User-Centered Design

Research provides knowledge.
Design makes it count. 

We complement our foundation of research services with a balanced approach to design.  By combining research-driven principles, business best practices, and aesthetic creativity, we help our clients create powerful, intuitive, and memorable products. Our user centered design services include:

• Information architecture: Establishing a hierarchy and navigation that feels natural to users
• User interface design: Defining the layout and behavior in an iterative process of design, review, testing, and revision
• Interaction design: Creating a well-defined and usable presentation for complex interactions, animations, and other elements of the design that take place over time
• Graphic design: Adding visual aesthetics, color scheme, branding, icons, and other artwork
• Implementation support: Providing documentation, templates, and assistance to the development team, to help smoothly integrate the graphic design into the final product
• Design retainers: Providing ongoing assistance with changes and new elements, to help the design evolve with your product

What is user-centered design?

User-centered design is a multi-disciplinary approach to the design of things that people use. Some key features are:

1. Understand your users.
   • Goals: Understand what motivates people to use it.
   • Expectations: Earn their trust, confidence, and enthusiasm.
   • Capabilities: Provide what works best for them.
   • Needs: Improve their success rate.
2. Design for the user's end-to-end experience.
   • First impressions: Quickly engage and impress users.
   • User perspectives: Understand how different types of users will expect things to work.
   • Meaningful feedback: Always indicate "what this does" and "what just happened."
   • Problem handling: Guide users through or around problems when possible.
   • The big finish: Provide unmistakable indication of task completion.
3. Validate your results with users.
   • Ask and listen: Field research, interviews, and surveys can provide priceless insight.
   • Go right to the source: Usability testing with real users is the best way to validate the user experience.
   • Measure success: Defining the right metrics allows you to reliably measure the success, performance, and satisfaction of users.
   • Keep up with users: TODO about continuing to reveal and fix usability problems

Multiple disciplines allow us to approach design from a number of angles

• Understanding: Goals, requirements, technology, constraints, measures of success
• Principles: Cognition, perception, usability, accessibility, ergonomics
• Creativity: Vision, innovation, aesthetics, branding
• Success measures: Task completion, efficiency, performance, satisfaction
• User experience results: Trust, confidence, respect, enthusiasm
• Business results: Revenue, adoption, cost reduction, customer retention, customer loyalty

Have questions?

Contact us for answers, or to discuss your design project and learn how we can help.