Walk West has the capabilities you need to brainstorm, research, prototype, design, deliver, and market web-based applications. Whether you’re looking for a full-service solution or fulfillment on one of the many pieces of the supply chain, Walk West is your partner for success.
At Walk West, we’re big fans of thorough and robust Strategy and Discovery. With projects that can be quite large, like a custom application build, It’s the only way that we can set your application up for success. Our first interaction together centers on understanding your audience and understanding and grouping features into categories. At a general level, these categories can be “must have”, “like to have”, and “can wait for later”. We’ll do thorough competitive analysis to understand what products may be on the market and how they market and deliver to their consumers to give us the best shot and presenting a competitive edge.
No projects of magnitude take place without this critical discovery element. It’s the only way that we can de-risk the project for you. We would love to give you a project quote after a few conversations, but the only way we’re going to know the investment level required to bring your product to market is through research.
Fortunately, we’re well equipped. Our Director of Strategy, Kurt Merriweather, brings an engineering background and an MBA from Standford University to run point on our strategy operations. You’re in good hands.
Data first is our guiding principle. Our methodology reduces error by confirming thought processes early and often. A key and critical stage to building out a successful product is user acceptance testing along the way. These tests don’t have to be difficult or time consuming but are critical to developing the product right the first time. To get us to user acceptance testing as quickly as possible, we don’t talk about art or design and we don’t write a single character of code. It starts with prototyping moving from low fidelity wireframes and architecture to high fidelity.
Getting process flow and user flow through the website identified correctly will set the entire product up for success and user adoption. The user experience is the first item tackled and we look to fine tune this experience before thinking of literally anything else.
The fun part is always the creative. Whether you have an existing brand or if we’re going to create one for you, layering creative on top of a validated and accepted user experience starts to cement concepts into deliverables. Each section of the wireframes are built out using applications like Adobe Photoshop and Sketch to get real-time renderings of the final product.
Then we user acceptance test that too. We don’t rest on validation that may have happened in previous steps. Involving the stakeholders and users along the manufacturing line is as important as anything else we do. It’s not assumptions or guesses that drive us. It’s knowledge and fact.
Walk West houses some of the best developers in the agency space. In fact, the company is lead by a former software engineer who understands the pressures and complexity involved with large scale application buildouts. Our team of dedicated product architects, developers, and testers will validate each function and test thoroughly via unit tests.
We operate on the agile methodology. It’s common during our one-week sprints to have activity from creative, to development, to testing occur simultaneously in the same week. During our weekly sprints, we calculate the project team’s velocity to keep you informed at every moment of the status of your product and anticipated launch dates.
“If you build it, they will come” only works in heaven and Iowa. The fact is, you’re marketing roadmap can be as critical to success as your development roadmap. We start brainstorming and ideating around marketing early in the process. The assets and infrastructure you’ll need for marketing success is well defined and incorporated into the overall strategic plan. Not only can Walk West develop the application for you, we’re also incredibly talented at driving users to the application. And not just any user. The right users who are perfectly matched with the outcomes your product delivers.