Normally, when I’m called in to assist on a project, there’s a lot of things already in motion. For example, when I worked alongside a handful of nutrition companies – they already had their own branding. They were married to specific ideas and as such the depth of my work was restricted in some respects.

In this rare case, I was approached at the early inception of a company. This company already had a successful list of paying clients, but lacked the branding and the internet presence it would need to expand.

This has netted me the awesome opportunity to sell a branding kit and a fresh website to the client.

Initial Prep Work

Before I invest myself in the design thinking process, the customer has requested that I help him illustrate a handful of “placeholder” branding items. This isn’t unusual especially for someone who wants to be up and running as soon as possible.

The parameters surrounding the branding I’ve been given are fairly simple.

• The colour scheme must utilise black and orange.
• the name of the brand is “Every Last Spot”
• The logo should feature a building
• The logo should also indicate that this is a cleaning company

Overall, these parameters are hardly that restrictive. After the client provided me with a rough drawing made in paint, I set about exploring my various tools to see if we could get a base to build on. After some back and forth with the client and a few tweaks, this was the final result:

As we work through each stage of the design process such as researching and exploring the problem domain, the customer may want to re-address his branding. My job is not to make decisions for the client, it is simply to put him in the best possible position to make informed decisions for his business. .

Phase 1 – Understanding

It is critically important before we begin any significant level of work for the client we need to generate an understanding of a few different moving parts. The task, the market, the technology involved, the client/customers and any other restrictions.

To get the ball rolling, I will ask the the client these three questions:

• Who are the clients customers?
• What problem do the clients customers have?
• What is the clients current solution?

in this instance, the answer to these questions are:

• Primarily estate/letting agents
• Their properties need thorough cleaning after tenants vacate properties
• The creation of a mobile deep cleaning service

Now that we’ve began to form an understanding of the overall task, it’s time to dive deeper on these issues.

HOW/WHY

I sat down with the client, and we mapped out the “How & Why” of why people would be utilising his business.

Fully understanding customer needs will be a key component in the later stages of design. Particularly when we’re crafting micro copy for the website or marketing materials.

After we had generated a rough understanding of his customers needs, I had two more goals in mind.

Goal 1: To begin crafting a business model canvas so could hopefully generate a more complete understanding of the business model

Goal 2: to begin crafting our user personas (with client feedback), namely so that we could further explore the needs and motivations of our customers. This will also be a convenient place to collate any research findings we could use to inform our decisions further down the road.

User Personas

Phase 2 – Defining

Now that we have a deeper understanding of our clients customers and the market they’re operating in, we can begin to draw upon and interpret our findings to define a point of view and a possible approach to tackling these issues.

One of the methods we can use to explore the problem domain and help us fully understand the field we’re operating is to generate a business model canvas, like so:

Business Model Canvas

Phase 3 – Ideation

We understand exactly what our problem domain is and we have a good idea of the types of customers we’re going to be dealing with, so it’s time to start actually designing things.

Wireframes

Before we build an actual webpage we should consider how we go about conveying the most relevant information to our customers and how we’re going to allow them to quickly access the things on our website that they’re most likely to need.

Let’s start with the homepage. For businesses like this I like to use a slider or a big background image with a tiny bit of microcopy and some relevant links.

I’ve found it also helps to allow customers to scroll down and access additional/supplementary info. Even if it’s just some basic additional info it helps people trust you.

Phase 4 – Prototyping

It’s time to start assembling a working model of the website. For this particular project I’ve opted to use Figma. This will allow me to generate a rough structure of the site so I can bounce ideas off the client and get some feedback before we go live on his domain.

It didn’t take very long for our planned structure of the website to come to fruition. This prototype was made without purchasing any stock images as we’ll invariable pick a better one on the final release.

The client is happy with this structure and so am I. This will be a simple one page website. We may consider adding in some anchor link type widget/buttons on the top page once the site is live and we have better feel for the flow/structure.

Phase 5 – Testing

We got right to work on getting the live version of the site functional. We encountered a hand full of minor setbacks in the early process. We decided to use WP as the CMS on our website, primarily because of how easy it is to chop and change larger design elements.

Responsive Settings

After a short amount of time I managed to get the responsive settings functioning and tweaked them to a reasonable standard.

Final Tweaks

After the site was built and thoroughly tested, we came to a conclusion that a few key features were missing from the site.

1. The inclusion of some form of ‘privacy guarantee’, to put potential customers at ease.
2. Information specifying what area the company operated in.
3. An explanation for what to include when you fill out the contact form. Things such as property size, preferred date of service etc.

These were then promptly added and the site was finalised for the time being.

You can view the website at everylastspot.com