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Twin BlogThe Experience is the Brand
Your brand is made or broken by the experience users have with it online. After all, what good is a highly scalable application if it isn't simple, usable, and compelling? We are students of our clients and it is our meticulous design research, strategy and customized approach that we bring to support your business goals.
In the often overwhelming environment of rapid technological advances, our User Experience practice thrives on balancing tried and true expertise with foresight and innovation. This allows us to respond with agility to the shifting technological landscape. We are fueled by the belief that the best is yet to come.
Our UX practice specializes in design research, sketching, information architecture, interaction design, usability analysis and heuristics - ensuring that every customer experience or application we design is intuitive, targeted, desirable, and innovative.
In the often overwhelming environment of rapid technological advances, our User Experience practice thrives on balancing tried and true expertise with foresight and innovation. This allows us to respond with agility to the shifting technological landscape. We are fueled by the belief that the best is yet to come.
Our UX practice specializes in design research, sketching, information architecture, interaction design, usability analysis and heuristics - ensuring that every customer experience or application we design is intuitive, targeted, desirable, and innovative.
Focused UX Practice
Design Research
How do you ensure that your web site or application actually gives customers what they need? What are the best ways to understand your customers' goals, behaviors and attitudes, and then turn that understanding into business results?
Personas bring customer research to life and make it actionable, confirming the right decisions are made based on the right information. Our approach to persona development draws from an array of quantitative and qualitative tools and methodologies, including internal stakeholder analysis, customer interviews, customer and prospect surveys, and statistical analysis.
With a full set of analyzed data, we develop the findings into crisp personas based on behavior trends. These realistic character sketches document the specific goals, behaviors, and attitudes of each customer, and are used to guide decision-making throughout the site design and development process, as well as other strategic business decisions.
Our combined qualitative and quantitative approach to persona creation offers key advantages over more traditional methods including the ability to map the personas back to existing marketing segmentation, financial, and demographic data. This correlation provides a three-dimensional picture of customer behavior; the segments reveal what customers are deliberating, desiring, doing, and the personas reveal how and why.
Personas bring customer research to life and make it actionable, confirming the right decisions are made based on the right information. Our approach to persona development draws from an array of quantitative and qualitative tools and methodologies, including internal stakeholder analysis, customer interviews, customer and prospect surveys, and statistical analysis.
With a full set of analyzed data, we develop the findings into crisp personas based on behavior trends. These realistic character sketches document the specific goals, behaviors, and attitudes of each customer, and are used to guide decision-making throughout the site design and development process, as well as other strategic business decisions.
Our combined qualitative and quantitative approach to persona creation offers key advantages over more traditional methods including the ability to map the personas back to existing marketing segmentation, financial, and demographic data. This correlation provides a three-dimensional picture of customer behavior; the segments reveal what customers are deliberating, desiring, doing, and the personas reveal how and why.
Experience Design Strategy
Creating positive customer perceptions is particularly important for businesses that are increasingly relying on the Internet to attract, convert and retain customers. Through a thorough user experience audit, we document every aspect of your customer's total experience of your brand. This process is intended to study customers goals, expectations, and requirements as it relates to your service, product, and physical as well as virtual location. Then we feed that data back into the information architecture process to enhance future decisions about design and flow.
Information Architecture
Initiating the IA process is the first thing you should do after completing user research. Typically, we begin with addressing the business needs and organizational goals, and move comparing these with the needs, expectations, and goals from the customers' perspective. This is referred to as the 'Top-down' information architecture - beginning with the abstract, and slowly narrowing down to clear objectives to drive the implementation.
The next step involves a content inventory: cataloging of all your existing content, as well as all the content which needs to be created. Correlating the underlying relationships in the content with people's expectations and behavior, we develop a new overall information structure. This is typically referred to as 'Bottom-up' Information Architecture.
We then extensively document the new site structure using a rigorous diagramming methodology, carefully selected labels, and a controlled vocabulary of key terms. Using these assets, we create a navigation design that allows people to move easily and quickly around the information, helping them find and use what they're looking for.
The next step involves a content inventory: cataloging of all your existing content, as well as all the content which needs to be created. Correlating the underlying relationships in the content with people's expectations and behavior, we develop a new overall information structure. This is typically referred to as 'Bottom-up' Information Architecture.
We then extensively document the new site structure using a rigorous diagramming methodology, carefully selected labels, and a controlled vocabulary of key terms. Using these assets, we create a navigation design that allows people to move easily and quickly around the information, helping them find and use what they're looking for.
Interaction Design
Interaction design (IxD) is the branch of user experience design that illuminates the relationship between people and the interactive products they use. While interaction design has a firm foundation in the theory, practice, and methodology of traditional human-computer interaction and user interface design, it's focus is on defining the complex dialogues that occur between people and objects of many types - from computers to mobile communications devices to appliances.
Our practice of interaction design is grounded in an understanding of users goals, tasks, experiences, needs, and wants. Approaching design from a user-centered perspective, while balancing users' needs with business goals and technological capabilities, we can design compelling solutions to complex design challenges, and define new and evolving interactive products and services.
As we understand it, good interaction design:
Our practice of interaction design is grounded in an understanding of users goals, tasks, experiences, needs, and wants. Approaching design from a user-centered perspective, while balancing users' needs with business goals and technological capabilities, we can design compelling solutions to complex design challenges, and define new and evolving interactive products and services.
As we understand it, good interaction design:
- effectively communicates a system's interactivity and functionality
- defines behaviors that communicate a system's responses to user interactions
- reveals both simple and complex workflows
- informs users about system state changes
- prevents user error
Visual Interface Design
We work with companies and their audiences to uncover the messages, values, and character traits that create user traction and loyalty. Then we build visual interactive designs that make brands and their stories vivid and appealing.
Simple interfaces are easier to use, easier to understand, more intuitive, faster loading, and easier to maintain than their flashy, image-heavy counterparts. Simplicity doesn't have to look cheap, and in our designs, usability takes precedence over 'cool', although, some of our RIA applications are the coolest in the business and we don't mind saying that.
Simple interfaces are easier to use, easier to understand, more intuitive, faster loading, and easier to maintain than their flashy, image-heavy counterparts. Simplicity doesn't have to look cheap, and in our designs, usability takes precedence over 'cool', although, some of our RIA applications are the coolest in the business and we don't mind saying that.