Review your website
A website can quickly develop into a bit of a mess over a period of months or years. If your clients can’t use your website they’ll either go elsewhere or impact on your call centre or email systems. Having your website reviewed to ensure it still reflects user-centred design principles is important to maintaining a good working relationship with your clients.
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.
Requirements analysis
During the requirements analysis phase we identify the current and future needs of both your business and your stakeholders. These requirements then act as a touchstone for all ongoing development and provide the basis for translation into a design concept.
Tasks may include:
- Business Process Analysis
- Stakeholder Management
- Requirements Management
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.
Conceptual design
Stamford's capacity for conceptual design sets us apart from the usability crowd. This often-neglected phase is the powerhouse where clear requirements are converted into a focused model, forming the DNA of the design solution.
Tasks may include:
- Requirements Analysis - Analysing the formal results of our process to identify patterns, relationships and directions
- Affinity Diagramming - Organising ideas to form and explore conceptual relationships
- Design Brainstorming - harnessing creativity to translate directions into design models.
Information design
The Information Design phase of a project relates to the organisation and shaping of data or content across the site. During this phase we gather, structure, and present information in line with proven user-centred principles.
Tasks may include:
- Information Analysis
- Internal Content Workshops
- Workflow Diagramming
- Card Sorting.
Deliverables from the Information Design phase include Information Architecture Diagrams, Site Maps and Procedural Flowcharts.
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.
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 & the real world
- User control & 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 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.
User experience evaluation
User experience evaluation is a process used to assess a sequence of screen presentations against user goals and business and functional requirements. A number of aspects are taken into consideration, such as user interactions, system responses and environmental factors.
Accessibility audit
At Stamford Interactive we understand the importance of ensuring websites and intranets are accessible to all users. Providing accessible web-based communication and information is not only best practice but it also makes good business sense.
Using a combination of automated validation and manual review, our Accessibility Audit will identify general barriers to accessibility which exist on your website or intranet and provide an evaluation of compliance against W3C Guidelines.
We will provide you with an Accessibility Audit report advising where your site requires further changes to comply with either A, AA or AAA levels of the W3CGuidelines.