WHAT IS USER EXPERIENCE?
What does a successful business need most of all? Happy customers right? Well, if you want happy customers it makes sense that you need an excellent user experience. Your customers, or users, need looking after if you want them to spend money with you. UX is about how users interact with your website, how they think, feel and, most importantly, how they act.
UX allows us to design solutions optimised to meet the needs of the end user and to help them achieve their goals and yours. Your website is one touch point within the wider context of your customer’s interaction with your business. UX is important to every little bit.
USER EXPERIENCE IS KEY
User Experience (UX) is extremely important to the success of your website, without it you risk not meeting your user's needs and goals and your business can suffer.
UX is an applied psychology, and we use a number of techniques such as research, user testing, analytical data etc. to identify user needs, pain points and desires in order to create the best possible solution. With a great UX solution in place your users will achieve their goals more easily, which can directly equate to better ROI and higher conversions.
HOW WE APPLY UX
User Experience is woven into the whole project and beyond, it's not just a one-off task. UX goes hand-in-hand with our other disciplines. When we design mobile first and content first the goal is the same; create the best possible user experience that delivers.
At the discovery phase we gather requirements, understand business and user needs and carry out specific research and user testing tasks.
At a minimum, we create well-informed user personas and interactive wireframes that we use to test our solutions against. These are optimised before any code gets written. All of our UX work will be informed by best practice UX strategies, relevant research and, if desired, specific user testing carried out for you.
USER RESEARCH
We collectively have years of knowledge in creating great user experiences. For any new project we pull on this knowledge alongside expert reviews and we gather as much information about your users from analytics and research. We can do everything from user surveys, contextual interviews and focus groups to running test sessions either remotely or in controlled experimental conditions. The more thorough the research, the better we can get to know your users and what they need so we can design the best solution.
INTERACTIVE WIREFRAMES AND PROTOTYPES
As part of our process we normally create interactive wireframes or prototypes, which can be quickly updated with live content and used to test with target users to ensure the solution meets all requirements. Users can intuitively ‘use’ the solution as well as clients, to see how the solution is shaping up. All of this happens before a single line of code is written so it is a much more effective use of budget and allows for more flexibility between requirement changes and new iterations.
