Digital Authority Partners is an award-winning San Diego-based digital services agency with a stellar track record for digital design excellence. Our team of top designers has crafted digital experiences, from websites to mobile apps to custom software solutions, that produce results for San Diego small businesses, enterprises, nonprofits, and government organizations.
When consumers need a product or service, they almost always start by searching for it online—a Google search, an app marketplace, a software solution. What will they find when they discover your brand? What will they see that defines a brand’s trustworthiness? How can you present a thoughtful and useful journey that will lead the reader’s journey towards a conversion, sale, or mutually beneficial relationship?
Digital users have high standards. They expect it all and give their valuable consumer loyalty to brands that can meet that standard. Digital experiences that meet these expectations don’t just happen by accident. It takes a talented, experienced designer to create the technical, aesthetic, and sequential facets of that digital experience into a captivating user journey. In short, it takes a San Diego digital design company at the caliber of DAP.
In many ways, the rise of the importance of digital experience design in healthcare is remarkable. Healthcare is about as intimate and in-person as an industry can be. The provider-patient relationship is private. What role can a digital experience play in that face-to-face relationship?
A key component of the provider-patient relationship is trust, and digital experiences are a key indicator of this trust. According to a study by RealWire, 70% of users don’t trust a brand with a bad website. In an era where consumers usually discover the digital experience first, a badly designed digital experience can end a relationship before it starts.
People seeking healthcare services are often scared or seriously concerned—it’s a time to build more trust, not less. An investment in digital design is an investment in the most important service a healthcare organization can offer—confidence.
Telemedicine and telehealth also play a larger and larger role in the healthcare industry. More and more healthcare services use the Cloud, the Internet, and mobile or wearable devices as their delivery avenue. Functionality is important in telehealth delivery, but design plays just as big a role. Design is not only about the beauty of the experience; the design also contributes to function.
Fintech is one of the most competitive sectors in the tech world, with geniuses racing to disrupt the financial sector with the “next big thing.” Expectations are high. Is there any excuse—or forgiveness—for lackluster digital design in this arena?
Yet design often falls by the wayside in fintech, where function and security take center stage. This is understandable in a sense. Financial technology isn’t just window-dressing, it has a job to do. It has to work before it can disrupt an industry.
Moreso, fintech often involves peoples’ money and sensitive personal information, making it a tempting target for cyberattacks. If stakeholders think they have to choose between an experience that looks pretty and an experience that protects their users from cybercrime, they would probably choose the latter.
But this is a false choice. Function and security come first, but even the most disruptive fintech solution is likely to be rejected by users if poorly designed. Remember, the design contributes to functionality in the form of UX and user-friendliness. It can’t be an either-or situation—it has to be all-of-the-above. Great design is part of great fintech development.
San Diego’s most prestigious schools, colleges, and universities existed for decades without having to pay attention to their digital experience design. But the tables have turned. These institutions don’t just deserve beautiful digital designs—students and other users expect them.
Beautiful digital design for schools is an important aesthetic choice to build the school’s brand value, but it’s also important for functionality. Schools and institutions of higher learning increasingly rely on digital experiences not only as marketing collateral but as avenues for the delivery of services. From event registration to room reservations, campus tours to meal plans, and digital student ID cards as well.
Digital experiences may even be delivery avenues for educational services themselves, from digital syllabi and course materials to recorded or live-streamed lectures and online discussion sessions.
As colleges and universities increasingly offer larger selections of digital experiences, their design becomes even more important. Students and other users may find a badly designed app or website hard to use, becoming a hindrance to their education. Seen in this context, digital design for San Diego schools and universities is not optional—it is mandatory to live up to their mission statements and creeds.
Much has been made of the decline of brick-and-mortar retail and the rise of Ecommerce. This doesn’t necessarily mean the death of well-loved San Diego retail brands, although they do face a greater influx of competition. Ecommerce represents one of the biggest opportunities for San Diego retail brands—a chance to expand their footprint far beyond San Diego to a nationwide or global audience.
A global audience means global competition, which means your brand has to stand out. That’s where a digital design experience comes in. One of the easiest ways to stand out from the competition, increasing market share and brand credibility, is to go for broke on design. First impressions matter and people tend to trust brands that make a good first impression—especially when the brand is asking them to type in their credit card number and wait for a product to ship.
Digital systems play an important role in retail experience design as well. Retailers depend on repeat business—upselling, cross-selling, etc.—for much of their bottom line. Remarketing and retargeting are a way of life. The only way to build brand recognition is to present a unified design approach—the same colors, logos, messages, etc.—across all retargeting channels.
Law is a respected institution in the United States. The imagery associated with law firms tends to be classical and portentous—Greek columns, blind statues with scales, flags, and eagles. You know what these images symbolize—but it’s not very modern. Many digital experiences in the legal field feel stuck in the time of our Founding Fathers—if the attorney even offers a digital experience at all.
San Diego attorneys and law firms face stiff, and it’s time to update their look. Clean, modern digital design denotes competence and authority—two essential qualities for building your client base.
San Diego law firms often depend on content marketing as a key channel for client outreach. Clients discover their brand in the process of searching online for answers to their pressing legal questions–often in a state of distress and in need of a brand they can trust. Digital design plays a huge role in content marketing. Good law firm blogs don’t look like blogs—they look like authoritative news sources that the prospective client can trust.
With effective digital design, San Diego law firms can even begin to offer a service stack through digital channels as well, expanding their market share far beyond their normal reach.
San Diego professional service providers depend on their digital experiences for many reasons. They typically anchor all their digital marketing efforts and help enable their service delivery through scheduling and work order management. They may even be the avenue of delivery for the professional services themselves. These digital experiences have a lot of heavy lifting to do … so doesn’t it matter that they look good too?
Yes, it does. San Diego professional service providers, including architects, accountants, financial planners, etc.—face stiff competition. If their digital experiences look terrible, potential clients will assume the service offerings are bad, and the service provider can easily lose market share.
Professional service providers need to pay attention to the design not only of their digital experiences—websites, apps, etc.—but to their surrounding marketing collateral and satellite web properties. Clients have many service providers to choose from. They have to be able to identify your brand at a glance. That’s why design systems are so important in unifying the brand’s messaging across all channels.
Well-designed digital experiences can be a stepping stone for San Diego professional service providers to scale their business and offer more services in digital format.
Have questions about your next San Diego design project? Schedule a consultation with a DAP expert today and find out what we can do for your san Diego business.
We’re Experienced. Our San Diego digital design company employs a team with a breadth of expertise across a variety of digital experiences, from websites to mobile apps to software solutions, in multiple industries and all manner of functions.
We Deliver On-Time and On-Budget. Every organization fears a major initiative going off the rails in terms of cost and time. Our San Diego digital design company has a history of delivering digital experience design projects on-time and on-budget. We can accurately judge the requirements and set parameters we can stick to.
We’re Award-Winning. Many digital experiences designed by DAP’s team of visionaries have gone on to win prestigious design awards. We’re thrilled to have such prestigious recognition from our peers, and strive to remain worthy of it.
We’re Future-Focused. Digital experiences can’t just take into account the conditions of today—they have to consider the conditions of tomorrow. DAP keeps its crystal ball polished in search of digital trends to future-proof your experience design.
Performance-Based Pricing Models. A good digital agency stands squarely beside its work. DAP lives this principle by offering performance-based pricing models. In other words, we get paid when you get paid.
Book a meeting directly here
Different methodologies exist to design and develop a product or experience, including digital experiences. One of the most popular methodologies for digital experience design is called agile, a process of design by short sprints with semi-autonomous cross-functional teams, advancing the design across multiple iterations with user feedback at each iteration.
DAP is a San Diego digital design company that fully embraces the agile method of design. We consider it the best way to keep a project on schedule, on budget, and suffused with the kind of user feedback you need to verify the quality, utility, and beauty of the ultimate digital experience design. Agile design is also less risky because problems get detected early and an iteration is rarely a complete failure—even problematic iterations usually contain the seeds of the next successful iteration.
Design isn’t a solo art. The best digital experiences are designed by professional teams, in collaboration with the stakeholders who will own the digital experience going forward. DAP takes an immersive, collaborative approach to digital experience design, built on cross-functional teams and seamless communication.
We don’t just collaborate within our San Diego digital design company, either. We consider the stakeholders and the end-users to be important collaborators. The final design will ultimately be the stakeholders’ ambassador to the world, while the users actually have to obtain value from the experience. We partner with everyone who stands to gain from the success of the experience to produce a design that satisfies everyone.
Organizations depend on their digital experiences. In some cases the digital experience is the entire point of the organization. Failure is not an option, and at DAP we take our clients’ trust very seriously. When we sign on to design a digital experience, we sign on to succeed, and we don’t stop until we get it right.
To ensure the success of your digital experience design project, our San Diego digital design company involves every stakeholder and gets copious user feedback, testing the design and then testing again to deliver the most proven, optimized design possible. We also offer performance-based pricing models so we have skin in the game.
Of course, it helps if you’re cooking with the right food. The crucial ingredient to the DAP recipe is the best team of digital designers in San Diego. Our designers are credentialed, experienced, awarded, and respected throughout the industry. Their resumes speak for themselves—a track record of digital experience design excellence for organizations large and small.
There’s an art to great digital design, an X-factor that requires both expertise and that spark of creativity. Every DAP digital designer takes pride in their craft, stays current on design trends, and settles for nothing less than their best possible work. Would you settle for anything less in your digital experience design?
