Ron is currently writing a book for O'Reilly Publishing on "Modern User Experience Design: how to design for the natural user interface." Describing in detail his method for approaching User Experience design and why designers need to start thinking differently. Things that need to be changed in current interfaces and things designers need to watch out for.

 

 

 

The key to solving your problems is understanding your needs. Once you have established your need, your budget, and your timeline, the rest is easy. We can sit down with you and help define milestones, deliverables, and check-ins on our side depending on what your requirements are and what our timeline is. We will adjust our process to your needs and deliver something amazing. Hopefully some of these answers will get you started.

 

Here are answers to some of the most common questions we are asked

"How involved do I need to be in the process?"

This is a very common question and the answer is very simple. How involved do you want to be?

I have been on both ends of the spectrum. Small teams that want to be involved, give feedback, and submit ideas every step of the way. Then on the other end, people who "Hire and forget." Either or is perfectly acceptable after all of our initial questions and our "learning" phase is complete. Tell us everything you know, give us all the customer data you have, and we will take it from there.

"Is User Experience Testing expensive?"

This depends on a few factors, but the common answer is "not usually."

The major factors here are fidelity (how accurate the test program needs to be at the time of testing) and how prepared you are. Being properly prepared can cut your costs down significantly. Don't go into a test with 30 questions. Go into a test with 5 and then iterate. If budget or timeline is tight, there are several things you can do to cut costs with testing. There are several short and sweet methods that we use extensively.

"What exactly is an Interaction Designer / User Experience Designer / Experience Designer?"

This is the field of study based around the examination of Human Computer Interactions. People in this field usually have Psychology Degrees or HCI (Human Computer Interaction) Degrees.

They have been giving PhDs in the field for several years and we happen to have one or two in our ranks. Basically, this is the study of how man interacts with machines. What makes it easy? What makes a particular machine hard? Why do certain websites make it so difficult to navigate? These are problems that we love to solve. If you are having problems converting, but have no idea why, then you probably need a UX Designer to take a look. If you are about to launch a product into a space with no relevant UX Data, then you absolutely need us.

"What exactly do you do after we hire you?"

The simple answer is we do what we need to do to communicate the correct path to your existing developers or designers.

The key to success on our mission is to properly handoff a fully detailed set of documents that properly explain what our research has proven. Along the way we create Experience Briefs, User Scenarios, User Mental Models, perform Competitive Analysis, Trends Analysis, Task Landscaping, WOW Experience Definitions, and many other things as well depending on the client and the project. We can brainstorm solutions, tasking, rich user environments, and other things for you and your product. We can help sell your product to the upper management using experience sketches, scenarios, and prototypes.

"What do you have experience in?"

Just about everything.

Ron started out as a developer 13 years ago, programming PHP/C# at the birth of the web. He developed the first spiderman.com, the first "Music" Experience at MySpace (while it was still privately held), the Clear Channel Radio Station Network, Lead Design on Yahoo's initial AJAX Mail Interface, Disney's Toontown Portal, and several other things. He has been in User Experience for 10 years (before the dot com bubble to put it in perspective) and chose this field because of his passion for making things usable.

Most recently he has been specializing in touch interfaces and multi-touch interfaces. Working at the Surface Team helping develop an entire system around touch without the use of a physical keyboard, and most recently he was at the Advanced Design Team helping Microsoft align their Natural User Interface strategy. In similiar fashions he has been working in the mobile space for several years and some other interesting products.

We are the Seattle based Human Computer Interaction Specialists.