Steve Mariani

[one_third] [iconbox icon=”crop” title=”Scalable” type=”inline”]Enabling velocity – quick deployment & analysis time. Economical. Fast participation. Easy to produce & use where user is located.[/iconbox] [/one_third] [one_third] [iconbox icon=”dollar” title=”Economical” type=”inline”]Cost effective, especially compared to other methods that product lesser or equal results.[/iconbox] [/one_third] [one_third_last] [iconbox icon=”bolt” title=”Rapid” type=”inline”]Quickly and easily administered. Actionable results are rapidly analyzed to produce impactful solutions.[/iconbox] [/one_third_last] [one_third] [iconbox icon=”arrow-right” title=”Predictive” type=”inline”]The results are consistent and repeatable. Predicts behavior (especially likelihood to recommend and purchase). [/iconbox] [/one_third] [one_third] [iconbox icon=”bullseye” title=”Sensitive” type=”inline”]Uncovers important issues when they are present. Culture and language adaptable.[/iconbox] [/one_third] [one_third_last] [iconbox icon=”gavel” title=”Actionable” type=”inline”]Allows for actionable insights, rapid and informed decision making. Root cause analysis of UX issues. [/iconbox] [/one_third_last] [divider_line][divider_padding] [icon_font type=”puzzle-piece” size=”4x” pull=”left”]

Experience Strategy

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Experience Research

We help you unlock hidden business opportunities by better understanding your customers. We define & measure your success improving your product and your customers fatisfaction and loyalty.

Our process and methods are: Scientific, Scalable, Reliable, Quantitative/Qualitative and Generate Actionable Results.

Observing your end-users through user research is the best way to understand them. We take understanding end-users’ needs and objectives seriously.

We’ll help you uncover latent needs.

Understanding your users, how they use products and services and the business opportunities they present is key to a product’s success. We will work with you to help you answer questions such as:

• Who is using the system and what are their needs and goals?
• What key characteristics describe the individuals who will use a system?
• What workflow patterns and user preference issues are important?
• How should the context in which a system will be used impact its design?

We use well established methods as well as avant-grade methodologies to save you time and money. Some methods we are are field studies and site visits, user surveys, contextual interviews, task and workflow analysis, ethnographic techniques, and others.

Surveys

User surveys are useful for capturing opinion and preference data from a large sample, making robust statistical analysis possible. User surveys can be administered via website, e-mail, telephone, or postal mail.

Contextual Interviews

Site visits to homes, offices, and other places provide insights into users’ true actions and behaviors when and where they use products. Contextual interviews involve partnering with users, who instruct the observers about how they work and use products as well as answer interview questions. These methods can help identify existing and latent product needs.

Task Analysis

Task analysis is often an output of site visits and entails deconstructing tasks of interest into simpler, discrete components. Tasks are defined and lists are made of the steps involved to achieve task goals. Task analysis helps identify critical elements of a task, potential usability issues, and aspects of a user interface that may have been overlooked.

Retail Experience Studies

In retail experience studies, researchers seek to understand how consumers make decisions about their technology product purchases. Experts can be sent out to “shadow” shoppers, observe shopping behaviors, and conduct pre- or post- purchase interviews.

International User Research

Conducting user research or usability testing in international markets of interest uncovers important cultural and societal variables that impact the usability and acceptance of products by their intended users.

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Experience Design

We help you enhance the emotional resonance of your Brand and products with your customers across digital, interpersonal and physical products and services.

Save time and money by rapidly prototyping and iterating your ideas with users to validate that you’ve got the right solutions and quickly make course correction before investing in development.

Seeing is believing. We help you tell your story with UI Prototyping, Demos and Front-end Development.

UI Prototyping

We creates interactive prototypes to better understand how a user is going to interact with an application.  We do this to help define how interactions are going to work and to test designs with users. We builds prototypes for:

• Websites
• Web applications
• Tablets
• Mobile Devices

We take a User Centered Design approach.

We focuses on an upfront understanding of user needs (which may include user research) and obtaining user feedback early in the design process.

• How will content and features be organized in the system?
• What are the scenarios which support your users in meeting their goals?
• What are the business objectives for the system?

Regardless of your development methodology (Agile, RUP, unstructured) we can tailor a project that fits into your current processes, budget, and timeframe. We design for any project phase including:

• New system development
• System upgrades
• Redesign of existing functionality

Our approach with every design project is to work closely with your project team to create the most useful and usable system possible. Although each project has unique needs, we typically create three main deliverables: high-level architecture maps, screen flow diagrams and wireframe prototypes. Methods we use for arriving at these deliverables include mental modeling, objects and actions mapping, and user scenarios.

High-Level Architecture Maps

With our understanding of your users’ needs and your business goals, we address the high level architecture with the following considerations:

• Goals of your target users
• Scenarios that support your users in meeting their goals
• Business objectives for the different components of the system

We communicate the architecture through large-scale navigation maps which illustrate the information hierarchy and the grouping of content and functions. These “blueprints” introduce the recommended system vocabulary-terms to be used consistently throughout the site.

Screen Flow Diagrams

Screen flow diagrams are more in-depth blueprints that show how the user will experience content and functions of a particular section or flow. These define, for example, the flow of a search functionality, registration, or document download. In creating screen flow diagrams, the system vocabulary is typically expanded to include a greater level of detail. These diagrams provide a visual representation of functionality, which is a highly effective communication tool throughout the development process.

Wireframe Prototyping

Wireframes are a key element of every design project. They consist of grayscale page layouts that illustrate the key components of each screen or page. Early in a project, wireframes help project teams visualize and refine requirements. Later in a project, wireframes serve as the basis for prototype testing. This testing -done before the design goes into development -allows for changes to the design while it’s still easy and inexpensive to make modifications.