UX Design

User Experience design is the bridge between science and art, delving into human psychology. A good or bad experience will ultimately determine the success of a product. This is why we design the experience of a platform for review before we ever write a single line of code. Products that provide a positive user experience are designed with not only the product’s usage in mine but also the entire process of acquiring, owning, and troubleshooting it.

Gathering Requirements

Our lead software engineer and a graphic designer will engage your team to discuss what is optimal for you. Things to consider are:

  • Who is your audience? What’s their skill level?
  • What devices are your users using?
  • Are there any existing branding assets to incorporate?
  • What activities are most popular, and which ones are rarely used?

A Diorama Prototype

With modern and easy-to-use design tools like Adobe Experience Designer, we often skip over wireframes and go straight to interactive mockups. Wireframes are typically black-and-white, time-consuming, low-quality visual representations of a product that will eventually be turned into colored, effective, and high-quality interactive mockups. Skipping over wireframes is an opinionated design choice that makes sense considering interactive mockups can be quickly updated and altered as project goals change.

With these interactive mockups, you will be able to click through your application and common use cases before the system is built. Many of our clients use these to demonstrate their app to stakeholders to provide a realistic perspective of what the final product will look like before committing to a full build out.

User Experience Testing

With a goal to gather feedback as early as possible, user experience testing holds developers accountable for sections of a product to make sure that it functionally works and makes sense. As the project progresses through milestones, our designers will work with our quality assurance testers and engineers to test the product continuously. Our testers will assume the role of a user to look for hang ups, confusing workflows, and anything else that may frustrate the user. Their discoveries are routed back into design alterations that can quickly be reincorporated into the software while it’s still being developed.

Advanced Support Features

As the product prepares to launch, we often recommend implementation of advanced support features. These might not always be strictly necessary for the operation of your software, but it can often greatly reduce long-term support costs and improve adoption of your platform.

Below, we detail some of the features that we like to add.

Affordance

The user should always feel like they are in control of the product. There should never be any doubt about what to do next or what will happen if the user does something. We handle this by using familiar controls enriched with vibrant colors and fluid reactive animations. As states change, so does the UI in a meaningful way to reassure the user they are doing the right thing.

Direction

Complicated systems can be confusing to use. This is especially so if there are too many use cases on the screen. Our UX designers will work to determine which actions are primary and what statuses make them relevant to be within the user’s focus. We then work to strike a balance between empowering experienced users and aiding those less familiar.

Animation

There can be a fine line between a beautiful application and an obnoxious one. We take caution and move with intention when applying animated reactions. Many modern systems move so fast that the user may be confused or concerned that nothing happened. Something as subtle as having a save button fade to ‘saving’, to saved, and back again can assert success without distracting the user.

Self Help

We believe good software shouldn’t require training or user guides. When done right, usage should be intuitive. We enable this by making sure primary actions are readily visible, irrelevant or unactionable tasks are obscured, and elements offer supportive text whenever relevant. This way the user won't get lost, confused, or frustrated trying to use the product.

Automation

If a systems behavior does not absolutely require human interaction, then we automate it, with the resulting status only in the peripheral. Examples may include things like auto-save or archive, automated field population, auto-suggestions, or daily routines. This reduces user clicks and frees up their time for more important activities.

Want to Learn More?

This is just a sample of what we can do. We have 15 years of experience working in nearly every technology and industry. Whatever you are doing, we've done it and are prepared to tackle your project. Reach out and we will discuss it with you.