Clients engage with our User Experience (UX) team to improve application usability, brand integrity and user adoption. Not all projects require the same design capabilities, and therefore the UX Team is applied differently depending on the nature of the engagement. You can read about our UX process here.
Assuming a larger, more complex engagement, our design team will work to build an overall strategy for the solution that accounts for the following:
User Studies
User studies are conducted through several research activities according to specific project requirements, scale of solution, timeline and budget. User study capabilities include user surveys, card sorting, interviews and active or passive observance.
In addition to documenting our findings, the output from these activities is most often the creation of user profiles and personas that will define who will use the solution and the specifics of how they will use it.
Information Architecture
Taxonomy refers to the specific structure of site information and ontology refers to the context of this information for a specific user’s perspective. Understanding the various user definitions of how information is consumed greatly impacts what a clean and intuitive interface will look like. This information is collected through facilitation and provided as a deliverable in the form of documentation.
Solution Prototyping
Solution prototyping refers to both site wire-framing and creating site mockups and screen-flow diagrams. This is often, although not always, done after user studies have been completed and taxonomy and ontology have been defined. This gives designers perspective on unique user persona requirements and behavior patterns that can drastically impact what is an adoptable solution design.
Visual Design
This is the more traditional design component of the User Experience team. Whether working with your firm to create a brand style guideline or using an existing brand style guideline, our designers will create the graphical components of the solutions and determine how these components will interact with each other and the user. This process involves multiple revision cycles and is a high-client involvement activity. Visual design can entail a simple template design to complex graphical and user interface functionalities; like menu-fly outs, ribbon customizations and drag-and-drop features.
Design Implementation
Design implementation is the process of converting the graphic design elements into .css and HTML images and laying them into the solution environment within the structures defined by the wire-frames, mockups and solution architecture. This requires modifying SharePoint master pages and page layouts.
User Adoption and Awareness
Without adoption, a solution cannot succeed. Our User Experience team is focused throughout the project lifecycle on how certain decisions will impact user adoption. In addition, they have capabilities that can be employed to increase solution adoption and awareness in the organization. These capabilities include internal poster campaign development, contest and prize-driven campaigns, featured success story galleries and user highlights, FAQ and training video development and super-user and achievement programs.