Studio

Ideation

We optimize a design for its intended environment. A good solution truly connects with its user. It not only provides utility, but enriches the experience by appealing to the user’s emotional and aspirational needs, congruent with his or her attitudes and lifestyle. If your vision requires it, we’ll take it a step further and incorporate the latest voice recognition and cutting-edge gesture and motion detection capabilities. Before we do anything we build a thorough ethnographic profile of the customer and the interactions with his or her natural environment. This isn’t about exact metrics. We look for a better understanding of a ‘day in the life’, accepted practices and norms; observe patterns of behavior, all to create a more compelling offer. We look far beyond the obvious pain points and strive to truly delight the customer. The resulting concepts, user personas, and experience frameworks give clear design direction to develop a successful product. From a simple software utility to complex business-to-business and industrial applications, we make it something special, a true experience that sets the tone for lifetime customer loyalty.

Concept Validation

When

Are you uncertain about your current design meeting its intended objective?
Do you need an independent, third party opinion?

We conduct

Online concept surveys
Online or onsite focus groups
Executive round-tables
We based usability testing

We help you analyze our findings, uncover critical insights, and draw the right conclusions. Preliminary usability tests can range from small, informal sessions to comprehensive web based customer tests using hand motion and eye tracking visualizations such as gaze plots, heat maps and gaze replays. A/B testing can be used to simultaneously test different design options with randomly selected audiences.

Prototyping

We use the latest ideation and prototyping tools to gradually build an information architecture around different user interaction models. For information intensive solutions, a Time Continuum Matrix™ is used to segment low to high usage functionality and incidental to continuous information availability. This provides a solid foundation for an optimal customer experience. The process is both iterative and collaborative. Interaction design will quickly evolve from early wireframes and sketches to detailed interactive prototypes that allow customer representatives to ‘touch and play’ early on in the process. We strive for solutions that ‘flow’ functionally with a touch of emotional engagement, recognizing that every product has to provide the customer a sense of empowerment and accomplishment.

We make it look real very quickly using the latest prototyping tools (e.g. Justinmind). While not functioning, screens are designed to ‘simulate’ the user experience with clickable buttons, tables, and graphs. Prototyping flushes out concept errors, oversights, and usability concerns, all before a single line of software code is written.

External Review

We will work with your team, familiarize ourselves with the overall design intent and project progress, review the application design documentation (DHF).

When

You are uncertain about the product design direction, functionality, architecture, development progress, or if the design even meets its intended objective.
You want to prevent non-compliance issues.
You need an extra set of expert eyes to make sure that nothing was overlooked or just want an independent, third party opinion.
You’re looking for practical advice for your staff.

What you get

An actionable, written Design Review Report, which describes the projects progress and lists of identified potential deficiencies and recommendations, along with remediation advice, if necessary.

Quality Partners

We do not have relationships with big vendors that predetermine what we recommend. We have access to a network of carefully screened, independent professionals for short- or long-term engagements. If needed, we have development partners in the US, Ukraine, and Argentina that have a solid track record in software development. We adapt our agile process to your quality system and documentation requirements, and use a cloud based platform for project management and documentation, revision control, as well as testing and issue tracking.