The second step in our web design process is another survey which is more fun. (Check out the first step business objectives survey as well, if you’ve come here directly.) We’re still at the discovery phase and trying to get to know our clients in order to build a better relationship and, as a result, a better product. Our design objectives survey is about the overall design of the website which gives us crucial information such as our client’s favorite website in terms of design.

What Exactly We Mean by Design?

The design of a website can be basically broken into 4 main components:

  1. Layout and shapes
  2. Color Palette
  3. Typography
  4. Media selection

In our process, we’ve recently made a change and left the media selection out of the survey and we’re offering it as an optional service. Because every day we see many emails from our clients to negotiate on the design price. And most of the time they have reasons to do so. If you’re going to shoot a video in your office or do a photography session with your workers probably you’d like to use those media instead of generic stock media. Or if you already have a membership with a stock media website, you may want to make this decision yourself.

Let’s Decide What’s Going to Be Where?

So we only focus on the other three parts of the design process in this survey. The first part is the layout. We’ll have an idea of what’s going to be required from our previous meetings but this is where we’ll put it into writing. We need to know how many page templates are there going to be and what kind of functions we’re going to have in those templates in order to create the best possible layout for them.

Rainbows Aren’t Always Nice

After this part, we move into the questions about the color palette. You might have already made your decision about this but if not, there’s no need to worry. We’ll try to get your ideas about the colors with a very interesting question. After seeing this question, even if you’ve made your decision, we believe you’ll want to reconsider it.

Give It a Character

The next part of the survey is a brief questionnaire about the character of your website. We’ve hidden some questions in this part that are related to typography, some related to colors, and some related to layout and shapes. For instance we have a question asking about your preference on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being flat, 5 being 3d. If you select 1 in this question, most likely you won’t see any shadows for the images or headings. If you select 5, the first image in your homepage may be a 3d rotating animation!

And at the end of the survey, we have some complementary questions to support our findings. Are you curious about the survey? What are you waiting for, you can just download it here.