User-Centered Design

At Foviance, our job is to help the world’s leading brands understand their customers better. That means uncovering who they are, along with their expectations, goals, behaviours and attitudes. We use this knowledge to deliver an experience that pleases end customers while ensuring commercial success for our clients.

Before we begin helping clients develop their websites, we try and learn as much as possible about the business, its objectives and its customers. This is because we are a user experience and research firm, not merely a design agency. Many companies will pay for a redesign that is essentially just a makeover that shuffles various content elements around to provide a new look and feel. This approach fails to measure the quality of the user experience when interacting with a website, and will miss even basic issues with navigation, such as inappropriate titles and taxonomy.

We take a user centered approach to design that examines exactly what a site needs to do to improve the experience of those who use it. We undertake benchmarking and user testing to see exactly how customers are interacting with a site. We look at competing sites in the same market as our clients, to see what they’re doing. We also study best practice sites, such as Amazon, or Flickr.

This is what we term the ‘discovery phase’. Sometimes we uncover content that a client didn’t remember it was hosting, or find long forgotten functionality that is no longer working. None of this is good practice. We conduct site audits and click on any and everything. If a site is particularly vast, we might suggest delving only as far as sections and sub-sections within the main site is the best use of time. Once we have gained a deeper understanding of what a client actually has on its site, we can begin building a site map, or an organisational chart that reveals whether all content is in its optimum place. We validate this with card sorting exercises to ensure customers are aligned with our thinking.

Think of this process as if we were taking all the goods from a supermarket out into a car park, then restack the shelves in the most logical way for customers. This is done by breaking content down into cards, Post-its, objects in online tools – it doesn’t matter as long as it makes sense when we show our thinking to a sample of real customers, this helps to establish trends of opinion. In this way we are able to either validate current structure or create a new recommended site map as a basis for the design phase.

In the design phase we use wireframes on Visio, PowerPoint or even whiteboards. At this stage we still work in greyscale, but we are able to define elements and inform navigation. A new recommended sitemap will reflect this as well as the improved taxonomy, enabling customers to find things more easily and enjoy their experience more. Multiple wireframe iterations and rounds of user testing refine the process before it is handed over to a graphic designer to lay on brand identity and image. The graphic designer benefits from the groundwork and has a purely design exercise, retaining all the navigation, organisation and content rationale of the wireframes while ensuring colour, palette and sufficient scalability.

So this is how we do User Centered Design. It’s a sound methodology that has been rewarded with many success stories. If a client comes to us with a site that isn’t performing and a set of targets, this is how we get them to where they need to be. Can a serious business afford not to do this? Well, we believe that it is vital to get user input into design and functionality of all services, otherwise redesigners aren’t informed, they are simply based on assumptions – a dangerous strategy. A business does know its customers, of course, but without user testing, these impressions can’t fail to be at least partly a reflection of internal opinions that require independent verification.

At Foviance we understand the complexities involved through experience, and know that user testing of services in the early stages will definitely save money and time – wireframes are cost-effective and easy to change compared to a finished site. Sometimes it pays to bring in a specialist. Everyone is a photographer, but can everyone take professional quality pictures every time?