Research & Design
Understanding users, their tasks and the context within which those tasks are performed are important for conceptualizing designs, identifying opportunities for breakthroughs and design differentiation and to drive user-centred development.
Design Analysis & Conceptualization
By analyzing users, tasks, workflows and contexts, we can help you to conceptualize forms and features for new classes or categories of products in emerging or evolving market segments (especially if there are no established precedents to follow). We can also help you generate fresh insights to improve your existing products or solutions and brainstorm future product offerings (for example, in product roadmap planning).
Real World Observations & User Inquiries
Gathering data by observing users naturally interacting with products and services in real-life settings and talking to users can give us a wealth of information about unconscious and unexpected user behaviour and the kinds of real difficulties they face. It can give us insights into your own products and services as well as those of your competitors.
We can also assist your market research teams in designing focus groups to elicit relevant information about user and task needs, or to assist your team in questionnaire design.
Usability Competitive Analysis
This is useful if you want to understand your competitor strengths and weaknesses, learn best design practices or look for opportunities for product differentiation. It is also useful for deriving "best-in-class" design goals to ensure your product or solution is as good as or better than the competition.
This typically involves expert reviews or usability tests of one or more competitor products, systems or solutions. In expert reviews, we will help you to review your competitor offerings based on a common set of tasks or criteria while usability tests will involve representative users interacting with your competitor solutions to identify issues and best practices.
User Interface Design
We can help you to design hardware and software user interface specifications, such as hardware control panel layout to software or web application look and feel.
This typically involves developing use cases and specifying the appearance and behaviour of the interface in these usage contexts. It also involves working closely with your design team to review design alternatives or the impact of technical and implementation constraints on the user interface, which often happens as the development progresses.
If required, we can also assist you in evaluating and assessing suitability of components and vendor solutions used in the user interface, such as displays, buttons, keypads, controllers and tactile switches.