Research
Stakeholder Interviews
Interviews conducted with internal stakeholders focus on goals, usage trends, challenges, success metrics, and desired outcomes.
Contextual Inquiries
Contextual inquiries are ethnographic field studies of a user interacting with a site or system in his/her natural environment. Observing behavior offers more insight into hurdles and issues than a simple interview.
Site Audit
A site audit is a systematic analysis of the ease of use, effectiveness, and aesthetics of a site or system, based on design principles and industry standards.
Competitive Analysis
Checking out what the competition is getting right and what they're getting wrong goes a long way toward understanding the industry and more fully supporting users' needs and goals.
Card Sort
A card sort offers insight into the mental models of users accessing a site or system. It helps determine how users would naturally group the content in the site or system as well as how they would be inclined to label those groups. Intuitive site maps and user-friendly global navigation labels emerge from card sorts.
Tree Test
The purpose of a tree test is to test the navigability of the hierarchy of a website or system. The results enable us to see where users expect to find certain information and indicate what changes need to be made to existing or proposed hierarchies.
User Profiles
User profiles are created to better understand and represent key user segments. The use of profiles is considered a best practice in user-centered design because they provide a concrete and holistic customer model that informs the design team of important goals, motivations, and other pertinent user attributes that affect the online experience.
User Journeys
User journeys provide a brief narrative of a user’s projected interaction with a system. Each journey highlights a user profile; a scenario that gives a brief overview of the user’s goals; and a system-specific flow in which the user navigates through an ideal experience. Journeys help to inform both design and usability testing by defining user tasks and necessary site requirements.