Full Product Design

OpenCraft’s Full Product Design service integrates product management with UX/UI design to create user-friendly and visually appealing online education solutions. Our process prioritizes your learners while enhancing your brand. Through expert reviews, wireframes, prototypes, and usability testing, we aim to make learning enjoyable and effective, keeping learners coming back for more.

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Product Design Approach

Full Product Design Service

The biggest problems with your e-learning site might be hidden, frustrating learners even when everything seems technically fine. Our designers focus on solving these issues—or preventing them—by prioritizing the learner experience from the start. Our design systems approach saves time and money by standardizing design decisions and ensuring consistency, familiarity, and accessibility across touchpoints.

Product Management

At OpenCraft, our product management approach is based on understanding customer needs while aligning them with your broader objectives. We manage the entire product lifecycle, from roadmapping to launch, following a continuous improvement model. By continuously gathering user feedback and making iterative refinements, we enhance your product for long-term success.

Blending UX and UI Design

Our goal is to make the design functional, intuitive, and easy to use. We combine User Experience Design (UX) and User Interface Design (UI) to translate your strategic priorities into an exceptional user experience. While UI emphasizes aesthetics (making it look good), UX focuses on the functional aspects (making it simple). Looking at both helps OpenCraft ensure the best possible learning environment.

User Experience Design (UX)

Expert Review

Our UX design process starts with a detailed assessment of the current user experience. This involves evaluating product usability and adherence to key usability principles. The review identifies strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. Findings are compiled into a comprehensive report, offering actionable recommendations to enhance the product's usability.

User Research

The expert review process may also incorporate direct user research to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs, attitudes, and expectations. Engaging with users in this way further informs the design process, providing valuable insights that help shape a more effective and user-focused design. By performing user research, we often discover unknown frustrations, desires, and needs.

User Personas

User personas are fictional profiles representing your ideal customers. Developing these personas, based on existing research or direct customer engagement, is essential for crafting tailored user experiences. Personas provide insights into user behavior, motivations, and goals, helping focus on the most critical design challenges and ensuring the product meets user needs effectively.

Wireframes

Wireframes act as the architectural blueprint for a website, outlining element placement and features. Despite their simple appearance, wireframes are crucial for mapping out navigation, functionality, and user experience. They provide a clear view of site structure and content, facilitating early modifications and saving time and resources by allowing for early evaluation and refinement of user pathways.

Prototypes

Prototyping involves creating interactive mockups that simulate the final product. These digital simulations offer realistic, clickable representations, allowing stakeholders to engage with and assess the product. Prototypes enable early usability testing, identifying UX issues for improvement before full development begins. This approach helps detect issues early, streamlining the design process and saving time and money.

Usability Testing

Usability testing is crucial for analyzing user experience from an unbiased perspective. It helps identify user preferences before committing resources to potentially ineffective features. We select test users aligned with target personas, and gather feedback by conducting one-on-one interviews and remote usability tests. From there, we compile a comprehensive report along with our recommendations.

Product Design Details

Full Product Design

Our designers keep your learners’ experience at the forefront of the development process so that your solution is simple and enjoyable to use. Both UI and UX design are essential for creating a successful website or mobile application. Combining them results in a site that makes sense for learners. Our design systems approach saves organizations time and money by codifying design decisions that can be replicated at scale. It also improves the customer experience by ensuring consistency, familiarity, and accessibility at every touchpoint. Things work as expected and the same way every time.

Product Management

The primary focus of product management at OpenCraft revolves around ensuring that the product experience and user experience (UX) are not only coherent but also support your broader organizational objectives. OpenCraft product management may include tasks such as in-depth customer research, defining features, prioritizing product initiatives, and establishing effective team workflows. The culmination of these efforts results in a well-defined strategic plan, laying the groundwork for successful product design.

UX and UI Design

Trusted Community Members

Our position in the Open edX® community means that we can advise you not only on how to solve your problems today, but on how to prepare for changes down the line. Our continued commitment to the platform means we are engaged in design decisions, version releases, and other key decisions.

Open edX® Core Contributors

Working with OpenCraft means having a say in how the Open edX® platform is developed and championed. We represent our clients in community working groups, tackling product design, marketing, development, and more. Our team sports more Core Contributors than any other organization in the community.

Learn More in Our Handbook

The OpenCraft handbook serves as the definitive guide to how we operate as a company. In line with our commitment to openness and transparency, most of it is publicly accessible. Our goal is to eventually only keep client-sensitive information in a private repository, while making the majority of our policies public.

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User Interface Design (UI Design)

Mood Boards

Mood boards serve as the starting point, ensuring alignment on the visual direction before actual design work commences. They consolidate diverse design inspirations, including typography, colors, images, and animations, culminating in a digital collage that reflects potential design styles. These boards facilitate discussions to finalize the overall tone and style, leading to a unique visual brand for your site.

Interface Design

The crux of the UI process revolves around designers transforming wireframes into visually engaging elements. This phase focuses on visual interface components such as buttons, text, and layout, incorporating elements like illustrations and icons aligned with your brand’s personality. A successful design outcome should create a positive user experience, foster user engagement, and ensure consistency across devices.

Style Guide

The style guide highlights the primary design elements used throughout the interface, including colors, fonts, icons, and animations. It provides clear and detailed guidance for our developers to ensure consistency and adherence to the design vision. Additionally, it establishes comprehensive guidelines for any future designers and developers who may work on your website, helping them to maintain a cohesive and unified design approach.

Theme Design

Customize your platform with our comprehensive theme design services, tailored to create a cohesive and visually engaging experience that aligns seamlessly with your brand identity. We work closely with you to customize the look and feel, ensuring it not only resonates with your learners but also reflects your brand’s unique values and style. Achieve consistency across all your applications, enhancing the overall user experience and making the platform truly your own.

Interaction Design

Interaction design plays a crucial role in enhancing user experiences by focusing on animations, page transitions, and responsive indicators. By carefully crafting these elements, interaction design makes interfaces not only intuitive but also engaging, ensuring that users have a seamless and enjoyable experience as they navigate through the product. This attention to detail helps in creating a dynamic and interactive environment that keeps users engaged.

Developer Collaboration

Collaboration between designers and developers ensures a seamless transition from concept to implementation. Our designers and developers work closely to align on design specifications, and address technical constraints. Regular communication helps both teams understand each other's perspectives, resulting in a cohesive product that meets both aesthetic and functional requirements. This is vital for creating a superior user experience.

I have worked with OpenCraft on multiple projects in the past years, and I am still amazed by how consistent, professional, and responsive they are. I can rely on their support and quality of the code, always. They continuously contribute to the Open edX® platform.
Natalia Berdnikov | Senior Project Manager | edX
OpenCraft has been an invaluable partner in making our vision for Cloudera OnDemand a reality. No other Open edX® provider can rival OpenCraft's deep level of knowledge of the platform, or match their skill in customizing it.
Rowan McVey | Former Program Manager | Cloudera
OpenCraft developed two custom products for my team to expand the Open edX® platform's capabilities. Their performance and attention to customer satisfaction exceeded my expectations with seamless integrations.
Stefan Esposito | Instructional Development Manager | HarvardX | Opinion independent of organization
We sought a partner who shared our values on open source, knew the Open edX® community well, and delivered high quality service. OpenCraft did just that and more, with rock-solid service and a willingness to explore ways to provide more value to our university community.
Michael Greene | Associate Director | Duke Learning Innovation | Duke University | Opinion independent of organization
OpenCraft has successfully delivered several complex features in the Open edX® platform, and are recognized throughout the Community as experts in development of XBlocks. We count on OpenCraft to develop key parts of our roadmap on time and at a high quality.
Steve Magoun | Former Engineering Director | edX
OpenCraft is fantastic to work with. They customized our Open edX® instance allowing for the very specific use case we needed. The high level of customization achieved thanks to OpenCraft is critical to our ability to train policy makers around the world.
Charlotte Tuminelli | Senior Training Manager | Harvard Kennedy School | Opinion independent of organization
OpenCraft matched all of our needs, quickly and satisfactorily. This is a service we would recommend. Everything works great and there is always somebody on the other side of the email.
Ramon Ovelar | Researcher | University of the Basque Country
OpenCraft's working relationship with the Open edX® Community allows changes to be quickly integrated in the latest Open edX® release, allowing everyone to benefit. The team provided fantastic support on a very complex issue with a very tight deadline.
Ethan Barden | MeriSTEM Project Coordinator | Australian National University
OpenCraft's work is professional, accurate, always on time and with a smile. They are true leaders of the Open Source community around the Open edX® technology.
Anne Lifshits Agmon | CTO | Campus-IL | Israel's National Project for Digital Learning
OpenCraft was a pleasure to work with, helping through every stage of the process. From idea generation, prototyping, construction, deployment, and testing. They were responsive to my needs and completed the work on time and on budget.
Bill Wisser | Sr. Director of Learning Technologies | Harvard Graduate School of Education | Opinion independent of organization
OpenCraft’s strong collaboration skills, excellence in their craft, and harmonic practices lead to significant contributions to the Open edX® ecosystem. This results in a profound resonance of the edX mission to provide quality education to the global community.
Nimisha Asthagiri | Chief Architect | edX
LabXchange is committed to open source, and so with OpenCraft's deep investment in the development of Open edX®, they were an obvious partner for us. OpenCraft built the LabXchange platform and ensured a productive collaboration with the technical team at edX.
Robert A Lue | Former Faculty Director & Principal Investigator | Harvard LabXchange