Understanding the user's context (tasks, skills, environment etc) is a pre-requisite for designing a usable system. Our profiling and contextual analysis tools help identify appropriate effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction targets for your new designs.

Researching the user experience and capturing both user and organisational requirements are an essential first step in the user centred design process which aims to:

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

Capturing requirements appropriately at the beginning of the design process:

• provides clear targets for the design against which potential design solutions can be tested
• helps ensure that usability issues are given appropriate weight in design decisions
•  reduces the risk of expensive retrospective changes.

 This avoids the problem of only discovering usability issues through testing or expert reviews when the design is already well progressed.

Benefits

• Sets clear user and organisational targets for new systems and products against which design solutions can be tested
• Major issues identified early in design before modifications become expensive
• Ensures effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction become part of the design brief and user acceptance process.

Our approach

• Based on industry best practice and international standards - which we helped develop
• Profiling and textual analysis tools including:
  • empathic research and contextual enquiry techniques
  • participative design approaches
  • ethnographic studies
  • focus groups
  • workshops
• Structured checklists to identify key user, task and organisational issues and to summarise these for your design team
• Experienced usability analysts - familiar with a range of products and systems
• Clear and straightforward results presented in an easy to use format
• Practical recommendations - we will continue to work with you to improve your design.

Typical projects

• Focus groups with disabled people, carers and youth workers for BBC Ouch! website
• Establishing users' requirements, habits, preferences and ideas around mobile messaging and music for the development of the Cocoon phone for O2 
• Interviews and participatory design sessions with travel agents to design a new graphical user interface for Amadeus software
• Investigating potential users for new Xerox product

What do our clients say?

We were impressed with the way in which System Concepts led a group of very diverse individuals, enabling their discussions, appreciating their varied access needs, and guiding them through the complex ideas not only of Ouch's current proposition, but also the ideas we have for future developments. The results of the focus group have been invaluable in influencing the direction of the project. 
Vaughan Simons, Assistant Content Producer, BBC Ouch!

For more information on any of our services, please contact us