Deeper into the wood.

In our quest to improve ease-of-use, our aim goes beyond the UI “skin” and into the functional essence of the application. Through workflow analysis and design, we are able to help translate key functional components into intuitive tasks well-understood by the user.

Digesting requirements.

Our process typically begins with the functional team’s requirements – sometimes presented verbally, but most often provided in written documentation. We hold a working session with the product team to ensure our understanding is complete and discuss any additional ideas we may have for innovating beyond the team’s vision.

Integrating users.

We like to then meet with users to understand their needs for the functionality in question. Through one-on-one interviews, analysis of their daily tasks, and other research methods, we are able to step into their shoes and view the application through their eyes.

Illustrating concepts.

Based on the input we receive from these meetings, we draft up a few working solutions, as well as the communication materials necessary to explain our vision to the product team.

Team and user iteration.

Once we’ve arrived at a few working solutions, we review our ideas with the team to ensure they meet all requirements and are technically feasible. We adjust as necessary and then put the favored approach before users to test its effectiveness. Note that no coding has to happen before this point – we can run through solutions using very easy and inexpensive methods, which affords us the opportunity to tweak to perfection before any real costs are incurred.

Publishing results.

In the spirit of design share, we can publish our final screens and workflow designs to the organization’s design library or other central information hub, to ensure that other product teams facing similar workflow challenges can learn from, and potentially reuse, elements of the new design.