We have reached the visual mockup phase, the final phase in the user experience process. I hope you are looking forward to making your websites look beautiful. Let's look at our abstract to concrete paradigm again. As you know, with every phase we've grown a little bit more concerned with the final shape of our sites. Now, in the visual mockups phase, all we are concerned with is the final shape of the sites. What we're designing here will actually be seen and experienced by the user. It's interesting to point out that the deliverables of the previous phases will only indirectly affect the user's experience. The user will not actually see your strategy document or your outline of scope, and they won't see the sitemap diagram or your wireframes either. What they will see, however, is the visual design that you create for the sites. In fact, the visual design is the very first thing users will experience. While the visual mockup phase is the last phase of the UX process, users will form their first impression from the decisions made in this phase. First impressions are obviously very important, and the visual mockup phase is therefore really important. But as I've emphasized throughout the entire course sequence, the success of the site as a whole, depends on the successful completion of each phase in the process. That's why we have a structured process in the first place. You could go and start designing visual mockups right after receiving your clients brief, and the visual design might be stunningly beautiful, but chances are pretty high that your website will not turn out that great, since you didn't spend the time defining your goals in the first place. By the way, the idea of a viewer judging the visual design first reminds me of something that the writer, Scott McLoud mentions in his excellent book 'Understanding Comics'. This book should be required reading for every visual design students. It's a great primer for visual literacy, and I highly recommend it. Since it's itself written in the form of a comic, it's also quite entertaining. But what I'm trying to get to here is that the author at one point talks about how people appreciate visual art most easily by looking at the surface of the arts. Kind of like choosing an apple for its shiny skin, but underneath the surface of artwork there are layers, craft, structure, idiom, form, and hopefully an idea at the very center. If these inner layers are missing, there's only a shiny skin, and continuing with the metaphor, we have an apple that is beautiful on the outside, but hollow in the insides. This makes me think of our UX process again, if you don't have a solid strategy in the center of our website, it might turn out to be quite hollow as well. What I also find quite interesting is how our design process is exactly the opposite journey from how a user experiences the final sites. We start with strategy and end with designing the visual design, which the user in turn sees first. Underneath the surface skin, however, hopefully, they will find a solid structure of the information on each page, which we developed in the wireframes. Underneath that, there should be a solid structure of the entire site, which we created when working on the sitemap. Hopefully, we have included all necessary content and functionality that the user will be looking for as defined in our outline of scope. Lastly, if we've done our work well, the site will achieve the user and client goals that we determined in the strategy phase.