The need to deliver seamless brand experiences across all digital touchpoints is stronger than ever, causing havoc for brand guardians that do not have modern design solutions in place. It’s time to say goodbye to brand playbooks and static style guides, and hello to design systems – the best practice solution to manage design at scale, allowing for efficiency and consistency of branding across your entire digital estate.

What is a design system?

A design system is a scalable online library of reusable components, guided by clear standards, which can be assembled together to build any number of digital assets or applications. 

Design systems bring order to chaos. The digital brand catalogue creates a more structured way to design and build digital products and solutions that guarantee brand adherence. Hosted online, curated by designers and coded by developers, they empower teams to rapidly build digital assets and products with ease while ensuring brand governance; reducing the speed to market and ensuring a consistent user experience across every touchpoint of your digital estate.

Implementing a design system

Implementing a design system is a long-term solution that helps to prepare businesses for the future. They are set up to evolve over time, preventing the need to reinvent the wheel of defining brand principles every time a new project starts.

Design system projects are the perfect fit to run concurrently with a website or app re-platforming or rebranding project. This way of working has become ingrained within DEPT®’s project teams and is a service we’re proud to be supporting our clients with as part of their digital transformations.

When partnering with London Marathon Events on a branding and digital improvement project, DEPT®  simultaneously developed a design system, creating a dynamic, scalable and future-ready brand that will ensure longevity via creative quality and consistency.

Specialist design system agency

Despite the name, it takes more than a team of designers to develop a successful design system. An ideal team is made up of UI specialists, front-end developers, content strategists, product managers and UX researchers – to name a few. 

That’s why working with a specialist design systems agency like DEPT® helps to bring all of these people together into one cohesive unit to deliver a future-forward solution. An agency can also provide fresh perspectives and really elevate the project to ensure its success. 

For Heinz, a clear, robust, flexible and accessible design system was created to bring structure and consistency to their refreshed web presence. And following its rebrand, Douglas turned to dept to implement a design system that would serve as the future “single source of truth”, ensuring brand consistency across all touchpoints. All elements are created within the design system, described in detail and made accessible to employees. 

The DEPT® approach

DEPT® has implemented design systems for a range of global brands, including eBay, Heinz and London Marathon Events. We understand the true impact a design system can have on a brand in an ever-evolving world. 

Working with a full-service agency gives you access to our experts across every department that plays a key role in creating a beautiful and effective design system – whether that’s content, UX research or brand identity, we’ve got you covered. 

Get in touch today to discuss how your business may benefit from a design system and how our team of creative experts can help visually connect your brand’s digital estate.

Get ready to build stronger, more meaningful and long-lasting customer relationships. Conversational marketing enables brands to improve and enhance the customer experience by communicating with them on a one-to-one basis in real-time, ultimately being there with the right information when your customer needs it most. And, what better way to do this than with a branded chatbot? 

Today’s customer is looking for the ultimate convenience and this isn’t only applicable to the B2C space, two-thirds of B2B buyers opted for remote human interactions or digital self-service across the sales process last year. And, with customer loyalty on the decline, it’s a smart move for brands to invest in creating a better customer experience. It’s never been a better time to explore chatbots.

What is conversational marketing?

Conversational marketing is a way to engage customers through dialogue, putting the focus on interaction by using two-way communications in real-time. Chatbots are the optimum way to implement conversational marketing. 

A chatbot simulates human conversations through text and voice, acting as a virtual assistant to handle customer queries. A strong chatbot will bring together staffed and automated solutions, directing visitors to the appropriate customer service representative depending on their query. 

Chatbots have various levels of complexity and are now more advanced than ever. They are built using AI technologies which include NLP (natural language processing) and machine learning algorithms, and can help to reduce operational costs by taking strain off your team and allowing customers to self-serve; all while providing an enhanced experience. 

Chatbot app development agency

At DEPT®, we design and build chatbot software to suit your every need, whether that’s driving e-commerce conversions or providing customer care, our experienced technical team can meet extremely custom requests, so the possibilities really are endless. 

We’re not just here to design and build your perfect chatbot, we provide a managed service that is focused on delivering ROI for our clients. Combining our technical capabilities and marketing expertise, we know what it takes to deliver the best-in-class customer experience chatbots that are results orientated. 

From product picker to customer care bots, our creative team has a wealth of experience in creating the digital tone of voice for a wide variety of brands’ chatbots and our in-house media expertise allows us to tailor chatbot content to fit the media entry point. 

Ralph Lauren turned to DEPT® to help translate their second-to-none in-store customer service into the digital space. The solution? A chatbot to help customers find the perfect gifts for the holiday season. And the results speak for themselves. Only 0.4% of users required a handover to a live customer service agent, one of the lowest rates we’ve seen in the industry.  

The DEPT® approach

We are global leaders in conversational marketing, creating chatbot app solutions for a wide range global brands. 

By bringing together creative, content, performance marketing, data and technology, we deliver market-leading innovation that helps brands generate revenue and scale returns from digital marketing. 

As a full-service agency, you have access to our team of experts to help you at every stage of the strategy, design and development, as well as ongoing management to make sure you’re getting the most out of your chatbot. 

Reach out to DEPT® today to find out how we can help develop a chatbot app that frees up your customer service team’s time and provides a next-level, always-on customer experience. 

When it comes to designing a digital offering, businesses have to equally prioritise visual appeal with a user experience customers will love to deliver a tonally consistent extension of their brand. Both website design services and mobile app design need to balance aesthetics with functionality, in a way that helps brands to stand out among competitors. 

Whether you’re overhauling your existing digital estate or just establishing your brand identity online, you’ll want to meet your audience’s high standards to build and maintain their trust. Today’s technological landscape offers ever-evolving means of creating incredible interactions, so users demand platforms that are simultaneously eye-catching, relevant, seamless and high-performing, across every channel.

DEPT® takes a digital-first approach to website design services and mobile app design, helping to bring brands to life and better connect you with your customers.

Mobile app design

A mobile app helps you to establish or build on a meaningful relationship with mobile users, connecting with audiences efficiently through the device they constantly have to hand. You can make a significant impact by maximising the potential of this marketing channel, as it helps you to cut through the noise within a space that’s dedicated to your brand.

Far more than an extension of your website, an app needs to add value for users while making your brand identity and messaging clear and memorable. In order to stay in customers’ minds, it needs to be designed with the intention of repeated use to be worth taking up valuable space on customer devices.

If you’re looking to refresh and revitalise your brand image and reinforce your brand values, a mobile app is a way to instantly communicate that to your customer. As part of the mobile app design process, we carry out design sprints and user testing to refine the end product and optimise your app, using real-world data.

When football team Inter updated its brand identity, it turned to DEPT® to bring this to life through web and mobile app design and help them reach a global audience becoming increasingly connected to sport through digital channels. Crucially, the strategy we created offered differentiation that would give relevance to the different areas of Inter’s online presence.

Website design services

Your website gives you an invaluable chance to make a first impression, so it’s essential to engage your customers from the moment they land on your homepage. You’ll want your brand personality to be instantly clear, with a continuation of your story on every page in the customer journey.

Your website’s user experience will need to keep your audience captivated, by being intuitive enough to hold their attention and enjoyable enough to leave your mark afterwards. Innovation is key in a world where the digital channels of industry-leading brands are creating next-level interactions in ever-changing ways, every single day. 

Working with digital design experts like DEPT®, you can be one of those brands creating enticing online experiences your audience will be compelled to take notice of.

DEPT® designed a new website for healthy drinks brand innocent, who wanted to bring their online offering up to date and reflect their strong brand identity. We ensured the visuals and tone of voice brought together their playful branding and purposeful mission, remaining authentic while inspiring customers with new features. This was carried throughout various touchpoints, from the homepage to product and 404 pages.

And when iconic food processing company Heinz wanted to reinvigorate their website following a rebrand, they tasked DEPT® with communicating this new chapter and revised ethos to their lifelong, loyal audiences. 

We created a design system that would facilitate the scale of this undertaking, with comprehensive brand guidelines. A pattern library of components and wireframes enabled efficiency in processes, allowing Heinz teams to work flexibly and consistently as they continued to move with the times and maintain an impactful presence online.

Specialist web and mobile app design agency

DEPT®’s website and mobile app design services bring brands to life in the digital realm. 

We design fluid, scalable and accessible websites and apps, which empower you to continue your brand’s digital journey with confidence. Our award-winning designers, front-end and back-end developers work together to take an all-encompassing, multi-channel approach, marrying core principles and best practices in strategy, design and user experience.

We take a customer-first approach to web and mobile app design, which means we plan with the user experience at the front and centre of all considerations. We take the time to get to know your audience and conduct research to understand what problem they want solved and how they generally behave. 

Get in touch today to find out how DEPT® can help you to strengthen your brand identity with our website and mobile app design services.