Early stage services
Design facilitation
If you're planning a new
product, or getting ready for a new version of a current
product, we can help you lay the groundwork for a system
that's easy to understand and use. We'll facilitate a
series of structured brainstorming and discussion sessions
which will organize functions and establish the key
elements of the
user model -- the concepts users
will learn in understanding how your system works. Our
background lets us incorporate the needs and desires of
engineers, marketers, and users into a design that
everybody can be excited about.
User needs analysis
Understanding what your users
really need is critical, but sometimes it's hard to get
past the complaints and feature request lists to determine
what features and fixes are essential for success. Through
careful observations and interviews with current and
potential users (as well as analysis of usage logs, if you
have them), we'll identify and prioritize their
requirements and expectations. Creative analysis may
uncover opportunities to simplify the system by combining
needs into general-purpose features. After our review,
we'll deliver requirements, use cases, or user stories --
whatever your process finds most useful.
Competitive evaluation
"Our system is way more
powerful than theirs -- but customers like theirs better,
and we're losing sales." What are your competitors
doing to make their systems easier and more appealing to
users? You might think your system just needs a graphical
"facelift" or "freshening", but the problems -- and
opportunities -- could run deeper than that. Based on our
assessment of their strengths and weaknesses, we'll
discover ways you can improve your UI's competitiveness
without breaking your schedule and budget.
Lightweight usability testing
By observing and
interviewing people using your system to complete typical
tasks, we can discover important issues that need to be
addressed in project planning. Testing can also shed light
on long-held assumptions about "what users do" and the
likely impact of anticipated UI changes. Even inexpensive,
casual testing with a small sample of 4 to 8 users can give
highly useful results.
