Most agency process pages are decoration — five vague verbs in a curved diagram. This one is the actual playbook. If you hire us, this is the sequence the work runs through, the artefacts we hand over at each step, and the moments where you have to decide things. We are publishing it openly because the process is most of why projects succeed or fail, and because keeping it private has not been protecting any secret worth protecting.
The Five Phases at a Glance
- Discover — understand the business, audience, constraints and the current state of digital surfaces. Two to three weeks.
- Define — translate that into a written brief everyone signs. One week.
- Design — move from structure to system. Architecture, wireframes, visual design, component library. Four to eight weeks.
- Deliver — hand off to development, build, test, phased launch. Three to six weeks.
- Iterate — measure against the outcomes agreed in Define and improve. Ongoing.
Phase 1 — Discover
The first phase is the one most agencies skim, which is why most projects end up redesigning the wrong thing. Discovery is not workshop theatre. It is a small number of structured conversations and a serious audit of what is actually live.
Stakeholder interviews
Three to six 45-minute conversations with the people who own the business outcomes, the team who will live with the result, and the people who handle inbound enquiries. No deck — just questions.
Audit of every existing surface
Marketing site, product UI, brand assets, email templates, paid landing pages, anything customer-facing. We document what is working, what is broken, and where the inconsistencies are.
Competitive and category read
What the closest comparable businesses are doing well. Not so we can copy them — so we can spot what is unowned and where the brand can credibly stand.
A short written report — usually 8 to 12 pages — covering the audit findings, the patterns we heard in interviews, the category read, and three to five honest priorities for the rest of the project. If we cannot agree on the priorities here, the project does not move forward.
Phase 2 — Define
Define is the shortest phase and the highest leverage. This is where the discovery findings turn into a project brief that says, in plain language, what the work will achieve, what surfaces it will touch, and how we will know it worked.
The reason this phase exists separately from Discover is that the same audit can support several different briefs. Define is where you choose which one. A weak product UI plus a tired marketing site plus a stretched brand could lead to a brief that focuses on product, on marketing, or on brand. We force the choice in writing, with you, before any design work starts.
Outcome statement
One sentence that names the commercial result the project has to produce. Concrete enough to argue about. Not "improve the website".
Surface list, in priority order
The specific pages, screens or assets that will be touched, sequenced by impact on the outcome statement.
Success metrics
Three to five measurable signals we will check 60 and 90 days after launch. Forms submitted, activation rate, time-to-first-value, recall surveys — whatever maps to the outcome.
Scope boundaries
What is explicitly out of scope. This protects the project from feature creep more than any change-request process ever will.
Phase 3 — Design
The design phase has its own internal sequence, and the sequence matters. Visual design before structure is one of the most common reasons digital design projects fail. Structure first, polish later.
Information architecture
Site maps, navigation, page hierarchy, content models. We sign this off before any pixel work happens, because rearranging the IA later is the most expensive change you can make.
Low-fidelity wireframes
Greyscale layouts that prove the page can carry the message without leaning on visual polish. If a page works in wireframe, it will work in colour. The reverse is not true.
Visual design system
Type scale, colour palette, spacing tokens, component states. Built as a system, not as page mockups, so the result extends cleanly into future surfaces.
High-fidelity screens
The actual pages or screens, assembled from the system. This is the moment that looks like "design" to most people. By the time we get here the hard decisions are already made.
Component library handover
A documented set of reusable pieces — buttons, cards, forms, navigation patterns — that the development team builds against. This is what makes the system survive past launch.
Phase 4 — Deliver
Delivery is where the design becomes something a customer can use. We do not always build it ourselves — when an in-house development team owns the build, our job in this phase is to support them, not replace them.
Build, in priority order
The highest-impact surface ships first, on its own, so the team and the business get a working asset before the rest of the work is done. No big-bang launches.
Real-condition testing
The site or product is tested on the devices and connection speeds your actual users have, not on the studio's M1 Mac with fibre. This is the difference between a launch that works and one that does not.
Phased launch
Where the surface allows it, the new design goes live to a subset of users first. We watch behaviour, fix the obvious, and then go broad.
Search and tracking continuity
For the marketing site, this is where redirects, sitemaps, structured data and analytics are double-checked so the SEO position is preserved through the launch.
Phase 5 — Iterate
The iteration phase is what separates a design project from a design partnership. After launch, we check the success metrics agreed in Define at 30, 60 and 90 days. Where a metric has not moved, we name the weakest contributing surface and propose the next round of work on it.
This is not "phase 2 of the redesign". It is a steady cadence of small improvements to the surfaces that are not pulling their weight. Most of the long-term return on a digital design investment comes from this phase, not the launch itself.
What the Whole Thing Costs in Time
A typical mid-sized Irish project — refreshed marketing site, sharpened brand system, one product surface — runs 10 to 14 weeks from Discover to Deliver, with Iterate continuing in monthly cycles after that. Larger projects with multiple product surfaces stretch to 6 months. We sequence so that you have something usable live by week 8 even on the longer projects.
What We Do Not Do
- We do not do six-week "discovery" workshops with no audit underneath. If you have heard the term "design sprint", we do not sell those.
- We do not do open-ended retainers without a defined outcome statement.
- We do not redesign things visually when the real problem is structural.
- We do not hand off Figma files and walk away — the component library and the build relationship are part of the deliverable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can we skip Discover if we already have a brief?
Sometimes. If the brief is recent, evidence-backed and has stakeholder buy-in, Discover compresses to a one-week sanity check. Most briefs do not survive that check intact.
How involved do we need to be?
Heavy in Discover and Define — at least one decision-maker available for 2 hours per week. Lighter in Design (an hour a week for reviews). Available in Deliver for content sign-offs and launch decisions.
What if the brief changes mid-project?
We re-open Define rather than absorbing changes silently. It costs a few days and saves weeks of drift later.
Do you work with our existing dev team or build it yourselves?
Both, depending on the project. Where the dev team is in-house, we deliver against their stack. Where there is no team, we build through trusted partners.
Want to see this process applied to your current setup?
The free audit is a one-day version of the Discover phase. You get an honest read on the strongest and weakest surfaces and a sequenced plan for what to fix first.
Request the free audit