We offer a range of services to help clients improve usability and customer experience.
We can work with you in different ways to suit your project. This could be working with your design team as a consultant, or providing independent user research or user experience testing.
No two projects are exactly alike, so why not contact us to discuss your project needs?
We can help make your website easy to use and ultimately more effective.
User experience testing is one of the best ways to learn what happens when real people visit your site or use your software. We work with you to find out your priorities and to design the test itself. Our methodology is based on 'scenario-based' testing, using people who match your target audience, trying out realistic tasks with your site, software or a design prototype. Our report and video footage shows you what happened and we'll suggest ways that you can improve usability.
User-centred requirements analysis goes beyond functional requirements. It provides a thorough understanding of who your users are, how they will be using your site or software and what they need from it. Getting this right can really give you a competitive edge. We can facilitate workshops with stakeholders and users, or simply help your team to focus on real user needs. User-focused requirements will help you to set the right criteria for usability. We can help you develop detailed personas and scenarios of your 'user journey' that can be incorporated into use cases, testing and evaluation.
How can you be sure that the way you structure and present information will make sense to your users? We can help you design information structures for maximum usability, taking into account your users and stakeholders' goals. We can provide wireframes, information flows and site maps for information structure and design. If you want to try these out with users, we have a wealth of experience in facilitating user feedback sessions, using simple prototypes and methods such as focus groups to ensure the 'user view' is part of the process.
When there's no time to carry out a usability test, an expert review is a fast way of showing you the main areas for improvement. Using established methods, we can 'walk-through' your system or website to identify usability issues, prioritize them and recommend solutions.
Assess your site against the others! How does the usability of your website compare to the competition? We will investigate exactly what users need to achieve with your site, and carry out expert evaluations of how easily they can do this, benchmarked against selected competitor sites.
Any new piece of software or website is only as good as the processes that support and surround it. Our experience in business analysis enables us to see 'usability' in this wider context. In addition, we have the skills in process analysis to engage with these issues and help you to address your 'total customer experience'.
What kind of people are your users? What do they want to do? The answers to these questions could be 'many and varied', so how can you make sense of this to give most of them what they need? A useful technique is to develop 'Personas' and 'Scenarios'. We use output from marketing surveys or stakeholder workshops to create a small number of 'typical' user stories and characterisations of different user types that your designers can visualise. This enables your team to focus on designing for these 'real' personas, and the things that each of them might want to do, and can be very useful when building use cases and testing scenarios.
We can provide general consultancy to your design teams on HCI and usability.
If you don't see the service you need in this list - get in touch and talk it over.