Design.
Experience Design
A specialism of our work is experience design. Experience design is a discipline that covers a set of techniques that enable you to design around the needs of your audiences.
There are a number of different tools we use as part of this Experience Design approach. We've broken out the tools into two related workflows: defining the proposition and designing the actual service, site or application.
Defining the proposition
How do the values of the brand match the experience you are trying to create? This is the strategic direction that is the bedrock of the design process. We know how people engage with different web services, applications and social media and work to pull together a strategy that works with your brand, your audience and your resources.
How do we do this? It's helpful to have some research to understand what your audience is doing. There are then a number of different methods and processes that transform insight into useful design stimulus and these include:
- Competitor Analysis: What do the audience think of the emotional and functional benefits of different 'brands'? Where are the opportunities in the market? How can you leverage those opportunities using digital and social media? Research using focus groups, design workshops with 'user maps' help to define the landscape and opportunities.
- Participatory Design: We have a pool of industry experts to deliver workshops in which the user articulates scenarios, needs and solutions based on their lives. Participatory design can be undertaken as a 'guerilla' activity or as a more formal part of the design process.
- Experience Maps: Documenting the touchpoints across an experience such as sharing music through mobiles. Good for understanding the context of experience - the spatial and temporal 'map'.
- Backcasting: Taking an ideal scenario and working backwards to work out how to achieve that scenario. More constructive way to flesh out issues and obstacles to the proposition.
- Scenario Planning: Scenario planning is a process to construct factual, believable stories [social, political, organisational, environmental and technical] about the context within which people will be engaging with your industry, service or product in 2-10 years time. They can allow you to plan, prepare and gain competitive advantage in the sector.
Designing the service
Making services aesthetically engaging is one thing, making them easy to navigate and interact with, is another. Once the proposition is defined we design how it will look and behave and importantly how people will interact with it. To do this we apply user-centred design principles such as:
- Personas: Personas are constructions of your audience or potential audience with example demographic details, interests, needs and scenarios. We build these from research insight. Personas should challenge accepted assumptions of your audience to push the proposition to its limit.
- User Journeys: Creating user journeys through a service based on a scenario around user needs. User journeys are a staple of our work and a good way to critically build up an appreciation of the user and of the social and technical issues involved in providing a useful service.
- Information Architecture: Designing the structure and the way in which people find or navigate through the site or application. We use techniques such as card sorting [getting users to sort descriptors and creating structures around that] for large structured datasets and use folksonomies / user-tagging, where appropriate to organise dynamic datasets.
- Interface Design: effective pattern design, up-to-date research into modes of engagement and types of interaction ensure that designs support the user across the site but also page by page and feature by feature.
- Paper Prototyping [and testing]: Gaining feedback quickly on designs and then bringing that into the design of the service.
Having completed the above, we provide mock-ups of key pages and user journeys and define the service. This constitutes the Service Design Document which is sufficient to describe a service to a development team [who would then write the functional specification]. However, we are able to build the site, web service or application and host it, if required.
As a guideline Service Design work requires a starting budget of £15k and above. In addition to research and design work we offer training research in design techniques. Training workshops for teams start at £2k. Contact us to chat about how we could help.