User Centred Design Strategy

As experts in the user-centred design process we can work with your design teams to transfer skills and provide support throughout the development cycle. We can also provide customised design courses.

We follow a user-centred design process (based on international usability standard ISO 9241 which we helped develop) to integrate usability into your design process in order to

• improve customer satisfaction
• increase your sales
• reduce your development times and costs.

The process has four main stages:

• Understanding and specifying the context of use (creating user, task and environment profiles)
• Specifying user and organisational requirements and setting effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction targets
• Producing designs based on current best practice.  We can produce full visual designs if required. 
• User testing to evaluate designs against requirements and targets.

We have developed practical checklists and tools to make sure that the procedures we use all conform with international usability standards.

Benefits of user centred design

• Improves the acceptability and usability of systems and products and reduces cost and effort of fixing usability problems
• Provides clear user and organisational targets for new systems and products against which design solutions can be tested
• Ensures effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction are built into the overall design process
• Improves buy-in of users and other key stakeholders.

Our approach to user centred design

• Structured process which can be incorporated in current design methodologies without major changes to process
• Based on industry best practice and international usability standards - which we helped develop
• Experienced user centred design consultants work closely with your design team.

Typical user centred design projects

• User centred design support to the O2 branded devices team in the development of new phones 
• Providing a full time team of usability and HCI (Human Computer Interaction) specialists on site as sub-contractors to the Affinity consortium who were implementing a new IT system for the Child Support Agency including:
  • Development of a usability strategy with consortium and department representatives
  • Development of a user interface style guide
  • Ongoing design reviews of the system
  • Usability testing in conjunction with the CSA's Model Office team
  • Providing usability assurance for the delivered system.
• User centred design for the Department for Transport's Transport Direct website
• Customised training courses for Ordnance Survey.