UX Research & Design Strategy
Why Start With UX Research & Design Strategy?
The cost of poor UX is well-documented. Yet some companies still struggle with figuring out how to transform themselves into design-driven enterprises. It’s as if there’s a secret, a magic sauce that some companies have and others lack. But good design is not magic. There’s a proven process of creative problem solving that delights customers and delivers better business results. It’s called Design Thinking, and it can be applied to new development initiatives, website and app redesigns, or even process and service problems.
Here at eCity Interactive, we help companies drive better business results by delighting users. From one-time user research efforts to complete UX strategy overhauls, we’re here to help. Want to learn more? Give us a shout. We’d love to learn more about your next project!
eCity’s Approach to UX Research & Design
Each project begins with a detailed understanding of your business objectives. We interview stakeholders, ensure your business goals align with your customers’ needs, and identify areas for further research. Based on the results, our UX experts tailor their approach to your project conducting a series of design and testing activities.
Facing a big challenge or building something new?
Don’t waste time and money building the wrong solution. Through a series of time-boxed exercises, our expert facilitators will lead your team through a 5-stage design sprint resulting in a prototype that’s already been evaluated and tested by real users. The benefits of design sprints:
- Eliminate the risks associated with a heavy upfront investment
- Generate thoughtful design approaches and quickly converge on the best approach to prototype and test
- Discover what you need to know while fostering a spirit of innovation and collaboration across your team
Looking to redesign an existing website, app, or product?
Learn how to dramatically improve what you already have. A UX Audit is an expert evaluation of your site, app, or solution based on a set of UX heuristics. These heuristics provide teams with a way of breaking down the attributes of user experience into descriptive categories. Our Audit Report will give you a clear understanding of the issues, their relative severity, and suggested approaches for improvement.
Need to measure your current UX and make a solid plan for improvement?
Learn how to evaluate and improve your UX quality like a pro. It can be challenging to get your team to have a shared understanding of the quality of your user experience. Without this, it remains vague and difficult to discuss in a meaningful way. We’ll show you how to create a UX scorecard that accurately reflects the current user experience of your offering and how to use that scorecard to define a UX roadmap.
Our UX Research & Design Services
Browse our services. If you have any questions along the way, feel free to reach out! We’d love to chat. UX research and design can be best explained in the following 4 categories:
UX Strategy
Stakeholder Interviews
We’ll help your project team align with stakeholders’ business goals, prioritize each group’s needs, and communicate how they fit into the design process.
Goal Prioritization Sessions
Different departments may have different (or even competing) goals; we help all stakeholders understand their role within the bigger picture and prioritize their requests.
Design Sprints
Design sprints are a proven method for solving big problems. Our expert facilitators will walk you through an immersive, 5-day process comprised of collaborative, time-boxed exercises. Your team will quickly define a specific problem, develop a potential solution, and test it with real users – all in 1 week.
Content Strategy Workshops
A true content strategy considers not just web copy but also the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of everything that appears on a website. We’ll ensure that your content is not only meaningful to your website visitors but also well-structured and easy to find.
UX Baselining & Improvement Planning
To truly know where you stand allows you to plan effectively for improvement. We’ll work with your team to assess UX quality, create a scorecard, and plan for future improvement.
Generative UX Research
User Surveys
Collect feedback and other information from a broad group of users to learn who your users are, their goals, and what information would be most helpful for them.
User Interviews
Valuable insights are gained by interviewing experts — those who will use the website, app, or product to meet their needs. Those insights inform the design process and ensure that we’re solving the right problem for the right users.
Contextual Observation & Interview
Observing user behavior in context provides more detailed and accurate information than interviews and feedback sessions alone. Direct observation of use reveals how well the asset is actually performing and highlights specific issues that can then be addressed.
Card Sorting Exercises
With your users’ participation, we can get instant input or feedback on your site’s information architecture. This helps us understand users’ expectations and priorities, which improves the entire site.
Persona Development
Interim persona development is a team exercise that helps us understand what you already know about your users. Our generative research activities take that understanding even further. We document our findings in the form of user personas which will become valuable assets to your team.
Competitive Review
Our UX experts will do a heuristic analysis of your primary competitors’ offerings so you know where you stand against the competition from a UX perspective.
Evaluative UX Research
Prototyping
We’ll quickly create simple interactive product drafts that help explore ideas and get user feedback before investing in a full redesign.
Usability Testing
Usability testing provides direct input on how real people interact with a system. Representatives are asked to complete tasks while expert facilitators observe them to find out where they encounter problems or experience confusion.
UX Audit
Our UX experts will evaluate your current offering against a set of UX heuristics that educate teams on the basic principles of design. Our detailed report provides a prioritized and categorized list of issues with recommended solutions.
Information Architecture
Content Inventory / Site Mapping
A content inventory is an analysis of the various types of pages on a website and the navigational pathways throughout it. The content inventory is documented in a sitemap which is a hierarchical representation of a website’s structure.
User Flow & Scenario Development
User flows are simple, useful diagrams that document a path of user activity. They are a good way to understand a core feature of a website, app or product without getting lost in the minutia. Likewise, a scenario is the written equivalent of a user flow diagram and tells the story of a user journey.
Page Architecture & Wireframe Creation
Wireframes document the page architecture. They are the structural blueprints upon which the pages are designed. They also provide details required by the development team for implementation.
Let’s Get to Work!
Need help with research and design for a new feature? Need to make it easier for users to navigate your site? Don’t know what you need? Give us a shout. We’re here to help!