User research and requirements capture
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.
Capturing user and organisational requirements are an essential first step in the user centred design process which aims to improve customer satisfaction, increase your sales and reduce your development times and costs. Ensuring that these requirements are captured appropriately at the beginning of the design process provides clear targets for the design against which potential design solutions can be tested. Capturing these requirements as part of the normal design process helps ensure that usability issues are given appropriate weight in design decisions. This avoids the problem of only discovering usability issues through testing or expert reviews when the design is already well progressed. Capturing requirements at the earliest possible stage reduces the risk of expensive retrospective changes.
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
- 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
- Creating personas for testing Hewlett Packard printers
- Investigating potential users for new Xerox product
- Capturing requirements was included in our methodology to design a front-end for a relational database system for an international software company.
For more information on any of our services, please contact us