visually pleasant for one person, could not be for another.

We believe design is a broad methodology that interprets real data regarding user’s cognitive principles and creates solutions for the product’s form and behavior based on that.

Accordingly, design at Daitan is an approach that contains 5 key elements: 

1. Research to understand the users, the market segments and the competitors; 
2. Requirements gathering; 
3. Information architecture conception based on form and behavior; 
4. Refinement iterations based on empiricism (usability testing) and analytics approaches (heuristics); and, 
5. Support to engineering teams.

……But We Do ConsiderAesthetics As Well

Considering that the user interface is the main touch point between the product and the customer, we also believe that the visual aspect is very important in product design.

First of all, the visual and behavior aspects of the user interface must be designed to reflect the guidelines defined by the company’s branding strategies, following rules for the usage of colors, typography, iconography, animations etc.

Style Guides

When we talk about user interface design, it’s impossible not to mention Style Guides as the main tools for standardizing and Agilizing the process of implementation of these interfaces. Daitan designers work according to business needs: creating new Style Guides or applying existing  ones.

In complex business scenarios, where a company may have multiple products, it is possible to go further than Style Guides and develop a Design System, which allows a much deeper and broader standardization of visual elements ensuring more consistency and assertiveness in the processes of creation, implementation and updating of new and existing products.

Design Tools

We believe that good design deliverables rely on the process and not only the design tools used. Hence, Daitan designers have skills and knowledge of a range of tools available for creation of interfaces, prototypes and animations.

The choice of a design tool may vary according to the preference or needs of the business and Daitan designers have the ability to adapt to these preferences/needs. The only common ground required in our design process is the usage of pencil, paper and creative thinking.

Some of the tools we have expertise in: Sketch App, Zeplin, Principle, Figma, Invision, Axure, Adobe Creative Cloud Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Premiere, XD), and Webflow, among others

Daitan

We Offer a Full Stack Design Approach

Daitan has designers with various professional expertise and specialties that integrate with development teams. With multi-disciplinary skill sets, Daitan can cover different design methods and approaches:

• Design research: The main benefit of applying research with users in the context of design is the identification of behavior patterns that help the designers understand how people interact with a product or service, as well as, their likes and dislikes. Research can also be done to better understand your market segment and competitors.
• Gathering business and technical requirements: An important design phase is the comprehension of requirements and constraints related both to the business and the technology. Design efforts aim towards a balance between those two axes and also a third one (and most important)—user needs and goals.
• Framework conception: Before beginning the creation of interfaces and prototypes, it’s important to go through an ideation phase which contains the conception of navigation flows and information architecture considering the experience as a whole before going deep into the details.
• Refinement: The process of designing use interfaces is iteratively and progressively based on what is discovered during technical validations with development teams, partial demonstrations to the stakeholders, usability tests with users, and heuristics analysis.
• Support development teams: At Daitan, we value the collaboration between designers and developers. Whether it is to explain how an interface should behave, or to adapt a design solution to reduce development time, our designers are always side-by-side with engineering.

We Can Adapt the Design Process to Suit Specific Needs

We know that it’s not always possible to apply every design phase in the process of building a piece of software. Having some of these phases already running in the company is also a common scenario, in which case Daitan might only be needed to help implement and run other ones.

Considering these scenarios, a strong benefit of Daitan Design Services is our high-capacity to adapt to your specific needs and goals. Does your project need a full process design approach? Or does it need designers to focus on specific design phases? Either way, we are prepared to adapt.

Due to the breadth of expertise among Daitan professionals, we can adapt and build a design team that precisely suits your business needs and goals.

A Design Project with Daitan Means the Project Team and Management are Structured for Quality and Velocity

Daitan is a software development services company that builds technology, software products and data solutions for our clients.  Founded in 2004, the company has a large organization of experienced engineering professionals and senior executives with the expertise to meet your project’s goals.  Our engineering Centers of Excellence are located in Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil and Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Daitan provides fully managed teams with executive and technical leadership to ensure project oversight and success.

By working with our designers, your project benefits from the collaboration, contribution and oversight of other Daitan professionals. For example:

• Input from software developers, architects and our Daitan Technical Council (DTC), because project designers communicate and collaborate with them. 
• Tech leads, the Development Manager, who are responsible for your project and offer technical support to the designer. 
• Project managers, who always consider the project as a whole and not only the operational tasks. 
• Executives on Daitan’s operational oversight board (O2), who ensure that we deliver high quality results, on-time and aligned with your business goals.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge some of Design professionals for their contribution to this white paper: Alexandre Ferreira, Ewerton Martins, Flávia Negrão, Hudson Souza, Paulo Latancia and Wilker Amorim.