UX Research & Discovery
Performance by Design
The best digital products are designed with intention. Good software should have, purposely woven into its architecture, an informed design that takes into account a wide variety of criteria extending well beyond basic business requirements.
While attempting to solve a business problem through an automated utility might be the rudimentary goal, losing sight of for whom we are solving and why is the first and grandest error and oversight of software development.
It’s one thing to have a general understanding of what to build, and to have the capacity to accomplish it, but the reason most software projects fail and become ingloriously laden with development cost is that they are not properly designed using User Experience best practices for understanding users, their expectations, abilities, and/or interest.
User as Stakeholder - Understanding your intended actor.
While the impetus for your project may be driven by a regulatory requirement or an executive mandate, the primary stakeholder in any interface based application is still the end user.
To deliver an excellent product for a user base/market/audience it is not advantageous for a project lead or stakeholder to assume needs and build to those assumptions. Successful digital projects actually budget the necessary time to conduct the appropriate research to determine the usefulness, needs, expectations, process gaps, and other root-cause drivers that only emerge from thorough user stakeholder engagement.
For consumer facing digital channel products, proformUX specializes in developing complex Personas with full psychographic overlays that draw from a wide array of data sources like analytics, sentiment, social listening, census/market data.
For internally facing, SaaS, or other B2B applications, our User Interviews and Aggregated Data Reports help you truly capture the expectations of your audience and get the honest feedback you need to be most successful.
Discovery - Design Thinking, User Centered Design (UCD), and Service Design
With the the user base properly understood, Discovery efforts can then begin. To set the general course for a possible high level product solution, proformUX incorporates a wide variety of product Design Workshops or team based “CRIT" Sessions using Design Thinking, and User Centered Design (UCD) principles. Honed over nearly two decades of successful digital product design, these sessions will help you and your team understand your stakeholders, users, impacted systems, and more.
Based on output from Design Thinking & UCD sessions, and the resulting stakeholder interviews, proformUX will help you and your team establish and document a Service Design Ecology Map through which you can assess, project, and socialize your project’s risks, impacts, opportunities. Your Service Design Model will demonstrate to your potential stakeholders how your project idea integrates to existing and potential system and human actors. This effort is a key component of establishing business readiness and helps others establish confidence in your effort.