Our goal is to help you delight your users. Our services are designed to ensure that we do. Here’s how our research, analysis, design, and strategy services compare.

Research and Analysis

Service In a nutshell Good for Not good for Duration
Expert Review Our usability experts review your system and suggest quick, inexpensive, ways to improve usability.
  • Identifying usability issues
  • When you need a quick usability sanity check
  • When you are unsure what usability can do for your company but you want to try it out
  • Understanding users behaviours and attitudes
  • Systems with very specific user groups
 2 weeks
Eye Tracking Tracks eye movement and eye-fixation patterns to help you climb inside your users heads and see your designs through their eyes.
  • Helping choose between alternative designs
  • Checking whether page elements were noticed
  • Understanding how people find and read information
  • Knowing why a page element drew someone’s attention
  • Anything other than high-fidelity designs
 1 – 3 weeks
User Testing We observe your customers using your system to find out what their actual issues are. We give you smart and pragmatic advice to fix the issues.
  • Seeing your system through your customers’ eyes
  • Testing at any stage in the development from concepts to a live system.
  • Urgent projects (i.e. a user test usually takes between 2 and 3 weeks)
  • If users are very hard to access
 3 weeks
Surveys An easy way to find out who’s using your system, why they’re there and what they like and dislike.
  • Getting quantitative data from a lot of people at once.
  • Understanding the basics about your users: who, when and why they come.
  • Getting detailed qualitative feedback from your users (i.e. understanding attitudes and mental models of users)
  • Predicting what users will/won’t do in the future
 3 – 4 weeks
Analytics Understand how users behave on your website by using actual data from their visits.
  • Complimenting other services (such as user testing and expert reviews)
  • Getting real data about issues with your site.
 Using on its own (best to be alongside with other services). 4 hours – ongoing monthly monitoring
Field Studies Gain insight into how people use a system in their typical environment: at work, home or on the go. When user’s context or environment is important (for example, mobile mortgage brokers, or an employee that uses three systems at once) When the users’ context is not important then a standard lab user test is more efficient. 1 – 3 weeks

Design

Service In a nutshell Good for Not good for Duration
Personas Helps to bring users’ needs and attitudes to life by creating fictional Personas. These help to ensure you are designing for the right users and behaviours.
  • Early on in the project
  • When the people developing your system don’t have easy access to your users.
 Later stages of your project. 1 – 8 weeks
Information Architecture We help you design a structure, labelling and navigation that make your content easy to find.
  • Large content rich sites. Especially large government, financial and telecommunication websites.
  • Benchmarking the performance of your current information architecture.
 Small function-rich websites 4 – 6 weeks
Interaction Design Designing how users will interact with a system or screen. Generally starts with lo-fi concepts and works through to clickable prototypes.
  • Any system that will be used by real people.
  • Projects where the experience of the end user is important
  • Projects that are nearly complete
  • Projects with no user interface
 Wide range.
Visual Design Visual design adds life to a system. It can delight, evoke emotions, persuade users, and help users interact more easily with a screen.

Strategy

Service In a nutshell Good for Not good for Duration
Service Design Looks at the end-to-end user experience for any service. Reviews the current state, looks at the ideal state, and then identifies and fixes the gaps.
  • When you have control over an entire service
  • Early in a project to understand the wider experience for your customers.
  • When your project is only a small part of a customers entire experience
  • When you dont have management support
Digital Strategy When you don’t know where to start, a strategy gives you a vision, a road map and clear goals for your channel, service or website.
  • When you can’t articulate what it is you need or want.
  • Getting common agreement with all stake holders.
  • Helping to make decisions about what channels to use, and what to spend your future budget on.
  • Projects that are already well underway.
  • When you already have a clear purpose and vision for your system or user experience.
 2 – 5 weeks