The UI can highlight or hide your product’s brilliance.

projekt202 takes a systematic approach to interface design, going beyond the design of individual screens, to the creation of a consistent and reusable design language, as well as the tools that ensure your full organization can use it.

Eradicating inconsistency is job 1.

Most software products – including, we suspect, the application you’re using to view this very website – are beset with interaction and visual inconsistencies. These inconsistencies not only expose the disunity of, and waste in, their parent company’s development efforts, they also point out a missed opportunity to increase customer loyalty through a uniform and familiar user experience, and improved brand efficacy.

A consistently designed system helps the user to focus on his or her work, rather than on trying to get the software to do what it’s supposed to do. In our eyes, consistency is one of the most important elements of usability, and one of the easiest to address.

If you feel your products have fallen victim to the inconsistency bug, you’re not alone. This is the number-one problem we see in our UI reviews – across companies of all sizes, in every industry. But the problem is only as pervasive as is the competitive opportunity for those companies prepared to correct it.

Meeting users’ expectations through interaction standardization.

The world’s software-user community speaks an ever-more common language. As Internet users, they know how to navigate the web using familiar cues passed down from one site to another. Similarly, they have expectations for how to “work” a piece of software, from the first time they crack the seal, click the desktop icon, or simply log in.

Our team is not only tapped into that language, we’re some of the folks that have helped create it. One of our specialties is translating your application’s functionality into this evolving “userspeak,” and continuing to innovate upon the systems of controls, widgets and other devices that make sense to users the first time they see them, and become increasingly reflexive with additional exposure.

Giving the sales team some sizzle.

The reach of visual appearance goes beyond the functional and into the emotional. Simply put, there’s a lot of leverage in a cool, functionally superior interface.

Let’s first address improved demoability. We’ve sat through enough product demos to understand how hard it is to sell a message of integration when every screen called up looks different. We’ve also seen enough UI screens across industries to know how little companies are doing it to visually set themselves apart – and how little it would take to make a big splash.

Next, let’s talk improved sales. We understand that the audience for your product demo is normally not your users. Fair enough. We also understand that a clean, good looking user interface makes functionality obvious – not just to users, but to those who make the buy decision. If a screen makes sense on first appearance to someone who never has to see it again, we consider our work a success.

Finally, let’s look at customer retention. Consistent, easy-to-use software products improve productivity – a subject that’s never been more top-of-mind to IT buyers than it is now. We can not only help you achieve it, we can help you measure it and sell it, thus making it easier to excite current customers about additional products, and pitch new products to prospects.

Empowering organization-wide design share.

There’s no point developing it, if it can’t be used – that’s our motto, and it applies to our own product as well.

We provide extensive documentation in a variety of media to help your development team make the best use of your new design system. From straightforward guidelines that graphically dissect design requirements, to full online design libraries complete with detailed specifications on how to create, apply and develop the elements of your user interface, to even the reusable code needed to streamline consistent control creation – we work to ensure every person who has a responsibility for ensuring the consistency of your design has proper access to it.

Ensuring compliancy.

Further, we can help create the review processes and compliance tools that ensure products meet your design requirements before they’re released. This service is especially helpful to larger organizations that have several products, and limited internal resources for overseeing design.

Setting off on the right foot.

We understand that the members of your team who own the vision for your product do not always have the design and development skills to produce it. Once a design system is in place and applied to existing products, it’s helpful to invest in tools that empower these users to test their ideas and then communicate their solution to developers. One such tool is a prototyping toolkit which makes the wireframing and designing of UI screens and components easier, and results in a final product that is closer to the mental picture originally envisioned.

As we hope we’ve demonstrated in this discussion, our goal is to create a design system that is not only competitively superior and completely feasible for you to develop, but well understood and accessible by everyone on your team so that they can repeat our success down the road.