User experience (or UX) focuses on the end-to-end experience someone has using your site, application or product. It’s about how they feel when they are using it, their perceptions and expectations. It’s about how well this experience allows them to meet their goals, their needs, whether these are personal or practical. Regardless of how well you know your business, or how well you understand the technology you are working with, by ignoring the user experience you risk a white elephant, alienating your staff or customers.
To avoid this, Object Consulting’s UX capability focuses on six key elements.
1. Balance
UX is about finding balance. Your business has its goals, your staff or customers have (evolving) expectations and the technology being used has strengths and limitations. Object Consulting looks at all of these to find the right balance when designing your solution for your users and hence your business.
2. Understanding
UX is not about you. It is about understanding the people who will actually be interacting with what you are building. It is about getting to know them, what they are good at, what is beyond them and what they can learn. Our UX team does not simply ask, we observe, explore, check and check again – and then UX techniques are used to turn this knowledge into a meaningful solution.
3. Meeting expectations
UX is about meeting user expectations, which have increased exponentially over the past decade. Rich interfaces and interactions are offered every day on the web, on multi-touch driven technologies and on mobile devices. Users expect this every day - at home, at work, when they are on the move. They expect to do what they want to do, when they want to do it, in a way that they are used to, or at least in a way that they can quickly figure out.
4. Desirability
UX is about making something desirable. A great UX leaves a lasting impression. It is one that people talk about, one that they share with others, one that they are happy to do time and time again. UX aims to minimise frustration, because it knows what is frustrating and avoids it. It is about deciding whether to put emphasis on fun, or on information or on completing a task – it aims to empower the person using it by knowing what is driving them, what will work for them.
5. Focus
UX is about retaining focus. It is about making sure that time and money is spent on those things that matter, ensuring value for money. It is not about making sure that everything meets every possible need and expectation for every possible type of person, every single time. It is about identifying what is needed when, by whom and then ensuring that the solution focuses on that which is important.
6. Return on investment
UX does not waste money building the wrong solution. It identifies user issues or concerns when they are just early concepts, or in the early stages of design when they are easy to adjust. It confirms assumptions during development. It helps avoid burning money when these are discovered after people start using it and they are most costly to change. Our UX team ensures that your solution reaches its desired return on investment.