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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.