User Experience and Usability

Our goal is to help you create great interactive products: website, web applications, and web communities. We've been helping organizations world-wide for many years and we consistently produce breakthrough designs with our clients.

We start with your business goals and help you come to a clear and shared vision of the product you want to develop. We design a product concept that supports your goals and engages and delights your users. We deliver a superb User Experience and add value that more than covers our costs.

We deliver value to companies investing in a web site, web application or web community. Croyten offers five services:

Conceptual & Screen Design

We create a conceptual design that supports the business goals, creates a high quality user experience and is technically feasible. We design from the user’s perspective and create detailed screen wireframes that show navigation and information presentation. Our wireframes are then implemented by the client’s development team or by us.

Expert Reviews

Expert reviews (also called heuristic reviews) can identify most of the usability issues that are likely to occur. In the hands of a competent designer, this type of review can be extremely effective. We have validated the quality of our expert reviews by conducting empirical usability tests on the pages we’ve reviewed. In general we find that careful and thorough reviews catch most of the problems with only a few additional problems being encountered in the usability test. Because expert reviews are less expensive than usability tests, we like to use them frequently.

Web Community Design

Most websites and products can benefit from creating user communities and from integrating web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and user forums you can create communities, gather user-generated data and foster relationships with customers and staff. But to be effective, you need to have a clear strategy and design focus.

Croyten can help. We have extensive experience with Web 2.0, community design and social computing. Design decisions can have an enormous effect on how well communities function. That's why it's important to enlist a top-notch design firm when you are venturing into social computing.

Persona Development

The value of personas is that it clarifies your understanding of the audience you are designing for. Croyten uses personas extensively in the design process. In some cases, we use simple personas that are "best guesses" about the audience. We call these "assumptive personas" and construct the quickly from the knowledge that our clients already have about their users.

In other cases, we develop personas through a rigorous research process. In these cases we identify participants who are typical of the users we are designing for and gather data about them. There are a number of ways to gather the data including: user observation (well-suited to web design), focus groups (excellent for gathering marketing information) and one-on-one interviews. Typically we recommend phone interviews. This would enable us to gather as much data as possible about both individual behavior and attitudes while keeping costs reasonable.

Usability Testing

How do you know the design your are considering is actually usable?
There are two major ways to learn this important information. One is the expert (heuristic) review. The other is usability testing. Croyten offers both.

Usability evaluation - direct observation of people using prototypes or completed software - is critical as a means of understanding not only what they have trouble with, but why. Usability problems observed during a test are analyzed to identify which design principles or usability guidelines were not followed - and correct the design in the next iteration.

Our approach brings results:
- clear examples that can be immediately used to improve an interface
- better understanding of usability issues to improve future work
- recommendations that consider business goals and technology constraint

We offer a range of options for usability tests can be conducted formally or relatively informally. They can be face-to-face, via a formal usability lab, or conducted remotely over the web.

Usability testing can be used to benchmark the current interface and create a clearer picture of the problems which need to be solved in the interface, and can also be used as part of the design process to test prototypes of new designs prior to full commitment and implementation.