Archive for the ‘Experience Strategy’ Category

What is UX and how can it help your business?

November 17th, 2009

Ux stands for ‘user experience’.  It can be applied to a wide range of disciplines and we, at Lushai, work it in the online or web space (so far) and work it good.

It is about the experience that you create for your users (these are your customers and other interested visitors or people who stumble across your site from Google).  It permeates every facet of web design from your idea to content to code.

To me a great user experience is one you don’t notice, (it’s only us webby folk that would rave about it) but to your average user they are just satisfied the tool (website) has successfully enabled them to complete their task. Be it book tickets, find the content or article they were looking for or navigate through a photo album.

As the web becomes richer with multiple channels and levels of visual and physical emphasis it is sometimes best to step back and keep it simple.  We like to solve problems. We like to know what your users face as a challenge online and we want to solve it, preferably with you. We enjoy solving complex problems (and sometimes the not so complex problems) with simple solutions.

For us good UX equals smart business.  How could it not be? You are discovering what your user needs to solve their issues and problems.

How do we find out what their problems are?
We use a range of techniques.  One could be trailing them in their work place or their natural user environment. Asking them probing, to-the-point questions, leading questions and vague searching questions (you name it we ask them!) Then once we know your users and their problems we use this to inform our design and create the solution.

Example:

  • You: You are a business, so you want insight into how the people that visit your site (your users) will think, act, and react when using your site right?
  • Us: We’ll use UX research techniques to gather information from your users, yourself & your business.
  • Users: What are their goals when they come to your site? How can you achieve these gracefully and successfully?
  • Business: what are you wanting to achieve with your site? What are the business goals for your site?
  • Together: We will work with you to create a site that reflects your business needs and your users needs. Design and wireframe the concepts we will walk through together. We’ll apply best practice principles, creativity and kick ass design to solve the problems and  needs of both parties.

With good UX  you can get your product or service connecting with your user and answering their needs.

What Ux means to me:  An overall experience that is as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Gracefully taking me from one useful piece of information to the other.  Anticipating my needs, meeting then and every now and then surprising and delighting me.

Time for planning?

October 19th, 2008

because of the economic downturn, it must make lots of people worried about where to spend their money for projects and build new things, where there is still an endless supply of ideas. i think it would be a smart to spend a bit, maybe a fifth, fourth or third of that investment, on a plan – an explicit one that outlines what the idea looks like, how it could work, how it helps people, what the experience of using it would be and most importantly why it is different from other ideas.

i think this would help – just  a few that comes off the top of my head:

  • the business and investors to decide whether this idea is feasible and ask the right question. they have something tangible and something they can “see”.
  • the business to decide which parts of this idea to start working on
  • the designers to know what to focus on
  • the developers to clearly think of the architecture of the product or website or whatever the idea is
  • to add more to this list…


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