UX/UI Design
UX Design Workshops
Most product design engagements will kick off with a one or two-day UX workshop facilitated by our team of experienced UX professionals. Expect to engage in a lively, comprehensive, and highly collaborative dialogue to uncover fresh insights about your business. Through a series of discussions and exercises, we will work together to evolve the right solution for your product, app or website.
Typical workshops outputs
PERSONAS
Personas are fictional characters that represent different users, stakeholders, and customers. They are captured in descriptions that include behaviors, patterns, attitudes, goals, skills, and environment – with a few personal details, including a name, to bring the persona to life. Who are these individuals? What motivates them? What are they influenced by? How do they make decisions? Where else do they look for goods or services like or unlike yours?
CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP
A Customer Journey Map tells the story of your customer’s experience: from initial contact, through the process of engagement, and into a long-term relationship. It may focus on a particular part of the story or give an overview of the entire experience. What it always does is identify the key interactions that a customer has with your business. It talks about the user’s feelings, motivations and questions for each of these touchpoints. It often provides a sense of the customer’s greater motivation. What do they wish to achieve and what are their expectations for the product?
It also helps our team and yours understand the context of users. We gain a clear picture of where the user has come from and what they are trying to achieve.
A Customer Journey Map helps us understand what questions users have and how they are feeling. It provides an overview of the customer’s experience, allowing you to see how customers move through your sales funnel. This helps identify opportunities to enhance the experience and shows how improved customer service can differentiate your user's digital experience.
For the user experience designer, a Customer Journey Map helps identify gaps, or points in the customer experience that are disjointed or unclear.
These might be:
- Gaps between devices (i.e., when a user moves from one device to another)
- Gaps navigating between sections where the user might experience frustration
- Gaps between channels (e.g., how could the experience of going from social media to the website be better).
Most of all, a Customer Journey Map puts the user at the front and center of how your business thinks. It shows how technology and the web have changed customer behavior and demonstrates the need for your business to adapt.
It encourages your team to consider the user’s feelings, questions, and needs. When it comes to digital products and services, this is paramount.
WORKFLOWS
A Workflow outlines all the steps within your UX process: performing UX research, gathering user feedback, defining design specifications, low-fidelity wireframing, high-fidelity prototyping, UI-UX design, and conducting user and usability testing before development.
Primary Ux Research Interviews
Analytics may tell you what users do, but user research tells you why. Who has this problem? How is it being done now? How do users respond to your solution? No matter how much we think we know about your users and their needs, we find it highly valuable to interview at least one user from each of the key personas identified in the UX Workshop. The total number of interviews will depend on the number of personas identified, but typically this results in 3-5 interviews scheduled, ideally immediately following the kick-off.
Primary user research is the best way to validate our assumptions about users, how they think, what other products or services they may use, and what their day-to-day is all about. Our research findings are shared with the entire team to improve usability and make informed product roadmap decisions.
UX Discovery
Sometimes, what seems obvious to us as product owners, may not seem so obvious to your customers or the users of your site or service. UX Discovery is about uncovering and documenting the business requirements, the enterprise, its stakeholders, customers, and end-users. Discovery informs the design process to ensure we build the right solution to meet your business needs.
UI Design
Designing a good user interface (UI) is key to the success of any software application. While people may expect products to be easy-to-learn and easy-to-use, this isn’t always the goal of an effective UI. In fact, the two concepts are more often than not in direct opposition to one another. If you find this statement intriguing, you may want to read our thought-leadership blog article, Is Easy to Learn the Enemy of Easy to Use?
Universal factors which are essential for UI design include:
- The intended user must understand the user interface; it must feel logical
- You must be consistent in the use of design patterns
- Users must always feel in control.
- Users should always understand where they are, how they got there, and how to get back.
If your user experience is not good, chances are that people will move on to another product.
Design Prototyping
The design includes branding, usability, and function. The key tenets of rapid prototyping are Fast, Efficient, and Enough. Prototyping allows us to develop simulations that reflect the final product quickly. Prototyping makes your product more real for the investors, enables test users to get a real feel for what it will be like to use the app, and provides a better sense of the intended UX before finalizing the design.
Leveraging everything we learned from UX Discovery, we typically start with low-fidelity, wireframes of the key screens. The purpose of wireframing is to capture the requirements for each screen. Rapid low-fidelity interactive prototyping may be incorporated at this stage to work out more challenging use patterns quickly. Prototyping in this manner helps to turn insights into tangible ideas for understanding the problem space.
With approved wireframes in hand, we can design high-fidelity layouts for review and approval. Once the key screen layouts are approved, then we add interactivity for user navigation.
Design Validation
Applications should be easily grasped and work well for the intended user-base.
TESTING
User testing is the best way to validate application functionality and overall design. Using an interactive prototype, we test the design with potential users to validate our design assumptions and the usability of our product design. Testing with objective parties will ensure we stay in sync with user needs and abilities and customer or stakeholder needs and goals.
ITERATION
The cycle repeats as we iterate the prototype based on what we have learned. Once iterated and reviewed internally, we retest.
RINSE AND REPEAT
The total number of design iterations depends on user feedback, repeating until you are reasonably sure that what is to be developed is what should be developed; typically 2-3 rounds.
Prototypes and MVPs validated with customer research and user testing have a better chance for success in the marketplace.