SpaceCraft

Responsive web design work for a variety of clients while working for the 20-person consultant agency SpaceCraft in Austin, Texas.

While living in Austin from 2013-2014, I collaborated with developers of a proprietary web CMS software called SpaceCraft. Similar to Squarespace and later Webflow, this tool was designed to let anyone manage their web content in a time where web hosting was less user-accessible and required expertise in Dreamworks or coding.

My role was to work with these clients to define their web brand, get their presence established, and launch products on a tight budget and short schedule while also educating the clients in how to maintain brand consistency in the future. The team would use my insight and first-person client interaction to improve the SpaceCraft platform and perfect the user experience.

Most of these sites have changed massively in the last 10 years - these images are taken from web snapshots from when they were current.

My Role

Web Design
UI/UX Design (SpaceCraft tool)
Client/User Research
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Client

SpaceCraft
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Launch Window

2013-2014
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Collaborators

Jeff Williams
Shawna Murland
Justin Boyce
Matthew Gregg
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Tools Used

CSS
jQuery
SpaceCraft
Illustrator
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Project Kickoff

The start of each of these projects was always an informative Creative Brief that we would use to gauge the client's needs and wants for a brand. Secondarily, this would give us good information about the client's familiarity with design concepts and general technical literacy.

User Definition

Using this information, we set design standards and rules for ourselves to make sure our users will have a good experience with the SpaceCraft program. Different clients have different needs, and while some will want to dive straight into the back-end code, others would rather not even know that there is back-end code.

Style Exploration

Design Drafting

Putting pen to paper and code to computer, we iterate on the design in the quickest way possible to communicate ideas. As with designing hardware, the goal at this stage is to present a minimum viable product to get a reaction from our users, and subsequently to walk them through how we made the UI within the SpaceCraft tool.

Each of these reviews is treated as a research opportunity. How easy is it to change a background? Do the hover states make sense? Could the site colors be changed easily with a future brand update?

Final Handoff

The product we give to the user is twofold: the site itself is ready for launch, but it's also ready for the client to manage. With intelligent implementation of custom code as well as internal documentation, we leave our clients with the ability to change their site in the future with brand, photography, and content updates.