Advance usability in your organisation
Implementing a user-centred culture in your organisation can sometimes be an uphill battle and the value of a single design win can be slowly eroded by a lack of understanding among those who take it forward. At Stamford, we live and breathe usability and can help you spread the user centred design word amongst your colleagues and managers, fostering understanding of the true value of balancing business requirements with those of your users.
We recommend the following activities
Evaluation
We understand how important it is for customers to engage with your product easily and intuitively. Usability evaluation is our business so we are well versed in the ways of identifying and understanding the issues affecting the success of our client's products.
Expert review
By using Stamford's usability standards and guidelines together with best practice heuristics from formal usability process, we can rapidly assess the usability of a product.
Where time is short and you need an immediate opinion to validate the usability of your product and advice on how to make improvements, our expert review service is an ideal starting point. On average, an expert review can generate more than 50 ways of improving your product.
Heuristic Evaluation
Our team of experts is experienced in evaluating products against a defined a set of user-centred design criteria, or heuristics and presenting findings in clear recommendations.
10 common usability heuristics or usability criteria:
- Visibility of system status
- Match between system and the real world
- User control and freedom
- Consistency and standards
- Error prevention
- Recognition rather than recall
- Flexibility and efficiency of use
- Aesthetic and minimalist Design
- Error recovery
- Help and documentation.
Formal Usability Inspections
In a formal usability inspection we perform both individual and group inspections, using elements of both heuristic evaluation and a simplified form of cognitive walkthroughs to assess your product.
User experience evaluation
User experience evaluation is a process used to assess a sequence of screen presentations against user goals, business and functional requirements. A number of aspects are taken into consideration including user interactions, system responses and environmental factors.
Strategy
With a client list spanning some of the world's leading product brands and over 100 years collective experience in connecting business goals with user needs, Stamford are adept at both making sense of, and managing, the big picture for our clients.
Web brand management
Web Brand Management involves understanding and translating your brand in the online world. This involves a holistic appreciation of not only the visual and content aspect of your website but also the interactive level and how this all impacts on user perception and overall brand.
Providing an online presence exposes the brand to a new range of perceptions and expectations around usability, accessibility and content values. User experiences online have an impact on sales, credibility and brand perception potentially impacting on adjacent communication channels such as email or your call centre.
At Stamford we ensure the solutions we recommend produce an online asset, rather than a digital liability.
User experience management
Managing the user experience means being aware of the entire user-experience lifecycle from first contact, through to engagement and transactional outcome.
We can identify your users and find out their end-to-end needs and wants. We analyse and prioritise their requirements from a holistic, practical point of view.
Our services cover the totality of the user experience, including user support (such as product documentation and call centre support), fulfilment, billing and branding. By understanding the user experience cycle we can then evaluate all the channels through which you and your products interact with your customers.