Landing pages, UX, UI, SEO, responsive design, buzz marketing, leads, interactive design, websites... even our everyday vocabulary has changed.
One-way brands are a thing of the past. The huge diversity of channels and platforms found in the digital environment have pushed brands to converse with their potential consumers, which is both challenging and attractive at the same time. Consumers can establish direct communication with brands. They're no longer mere consumers. The traditional customer is a go-between in this new era. And they have an opinion and the means to express their views.
The Internet arrived with a view to changing everything.
Farewell to brand monologues
The success or failure of a brand no longer lies solely in its sales figures, nor is it measured in monetary units. Now it also depends on its position in a search engine or it is calculated in the number of likes, comments and shares. An unfortunate tweet can destroy the reputation of a brand and Google Analytics play a leading role in the definition of business strategies.
'Good online presence' is paramount these days. Either you're cool in cyberspace or you're condemned to cruel ostracism.
New terminologies, new methodologies and new phenomena that have gained importance in parallel to our history: twenty years of a shared journey, in which we've been learning and unlearning together.
It's all about creating experiences.
Online presence is no longer synonymous with having a website with its bog-standard 'about us' or 'our history'.
We no longer talk about launching messages that are only heard. We now talk about messages that are decoded and internalised through experiences. It's no longer just about communicating, it's about connecting. Let's forget about being or appearing on the Internet and concentrate on what we should be like online.
Taking these premises into account, good interactive communication is what creates a long-lasting connection with our audience that can manifest and reinforce itself from any type of channel.
To achieve this, we know that it's vital to detect each of the brand's contact points with its target audience, define the messages to be conveyed at all times, and how and where to do this, thereby building a solid and consistent connection throughout the consumer journey process (or better said, the user journey).
UI and UX aren't the acronyms of political parties
User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design rose up from the depths of the WWW like the Loch Ness Monster to become the key principles for the creation of any product that resides in the digital universe.
Every single day, without exception, we interact with an interface. Whether driving to work, buying an underground ticket, accessing our email inbox, setting the time on a microwave oven, taking out money from a cash machine, and so on. We don't realise it, but we live surrounded by systems that we interact with (we'll soon be replicants). The place where this interaction with visual, tactile or phonetic representation takes place is an interface.
User experience is all the work done so that the user has the feeling, whenever they're facing a specific digital product, that they have control and that everything is recognisable, intuitive and usable for them.
In both cases, without the U there's nothing. Without users, there's no UI or UX. That's why we have to focus on users when we're working on the creation of a digital product.
We like to put aside all the 'firsts' to focus on 'user first'
Without users,
there's no U
Whatever the online format in which a brand wants to portray itself and interact with its audience, we always set the same guidelines and have the same pattern of touchpoints in mind when approaching its creation: research, strategy, positioning, concept, message, information, architecture, differentiation, added value, intuition, usability and response.
And here are the elements that we pass through the sieve of all those variables:
Design should organise the user interface purposefully, meaningfully and usefully based on clear and consistent models that are obvious and recognisable to users, putting related things together and separating unrelated things, differentiating different things and making sure that similar things are similar.
Design should facilitate straightforward and common tasks, communicate clearly and easily in the user's own language and provide great shortcuts that are significantly related to longer procedures.
We should make visible all the options and materials required for a given task without distracting the user with superfluous or redundant information. Great design doesn't overwhelm users with alternatives or confuse them with unnecessary information.
We need to keep users informed of actions or interpretations, changes in status or condition, and errors or exceptions that are relevant and of interest to them by using a clear, concise and familiar language.
Design should be flexible and tolerant, reducing the fallouts of errors and misuse by allowing users to undo and redo, and at the same time it should avoid errors whenever possible, tolerating varied entries and sequences and interpreting all reasonable actions.
We need to reuse internal and external components and behaviours, maintaining consistency with the goal instead of merely arbitrary consistency. We can't force users to rethink and remember.
Great design doesn't confuse
But why all these variables and guidelines?
Because we want to understand the motivations and needs of users in order to deliver solutions through the design of the interface.
Because we want to create useful products that provide an optimal experience to users before, during and after interaction with them and, at the same time, we want to streamline the contact between brands and their users.
We have specialised profiles in information design and interaction. And if we talk in more technical terms, we also focus on design and accessibility, creating products that are compatible with any type of device (responsive design), performance standards and content indexing. We make sure that there's no type of noise or interference that inhibits the transmission of the message and makes it impossible for it to be perceived clearly and directly.
At Vasava we like to put aside all the 'firsts' that have emerged over the years. What we focus on is 'user first'.
Art direction meets technology
Our skills mean that we can work on projects involving various disciplines. But the fact of incorporating technology into our design expertise has helped us create a whole host of digital, physical and communication experiences in a solvent way, without neglecting their aesthetic value at any time.
Our skills mean that we can work on projects involving various disciplines. But the fact of incorporating technology into our design expertise has helped us create a whole host of digital, physical and communication experiences in a solvent way, without neglecting their aesthetic value at any time.
We're not afraid of technology. We know how to learn and adapt to technology, bringing it into our terrain. An obsession with detail, creativity and nonconformity are intrinsic and integral elements to Vasava, as is our groundbreaking tendency. And another innate feature of ours is curiosity. Without a doubt, this has paved the way for our lifelong loving relationship with technology. We believe in it as the driving force to create fresh, attractive and creative ideas and approaches. Technology has also injected us with a passion for functionality and the desire to make this functionality compatible with the visually attractive, as well as the recognition, relevance and reinforcement of the brand. There's a conviction that such compatibility doesn't exist. Fake news. This is showcased by our portfolio, in which our digital versatility is clearly proven. Don't expect pieces in it, though. What you'll find are experiences rendered as websites, apps, web apps, social media, installations, and so on... but experiences, after all. Pieces are for Lego.
On behalf of interaction
Easy to use and easy to remember. That's a successful digital product. We bolster brand identity in the digital environment by creating visually appealing and consistent products and designing behaviours built on simplicity (but not like the easy as in the 'easy-to-open' of some demon packaging).
The digital experiences that we create are not just short-term and concentrated at the exact time when the user and brand come into contact in a digital environment, but we build them for the medium term. And we don't just want to have a user to build a fluid relationship with (which is a panacea); we want to make that user, or transformer, end up as a customer.
Of course, this is only possible if you have a team can make a complex project yield a simple and effective product.
We have front- and back-end developers, motion graphics experts and design professionals who together make up a multidisciplinary in-house hybrid team that works with different approaches and points of view. This is the best way to deliver efficient and effective solutions for the development of an online product without neglecting the slightest detail. This team knows about various platforms and programming languages and implements projects that guarantee the most competitive standards.
Digital strategy
Nowadays, having one or several solid and consistent digital products is an essential requirement for brands. What's more, they must be optimised so that they can adapt to the never-ending changes in this environment and guarantee favourable results. That's not feasible if there hasn't been full immersion with the customer and the project and if an opening strategy hasn't been built.
Brands are looking to identify their target audience with their universe and their product or service. And that happens whatever the resources they use to communicate. However, in no other medium is such a direct and bidirectional contact established as in digital environments. How do I turn a click into conversion? How do I make a message attract engagement? Attraction or loyalty? Which digital product do I need? Which platform will let me best achieve my goals and with the least possible investment? We answer all the questions that arise when a brand is thinking about the creation of a digital product and we're able to propose realistic and feasible goals in the short, medium and long term because we draw up a meticulous digital strategy and we control measurement tools, allowing us to easily monitor results from day one.
We explore. We plan. We conceptualise. We visualise. We design. We experiment. We redefine. We experiment again. We redesign. We think again. A flight's not a flight without turbulence, because in interactive design the fastest way isn't always the best or the most effective way. We're in an ever-changing and ever-evolving environment that forces us to do exactly the same: i.e. evolve in order to always deliver the best result.
We accept this level of demand from the resource and apply it in all phases of the creation of a digital product: from the definition and construction of the first demos in test environments to the infinite tests of precision, launch and optimisation.
▸ Integrating business goals, brand communication needs, technological advances, user habits, sociological and consumer insights, disruptive ideas and innovative design.
▸ Making them coexist harmoniously in a cocktail shaker that our team expertly shakes. Using them to create interactive experiences that are attractive, functional, effective and no longer sought-after, but relevant for the users who engage in them.
▸ Creating connections between brands and users.