A decade ago, you could make significant improvements to your website's performance by improving its usability. Can you remember how poor most sites looked back then? Just making the site work a bit better was enough to get a headstart on the competition.
Thankfully, technology and design has moved on a lot since those early days. But this does mean that gaining a competitive edge from your website’s performance is ever more challenging.
Exceed expectations
You still need to meet all your user's basic needs, but you also need to exceed their expectations to make a really positive impression. Life is too complicated to expect your customers to tolerate a poor website and poor service. This is where good user experience design comes into its own: making sure people get an effective, efficient and satisfying experience. If you don't cater to these needs, people are unlikely to have good experiences and become brand advocates.
Understand your customers
Right at the beginning of the work we do, we find out about the people who will use what we make, and what they want to do with it. We call this user experience research.
This research can include usability testing and depth interviews where we speak to members of our client's target audience to gather their requirements. Sometimes we do this in the office or in research facilities, and sometimes we do this 'live' out in the field, like in airport departure lounges. Wherever it takes place, the important thing is that real people's needs are recorded and incorporated into our designs.
Our aim is to marry user needs with the business needs; websites need make money as well as be useful!
User centred design
When we have an understanding of what we need to build, we start designing and problem solving. This is known as user centred design and it’s a bit like drawing out architectural blueprints, as the wireframes we produce are the basis for all subsequent work. We sketch ideas and then transfer them into a prototyping tool called Axure. This allows our user experience and interaction designers (Iwein, Bonny and Pete) to create clickable, interactive prototypes to share with the rest of our team and our clients.
This set of templates forms the basis of all the work we go on to do: our designers use wireframes to understand what information and layout different pages need and our developers use the prototype to plan and specify how they need to build the project.
Keeping users at the heart of all our designs ensures the sites we produce are effective for both our clients and our client's clients.
Our latest thinking about user experience research and design