Design and Evaluation

At the Design and Usability Center (DUC), we believe that successful design comes from an informed and validated approach.  Whether you’re in the earliest stages of sketching out ideas, or working with currently released designs, we offer a proven methodology of design and evaluation that will provide solutions to critical challenges.

Assess Critical Design Issues

It's often hard for designers to spot the problems in their own design. In some cases, the most effective solution is to have an outside expert quickly diagnose design problems interferring with business success. The DUC can provide an immediate tactical assessment of your product and deliver a set of detailed and prioritized recommendations for immediate improvements to the user experience.

What we do:

• Identify key user groups and task flows
• Analyze key elements of navigation, page flow, interaction model, and information architecture
• Evaluate elements of detailed design including information density, look and feel, and branding
• Conduct a comprehensive UX analysis against key competitors
• Provide prioritized, detailed design recommendations for immediate impact to the user experience

Develop Intuitive User Interface Structure

Creating an “intuitive” design mostly comes down to whether or not the key structural elements (navigation, information hierarchy, layout, and interaction) match user expectations.  We can use several techniques to diagnose whether your current design structure matches what your users expect, or even help create one based on user insights.

What we do:

• Conduct focused user research as needed
• Identify critical and frequent use cases
• Conduct card sorts to identify the optimal information hierarchy
• Review task flow for opportunities to optimize efficiency
• Provide a solid foundation for design structure to inform detailed visual design efforts

Build Early Design Concepts

The DUC creates early design concepts as an integral part of the user-centered design process. These designs are typically represented as a series of wireframes, without a finished look. Early design concepts include page layout, task flows, and some level of interaction. We strongly believe that designing and evaluating a various conceptual designs is critical to arriving at the right design.

What we do:

• Create sample page layouts
• Design wireframes of representative pages/screens
• Create workflow diagrams
• Develop clickable prototypes

Conduct Usability Testing

The DUC provides a range of services for testing websites, software, mobile applications, consumer products, and medical devices. We conduct performance-based studies with actual end usersin order to observe and identify critical design problems. Testing can be done in our state-of-the-art labs, remotely, or in the field.

What we do:

• Create testing scenarios that lead users through representative tasks
• recruit and schedule representative users for testing
• Observe and document key usability issues
• Provide video recordings of all sessions
• Document and recommend critical design improvements

When to Consider Design and Evaluation Services

• When embarking on a new design or re-design of your product
• When users have difficulty interacting with the core features of your system
• When web metrics show unusual or unexpected activity
• When you need to improve the chances of success in the market