Craft delightful UX for your digital products

Why clients love building digital products with Intoteq.

Intoteq's Product Design stages

A 5 Stage Process to Better Product Design. At its core, design thinking is a problem-solving methodology that, first and foremost, focuses on the user’s needs rather than the product’s specifications. Teams that fuse design thinking into their design process can develop better, user-centered products.

This process helped us build great products for our clients

Empathise

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test

Here is our secret sauce.

Reimagining smart product design by bridging design, User Experience, and Technology to create fresh and unique experiences.
Here are 5 steps that we follow here at intoteq to create exceptional products.

1. Empathise - Critical starting point

The first stage of the process is spent getting to know the user and understanding their wants, needs and objectives. This means observing and engaging with people in order to understand them on a psychological and emotional level. During this phase, the designer seeks to set aside their assumptions and gather real insights about the user. Learn all about key empathy-building methods here.

2. Define - Defining the problem

The second stage in the Design Thinking process is dedicated to defining the problem. You’ll gather all of your findings from the empathise phase and start to make sense of them: what difficulties and barriers are your users coming up against? What patterns do you observe? What is the big user problem that your team needs to solve? By the end of the define phase, you will have a clear problem statement. The key here is to frame the problem in a user-centered way; rather than saying “We need to…”, frame it in terms of your user: “Retirees in the Bay area need…” Once you’ve formulated the problem into words, you can start to come up with solutions and ideas — which brings us onto stage three.

3. Ideate - Solid understanding

It’s time to start working on potential solutions. The third phase in the Design Thinking process is where the creativity happens, and it’s crucial to point out that the ideation stage is a judgement-free zone! Designers will hold ideation sessions in order to come up with as many new angles and ideas as possible. There are many different types of ideation technique that designers might use, from brainstorming and mindmapping to bodystorming (roleplay scenarios) and provocation — an extreme lateral-thinking technique that gets the designer to challenge established beliefs and explore new options and alternatives. Towards the end of the ideation phase, you’ll narrow it down to a few ideas with which to move forward. You can learn about all the most important ideation techniques here.

4. Prototype - Experimentation

A prototype is basically a scaled-down version of the product which incorporates the potential solutions identified in the previous stages. This step is key in putting each solution to the test and highlighting any constraints and flaws. Throughout the prototype stage, the proposed solutions may be accepted, improved, redesigned or rejected depending on how they fare in prototype form. You can read all about the prototyping stage of Design Thinking in this in-depth guide.

5. Test - Build test repeat

After prototyping comes user testing, but it’s important to note that this is rarely the end of the Design Thinking process. In reality, the results of the testing phase will often lead you back to a previous step, providing the insights you need to redefine the original problem statement or to come up with new ideas you hadn’t thought of before. Learn all about user testing in this guide. In reality, the results of the testing phase will often lead you back to a previous step, providing the insights you need to redefine the original problem statement.

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How can branding help a business?

Branding will increase the value of your business in the market. With the increase in value, you will get a better price and sales for a product. For buyers, your brand will represent satisfaction and value towards the services and products.
How does your branding process look like?

We call our brand identity process the Funnel.
This work process is inclusively being done with the client team to achieve the desired results while jointly immersing into the brand identity process. We do not leave you out of sight, just to come back with an outline of our exclusive vision. We collaborate and try to make this process transparent to break down every single step.
We have three basic rules that we follow:
Make it inclusive. During the collaboration, we treat everyone as one team.
Make it practical. Let there be a transparent and modest development flow.
Make it specific. Start with understanding, end with execution.
How does your funnel process work?

We divide the Funnel process into several steps:
1. Information gathering
We start by understanding your product and company, which is an underlying basis for all other steps.
2. Visual positioning
In this stage, we audit an existing product or company's visual identity while analyzing competitors' visual identity. Done to form a hypothesis on the applicable brand archetype (when needed) and define an area of future visual positioning.
3. Visual brand expression
This stage is all about visual inspiration and conceptual metaphor. It helps align the emotional aspect while building a foundation on a future color palette, shapes, and dynamics.
4. Sketches
Here we venture to explore more concepts and general directions on how the logo may look. We follow Visual positioning and Brand expression findings and recommendations. This stage helps to examine a lot of concepts and shapes fast.
5. Draft shapes and uniqueness test
Then we define a few (up to 3) sketches and refine their shapes. Here our focus is on the form and tonal contrast. Our team researches similar logos to avoid similarities with existing brands. However, it's not trademark research.
6. Wordmark
When it comes to a combination of a logo sign and a logo mark (which is a common situation for digital brands because they need icons, favicons, social network thumbnails, etc.), we start working on the wordmark when a logo sign draft shape is approved. We explore typefaces, cases, and design lettering to find the best pair for a logo sign.
7. Color and application examples
Color matters. People mostly judge products based on color, which proved various experiments. To make the logo and the brand identity with the best possible potential, we spent time exploring proper color combinations. Our decision-making process is grounded by information about the culture, physiology, and psychological influence of color.
8. Logotype fine-tune and guidelines
At this stage, we construct a logo sign and wordmark with grids to make it perfectly balanced. Our team creates documentation to explain rules on how to use visual identity assets correctly. The complexity of the guidelines depends on the scope and project requirements.
How long does it take to create a basic brand identity?

Based on our experience, we estimate that the development of a basic visual identity can take 3 weeks. Our team can do the job even faster, but the decision time is a core part of this process. It takes time for our clients to discuss the intermediate results and to agree with the selected choice. Apart from the other companies, we demonstrate each produced brand identity option. We explore and discuss the produced results along with the client and hear their opinion to make the relevant changes. Furthermore, to support our research we explore additional directions to state that the proposed solution is optimal for the company.
How much does it cost to develop a strong brand identity with your branding agency?

Our hourly rate starts from €25/hr (for our brand designer) and may rise, depending on the companies requirements based in San Francisco, California. The total project price is directly connected to the amount of work our team needs to invest. Other factors directly affect the cost, such as the scope of work, team structure, and a rate card.
Does your company provide any services beyond branding?

Technology & Marketing is at the core of Intoteq. To provide more holistic approach to our clients, we provide compelte software engineering services from UI/UX architecture to software development and full funnel marketing services from performance marketing to branding services. It helps us bring more value to the projects.
What kind of tools does Intoteq branding company typically use?

In terms of designing a visual brand identity for our clients, we have our favorite tools pack. Most of them include Figma, Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects. If there is any web development involved, we can shift to the tech stack of your preferences. Our main experience lies in ReactJS and Vanilla JS. Besides, we are huge fans of functional programming, so no wonder several we have used functional programming on some of our projects.
What’s different between your branding agency and other angencies?

Most of the agencies or companies are proficient in producing highly visual identity brands and tend to stamp lots of them every year. While we also do love to collaborate with lots of clients, we don’t just print the solution in one go and present it to our client like it is a pill that can cure everything.Instead, we treat every project as a complex, definitive but fruitful alliance that can produce impressive results. While all of this may sound like a tedious process, we do keep the entire development process transparent, simple, and efficient. Embedding the passion of our client vision into brand identity development.
Why do companies choose your branding agency for creating their brand identity?

Apart from other San Francisco companies involved in the brand identity process, we love to research every detail about the client's company requirements. Furthermore, over the past ten years on the digital market, we have developed three core principles that our team connects. And this is not only about the team union. It is about the connectivity with the client projects. These are the three simple factors that we follow.
Transparency - Every process is open, every dialogue is continuous, and every change is free to be changed.
Flexibility - Our team is flexible in both your technical preferences and your identity vision.
Efficiency - Every result is meeting its deadline with a unique story to tell.
These factors lead to trustful and productive results that many have already labored and are still enjoying the process.

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