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White Pond Design Process

Listen

The key to building a successful user interaction is having an understanding of the customer's goals and expectations. The ability to listen is the best asset for gaining this understanding.

Obviously the customer, not to be confused with the person responsible for the purchase order, provides the richest source of task insights. There are others in your organization that are also vested in helping the customer achieve his/her goals:

  • Professional Services
  • Customer Support
  • Documentation
  • Training

Poor usability is often accompanied by a deaf ear directed towards these different organizations. Being vested in a specific design, a specific product offering, or sales objective can muffle the voice of the customer.

Learn

Listening to the customer provides necessary but insufficient data for interaction design, or more generally speaking, tool design.

  • Context of work - For a product tool to be effective, it needs to comfortably reside in the customer's palette of other tools. The tool design needs to respect the time budget required for the target task.
  • Customer's domain - An appropriate understanding of the customer's domain, e.g. Product Manager, Mechanical Engineer, etc. is required to build an effective tool.

Design

Armed with the analysis described above the interaction design can proceed. The following steps outline that process:

  • Task scenarios, personas; describe who needs to do what.
  • Essential model; objects, verbs, and relationships.
  • Product requirements; impact of essential model on product requirements.
  • Primary and secondary workflows.
  • High fidelity mockups.
  • Repeat; this is an iterative process.

Deliver

Designs are not enough. We deliver:

  • Designs that can be built on a target technology by the available team.
  • Design iterations that reflect the rapid acquisition of feedback.
  • The specific product requirements necessary for a quality customer experience.
  • Designs on time; development is not gated by the delivery of designs. The budget for process steps is schedule driven.
  • Guerilla usability testing; video tapped validation of interaction designs.

 

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