• .

Methodology

Our methodology can be divided into four parts:

By involving us early you can be assured of a product that will succeed at meeting the customer expectation and need. By understanding and designing for your customer you will see an increase in sales. The average business metrics improvement after a usability redesign is now 83% according to a recent Nielsen report.

Typical business metrics include:

  • Conversion rates, such as sales or lead generation
  • Traffic numbers, such as page view statistics
  • User performance, such as the time needed to perform key tasks
  • Target feature usage, such as the number of users who click a link to crucial information
According to Nielsen the formula for digital success is:

Where:

  • B = amount of business done by the site
  • V = unique visitors coming to the site
  • C = conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become customers); note that the concept of conversion applies not only to ecommerce sites, but to any site where there is something you want users to do
  • L = loyalty rate (the degree to which customers return to conduct repeat business)
According to their survey, spending 10% of your development budget on usability should improve your conversion rate by 83%, there has not yet been clear ROI's on what the loyalty increase will be, however it's predicted to be the future success factor.

Gather

 This part of the process consists of two important areas; Business requirement gathering and Customer requirement gathering

Business requirement gathering

Through intensive business consultation we gather requirements for the project.

This entails gathering the vision, objectives and target from the business; we facilitate workshops and meetings to enable all the detail for the product to be gathered. We also gather marketing plans and any strategy documentation if already created.

Deliverables

  1. Strategy proposals
  2. Business requirement specifications
  3. Project proposals

User requirement gathering

We assess the customer needs and objectives establishing mental-models, cognitive behavioural factors and paradigms for the product or service. We normally do this through intensive customer research; heuristic evaluations, qualitative usability testing and at times we test the current site against the competitor sites with customers in a controlled environment to establish the market landscape. At the end of this phase we meet with the business raising issues and opportunities seen in testing and closing these off with the business ensuring the business is aware of all the possibilities and risks involved.

Deliverables

  1. Customer behavioural trends
  2. Customer mental-models and learnt behaviours
  3. Market landscapes
  4. Design considerations
  5. Product USPs and possibilities
  6. Customer requirement specification
  7. Strategy input
  8. Development quick win and phased functionality list
 

Back to top

Solve

The solve phase works through all the requirements prioritising the requirements and visualising the product within technical constraints.

Project scope and planning

We offer clear direction as to the strategy of a digital product. We ensure sufficient phasing of the functionality to meet customer and business expectation and to ensure the roll-out of the product does not miss key elements to meet the expectation.

Deliverables

  • Quick win and phased list of functionality
  • Prioritisation of requirements

Concept development

We perform product visualisation working closely with technology, design and copy teams investigating all possible solutions ensuring the business and customer requirements are at the top of the agenda without expending coding time.

Deliverables

  1. Concept visualisation
  2. Brainstorming facilitation
  3. Customer-centric concept development

Product visualisation

We work through all possible concepts creating experience flows, scenarios, personas and wireframes to ensure the solution is usable in its entirety. At times we may even take key concepts and test this with customers to establish whether we align to their mental-model.

Deliverables

  1. Experience flows
  2. Persona and scenario creation
  3. Prototype testing and concept validation
  4. Solution proposal
 

Back to top

Develop

We assist with the communication between technology, design and the business; enabling the business to see where we are going development wise and enabling technology to understand the objectives of the business and ensuring the design remains on brief and within technical scope. This is done through a User Interface specification that contains all the elements required for the digital product.

User experience architecture

We create a document that contains all the sitemaps, site flows and wireframes of the complete digital product with full descriptions of front-end functionality and rules required for the interaction.

Deliverables

  1. Sitemap and flows
  2. Wireframes of all the pages and template creation
  3. Full description of the front-end interaction

Design briefing and support

The final document forms part of the design brief enabling the design and copy teams to create the pages that meets the business and customer expectation, enabling a full understanding of the product functionality and aims. Ensuring the teams to stay within technical scope and understand the product that will be designed

Deliverables

  1. Design brief
  2. Design support
  3. Customer-centric solution design
  4. Interaction design support

Development briefing and support

We assist the development team to understand the product that will be built and what is required from the functionality. This prevents deviation from project scope enabling the team to focus on the code preventing on the fly solutions that may impact the product in the future.

Deliverables

  1. User Interface specification
  2. Development support
  3. Customer-centric solution development
  4. Development rationalisation
 

Back to top

Support

Post product launch is normally the time where we need to assess customer paradigms and ensuring change requests are not impacting the product uptake and consumption.

Metric evaluation

We investigate the click-streams measuring drop-off zones and possible causes of this

Deliverables

  1. Click-stream and recommendation report

Heuristic evaluations

We perform regular heuristic evaluations to ensure change requests have not negatively impact the customer experience.

Deliverables

  1. Heuristic evaluation report
  2. Quick win change requests to improve customer experience

Customer usability testing

We perform a variety of usability tests from competitor benchmark testing to compare the client's digital product against its competitors to performing usability tests on current or future functionality to ensure it meets customer expectations.

Deliverables

  1. Competitive benchmark usability reports
  2. Functionality usability reports
  3. Trend reports for future functionality phases
 

Back to top

"We'll soon reach the point where increasing the loyalty rate is the best way to achieve substantial improvements in website business metrics. Whereas we might aptly call the period 2000-2010 the conversion decade... 2010-2020 will be the loyalty decade."

Jakob Nielsen