User Experience

When we begin work for any of our clients, we study the whole experience of each customer or target audience. Wherever possible we conduct original research with these audiences to understand the many nuances of this experience.

The experience vision for each audience plays out over 5 stages:

We look at the experience for each of these 5 stages and determine what strategies for your website, mobile, print, online and traditional marketing, social media and other tactics can move people from one stage to the next more quickly and support them throughout the relationship.

The strategy may describe things that will become reality a few years down the road, but it should be clear to everyone if each tactic is moving you toward these experience goals or not.

How we approach audience research

To make smarter decisions about strategy, language, structure and functionality you have to spend time with your customers and audiences, listening to them and observing their behavior, considering carefully what you learn. We lead our clients through this process with practical research methods that you can continue to use to improve your experience and uncover opportunities for innovation.

Some of our favorite research and strategy tools in our toolbox include:

• KJ Sessions
• Mining your search logs
• Carewords Surveys
• Baseline and competitor usability tests
• User interviews
• Personas
• Task Maps
• Mental Models

We love KJs and Carewords Surveys because they are fast and focused, providing good insight without great expense. Mental models provide a deeper level of insight and often bring to light areas where you can innovate and move ahead of the competition. They are more time consuming, however, so we are careful to use them only where we don’t have good existing data on a particular audience.

Planning the Experience

When done right, the audience research serves to directly inform our plans for your project. By distilling this research into personas we are able to focus strategy and communication on the people we want to reach.

After completion of our audience research we get together with you for an intensive series of planning workshops over 2 days to a week.

We’ll often put the mental models, task maps and personas on the wall and use post-it notes to build prototype screens or sketch layouts based on what we learn from the data.

Wireframe Prototypes

After the planning workshops we move quickly to create the first structural wireframe prototype of the website or application.

This first prototype demonstrates the proposed site map and the layout of major screens. It is usually a clickable set of wireframes that we can explore to determine if the overall flow is right.

Navigation Tests

We use online tools such as TreeJack to test proposed navigation with representative users from your key audiences, to ensure that our proposed navigation and flow makes intuitive sense. We may perform these tests before or after developing the structural prototype, depending on what makes the most sense.

Usability Testing

With these key structural elements in place, we will conduct usability tests with the prototype to determine if we are on the right track or where we might improve. We conduct tests with people from your key audiences, following scenarios identified during our audience interviews. Each scenario might include multiple tasks.

The tests will help us to validate the overall site architecture as well as the navigation and screen layout.

We may conduct tests in-person or remotely depending on the stage of the project.

We’ll repeat this at various stages of development.