Renovate your website
A website redevelopment can be as substantial or as simple as you need it to be. At Stamford we’re about doing it right with an end-to-end service starting from user profiling and requirements analysis through to design implementation. Whatever the scope, the result will be a user-centred experience that works for both your business and your customers.
We recommend the following activities
Research
At Stamford Interactive, we employ user-centred design techniques to gain detailed understandings of your users' needs and business objectives. Working with your business and the target users, we specialise in deriving focused requirements, which lead to relevant and effective outcomes.
Domain analysis
Domain Analysis is used to understand the full context and environment in which your product operates. When undertaking a domain analysis we use a selection of approaches aimed at understanding your business, the environment in which your business operates and how your users interact with your business and/or product.
Tasks may include:
- Expert Interviews (internal and/or external)
- Contextual Inquiry
- Field Observation
- Competitive Analysis
- Process Analysis
- Technology Analysis
- Business Domain Modelling
Selection of tasks can be tailored to suit your scope, time and budget.
User research
The number one rule in any user-centred project is to determine who your users are and what they want to do. We use a variety of approaches to better understand your users' characteristics, the tasks they need to complete and the expectations they bring to the process.
Tasks may include:
- Surveys/Questionnaires
- Contextual Inquiry
- User Interviews
- Scenarios/User Case studies
- Focus Groups
Benefits of user research include establishing a realistic foundation early in the project, exposing hidden requirements and ruling out unfavourable ideas before it is too late (and costly) to make changes.
Design
At Stamford Interactive we are experts in designing and refining products to ensure that the user experience is enjoyable, intuitive and efficient. We apply our analysis and research findings to improve the design of products that demand a steep learning curve and rely on learned behaviour for users to complete the required tasks.
Our goal is to create designs that represent the union between your business goals and your user needs, increasing productivity and user satisfaction, therefore amplifying the real value of your product.
Prototyping
In prototyping we develop a model of the proposed user interface so that we can test various aspects of the design, illustrate ideas or features and gather early user feedback.
Prototyping greatly reduces the risk and cost of building a product that may prove less than optimal to users' needs and therefore require further refinement. There are two common approaches to prototyping:
Paper Prototyping allows users to interact with paper-based representations of the proposed product keeping the cost of the user testing to a minimum. This approach tests the validity of a concept by testing the fundamental design elements prior to the aid of interactive cues.
Using the paper prototype method we can gather feedback from which we can easily (and cost-effectively) add more cycles of testing, more subjects or more prototypes as required.
Electronic Prototyping involves an electronic model of the proposed design being built for users to interact with. Although less cost and time efficient than paper-based techniques, this model closely represents the proposed interface allowing us to observe users' reactions to the solution at high fidelity. As with the paper prototype approach, this method provides feedback about the interaction between the user and the interface allowing us to add more cycles of testing, more subjects, or more prototypes as required.
Evaluation
At Stamford Interactive we understand how important it is that customers can 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 clients' products.
User testing
User testing involves carrying out specific assessment tasks with carefully recruited, representative users in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a design or product.
Tasks may include:
- Usability Walkthroughs
- Prototyping and Testing
- Tracked Testing.