User experience.

User experience (UX) begins at the inception of a project. Understanding the aims of our clients, the needs of their customers, and predicting the short, medium and long term achievements. This vision informs the design and build phases of work, ensuring that the essence of a project isn’t lost. We don’t rely on silver bullets, we work methodically through research, experimentation and creative best practice. Everything is done with purpose.

We use a variety of techniques and activities throughout the project lifecycle to understand the needs and opportunities available, and to turn them into solid, creative prototype and designs. UX is the foundation for everything we create, underpinning what we deliver for our clients and their end users.

User-centred design.

Our user-centred design model runs within our general project delivery process, and tracks the needs of all users – client and customer – through the project. It follows a four-step process: discover, define, develop and deliver.

The discovery phase explores all aspects of the project and its context. Involving audience research and UX strategy workshops, as well as establishing current performance and measures of success. The outputs are refined during the define phase, where we merge our research and establish our priorities for the project. The developing phase follows with a broader solution exploration, experimenting and iterating possible design approaches. Worked on in collaboration with our clients and involve further audience research as required. Finally, the delivery phase tightens these ideas into requirements for the new system or website. We produce wireframes and requirements documents that hand over our knowledge and approach to our design and development teams.

UX strategy.

We focus on UX strategy during the early stages of a project. Rather than jumping into solutions, we prefer to understand the context of the project, what it’s trying to achieve and who it’s trying to serve. Typically, we would ask: Why are we doing this? What’s the central problem we’re trying to solve? Can we test our ideas and approach? This UX strategy work involves client workshops, desktop research and audience research, leading to a mapped model of business processes, customer needs, priorities and opportunities.

Analytics and benchmarking.

As the internet and digital design matures, much of our work consists of improving existing products and services, rather than starting from scratch. Either way, we always want to learn from business experience and what’s been before. Using your analytics platform and any KPIs you’re able to share, we examine current performance to look for areas of improvement, and establish how we will measure success. After release we can use our benchmarks and measurements to evaluate how the site or product is performing. Allowing you to make small iterative changes and test for improvements. In the past, we’ve help clients with multivariate testing and personalisation experiments to further drive improvements in user experience and conversion rates.

Audience research.

We try to involve a client’s audience and target audience throughout the UX process. Through focus groups, interviews, customer feedback, analytics and observation, we’re able to find out who’s interacting with the brand, product and website. We look to find out: what are their thoughts and feedback; who are the audiences we want; what do they need at a high level, and how can we address some of those needs; and what’s an appropriate way for the business to interact with their lives. We also use usability testing and feedback sessions to generate ideas, and experiment with solutions, always underpinned by a solid understanding of the business plan and strategy.

Information architecture.

Once a UX strategy is complete, backed by audience research and formalised into defined requirements, we focus on ensuring that the proposed solution works well for clients and end users. This means organising the website in a way that makes sense for its intended audience. A successful release will match their intentions, and facilitate their tasks, using language they understand. We always ensure that page designs work well cross-device and that the interaction design and content structure gives a favourable impression of the brand, as well as getting the user to where they want to go to get what they need. Information architecture activities can include wireframes, taxonomies, sitemaps, content structure user journey flows – however best represents the detail and dependencies to our creative and development team, ready for a smooth handover.