Paras Ralhan

Foundation of every successful project lies in the extent to which person or team doing it understands it. Before I start doing anything, I need to know and understand, as much as I can, about you, your business, and your industry.

More you help me understand, better would be the outcome. So, I listen, discuss, and research extensively before starting a project.

Next, I ask you for content and how you are planning to organize it for your site. I study your content and suggest changes. Changes can be: reorganizing, rewriting, reordering, or removing some parts that are not doing useful work, etc...

Changes almost always happen because of the Curse of Knowledge: “more we know something, more we fail to appreciate how little our message is going to be understood.”

Right amount of content, in target customers’ language, and in the right tone is the cornerstone of an effective website.

Poor content is a failure, but poor design with great content is equally a failure. People tend to attend things that look interesting, and right Design makes them worthy to look at.

I start designing pages based on graphic design principles. They guide me in making wise design decisions about colors, contrast, alignment, fonts, spacings, layout, hierarchy, balance, animations, etc. Right design choices help people focus, understand, and remember your message quickly and effortlessly. And people must remember you and think about you before they decide to act.

In addition, consistent and elegant designs also reinforce brand identity, making your site recognizable and memorable.

Development can amplify the impact of a thoughtful design many folds up. A static page, no matter how thoughtfully designed, has one fundamental weakness: it forces the visitor to see all of it at once—which he doesn’t like much. Hiding, showing, moving certain elements when needed assist him to focus, and understand your content with much more ease.

The more we assist him to do what he wants to do, happier he’ll be.

I will discuss and take your feedback at each step going forward, and make adjustments accordingly.

Who will use this product? What’s his intellect level? In what environment will it be used? What would be the distraction level? What would be the priority levels of the features? How big is the market? There are hundreds of such things that need to be understood deeply before creating a promising product.

Product development is a huge investment of time and money. More you help me understand everything related to the end user, more satisfying will be the outcome.

After I get confident in my understanding, with your coordination, we’ll explore different options for how to arrange and organize things on the page, and try to find the best one. Best solution should make most sense to your users, helps them find things easily and do what they need to do fast, without any external help. Sketches are the great way to such discovery.

We’ll also find and choose best words and sentences that your users would be most comfortable with.

Planning is the most important phase in all phases. Here we prepare the root, and it must be strong and right.

Based on the concept we finalized in the planning phase, I’ll start designing it. I’ll ask if you have any brand guidelines that I need to follow. All of my designs are based on solid understanding of all the design principles.

Design will help us see things more clearly, and further validate our decisions. I will take your feedback, discuss, clear any of our doubts, and make changes based on further understanding. This process continues till we are satisfied. Making changes during design phase are far less costly than doing them in development phase.

I always remind my clients to keep our goal in mind while making any design decisions.

Development starts bringing things to life. Most of products I develop doesn’t need a complete page reload. No matter what action you perform, it will happen instantly, but not abruptly. Abrupt changes are difficult to follow and make less sense of what’s going on. It’s called change blindness. Unless needed, I always make elements appear or disappear smoothly and thoughtfully, but never unnecessarily. It makes things easy to follow and remember.

Right development amplifies the impact of right design by reducing number of things User has to deal with at a time. By helping him focus where he needs to focus, we earn his love and trust.