Services: User Experience, User Centered

Luminanze Consulting offers user-centered services to help make your products and systems effective, efficient, and satisfying for their users. Our services fall into six broad categories (summarized below):

• Goal setting
• Research and analysis
• Product evaluation
• User experience design
• User assistance design
• Life cycle support

In collaboration with our clients, we tailor these services to the needs of each project at appropriate points in its life cycle.

Goal setting

Before beginning a project, you need to plan it and define what you want from it. Goal setting can produce business goals and objectives, success metrics and criteria, and business requirements. Here's how we can help:

• Stakeholder interviews — Interview the project's stakeholders, in groups or individually
• Vision and planning workshops — Facilitate workshops, which can last from a few hours to a few days

Research and analysis

Building a successful product requires understanding the goals and needs of the target audiences. Research and analysis can identify audience goals and produce audience personas and user-centered requirements. Here's how we can help:

• Interviews and contextual inquiry — Interview users, via phone or in the context of their environments, to learn about their goals, processes, and use of tools
• Content inventory and analysis — Inventory the pages and links in a web site and identify attributes such as document type, topics, keywords, and currency
• Content prioritization — Identify the relative priorities that users give to content and functions
• Persona development — Identify patterns of audience goals and behaviors, and synthesize them into personas
• Task analysis — Identify and analyze the tasks performed to accomplish the users' goals
• Focus groups — Moderate group sessions to explore audience attitudes and reactions to proposed product features
• User-centered requirements definition — Translate the audiences' goals, needs, and priorities into user-centered requirements for the product
• System engineering support — Assist system engineering in understanding human factors issues and making tradeoffs that will enable them to better allocate functions and other requirements to personnel or other system components

Product evaluation

Evaluation identifies usability problems with your current product or a prototype or emerging design. It can give you anything from quick fixes to strategic recommendations to a snapshot of user task performance. Here's how we can help:

• Expert review — Examine the existing product with respect to industry best practices, at levels from a high-level heuristic review to a detailed inspection for compliance with specific standards or guidelines
• Surveys — Design and conduct online surveys to collect and analyze information from your target audiences
• Usability testing — Watch representative users as they use the product, and see how well it supports them in reaching their goals and accomplishing their tasks; identify empirically what works and what needs improvement
• Help desk call analysis — Interview help desk personnel and/or review call logs to identify common problems about which users call for help
• Section 508 assessment — Review and assess Web sites for compliance with Section 508 regulations; review pages, inspect code, run through automated tools, exercise with screen reading software

User experience design

User experience design develops all aspects of the UE design from the user's perspective, from information architecture to interaction design to graphic design to prototypes. Here's how we can help:

• Information architecture — Design the organization and labelling of the content of a web site, using techniques such as card sorting, site mapping, hierarchy development
• Interaction design, user interface design — Design the appearance and behavior of interactive products and systems such as Web sites, software applications, complex systems
• Style guide development — Select guidelines and standards, and tailor them to project needs

User assistance design

Regardless of their usability, most products and systems need some kind of accompanying materials that guide and assist the users in learning and using the products. User assistance design can produce and/or evaluate user guides, online help, tutorials, and electronic or printed training materials. Here's how we can help:

• Interaction design, user interface design — Design the appearance and behavior of interactive user assistance for products and systems
• Usability assessment — Review and/or usability-test user assistance materials
• Training design and evaluation — Design training materials

Life cycle support

To develop usable products, you need to establish usability and user-centered design as integral components of your development process. Here's how we can help:

• Process integration — Work with your process team to integrate the user experience process and user-centered methods into your system/product life cycle; help write standards for specs, style guides, etc., to be used in the process