Usable, sophisticated experiences built from thoughtful processes.

Stakeholder Workshops

You, your goals, your vision, the problem and the domain. I want to understand the complete context within which a new design or an improved design will reside. One of the best ways to accomplish that is to get key stakeholders together in a room and talk about it. Half-learning, half-teaching, these workshops set the stage for any project to come and bring us altogether to have robust discussions you may never have had the luxury to do. Topic-specific workshops can also be arranged to learn about general usability practices.

User Research

This is the big kahuna, the basis for a lot of decisions that come after. We need to know who your users are, what they want, how they work, where they work. This is not demographics and customer surveys — this is a much deeper understanding. We will talk to users directly to gather information on their wants, needs and behaviors. Our findings are translated into a set of personas that represent specific user groups. Understanding these user archetypes will inform the design and evaluation processes.

• Contextual interviews
• Usability roundtables
• Task analysis
• Persona development

Expert Evaluation

Often called a "heuristic evaluation", this is quick way to assess the current state of your user experience when compared against best practices and your direct and indirect competition. I'll look at how usable and useful the experience is and recommend both tactical and strategic changes. This is sometimes combined with a usability test to get both expert and user perspectives, completing a holistic evaluation of your site or application.

• Best-practices evaluation
• Competitive/comparative review

Concept Development

Sometimes all you have is an idea. It's a great time to bring in a user experience professional to help you construct the idea into something more concrete and evaluate its efficacy. How we tackle it will depend on the idea and how big it is but will usually involve some combination of evaluation, design and testing. What you end up with is enough data and detail to make the "go, no go" decision and a better understanding of how the concept will fit into the overall user experience.

Structural Design

When beginning a new or replacement design, it's always important to think first about structure. It's very much like drawing a blueprint of a house before you start putting up walls. We want our users to be able to understand the structure, move through efficiently, not get lost, and ultimately find or do whatever it is they need to. I'll work with you to create effective labels and groupings, combine different navigational elements into a cohesive structure, create task and information priorities and express them in the design, and build a "floor plan" that allows users to get to what they need without even thinking.

• Information architecture
• Navigational structure
• Navigation container design
• Task flow

Detailed Design

With an effective structure in place, the detailed design process covers everything else: Layout, use of color, use of buttons, links and other controls, highlighting interaction, wait times, progress bars, window management, etc. We'll start with wireframes that are detailed enough to express the complexities of the page while still being flexible enough to allow for fairly rapid iterations. I'll test the designs along the way to get actual user feedback. Depending on the design, I'll either create myself or work with a visual designer to create a robust and usable visual system. And then I'll document the design to aid your development team in putting it all together.

• Page or screen wireframes
• Interaction prototypes
• Formative user testing
• Visual design support
• Documentation

Usability Testing

There are many ways to figure out what is and is not going to make a usable experience. An expert evaluation will catch many issues. For example, I can tell you right now that a hot pink background with blinking bright blue text is probably not going to be very successful, and I can tell you why. But oftentimes there are interesting nuances that can only be sussed out by placing a concept or design in front of real users. There are two main types of testing: Formative testing brings in users to evaluate designs that are not fully developed in order to catch design issues early and challenge assumptions; summative testing is usually done at the end of a design cycle to confirm a usable design. In either case, a smart user experience practitioner knows that he doesn't know everything and must eventually rely on real user input to make the best experience.

Other Services

These are the most common services I provide to my clients but I frequently create customized services. If you need something special, or you're not sure what you need, let's talk. For example, I can create a workshop on institutionalizing usability, set up a mentoring program, manage your design process at a high level, or whatever it is you need.