Creative and UI Designs

User interface is soul of any application and plays major part in user experience about an application. A poor functionality support can't bring a good experience. However, a poorly designed user interface is certainly going to leave users dissatisfied and shall result in reduced operational efficiency and productivity. With help of extensive research including user research and usability testing, we try to create interactive and visual designs with focus on operational efficiency and improved productivity.

Our designing process starts with user research to understand what they want, their likes and dislikes, operational environment and habits through interviews, surveys, contextual inquiry, task analysis etc. We classify their requirement into MUST HAVE, SHOULD HAVE AND COULD HAVE categories to ensure priorities are in place and in case of conflict between design and functionality requirements, we have enough indicators to decide on which one is the winner or a truce is required.

Usability Testing is an important process in our software development process. Very early in our implementation process, we engage prospective users on sampling basis to get their feedback on the user interfaces we build to ensure that the designs will throw no surprises when the application/solution goes into production. We also identify areas of conflict between usability expectations and operational and functional requirements. One of the frequently encountered conflicts is between ease of operation and security requirement. We try to minimise the conflict with help of design changes, new system processes, new technologies and user/developer education.

The following are some of the methods used by us during our design process:

Wireframe
Wireframes are blueprint of the web solution UI which mostly contains still images of user interfaces to be developed, proposed behaviour, structure, navigation, and content layout. Due to non-technical nature of content of wireframes, it works like common language between the business users and developers. The wireframes allow users (both business users and developers) to understand what the solution is going to be and what should they expect when the latter is ready.

Storyboarding and Flowcharts
Next step after wireframing is creating storyboards which typically, in our case, contain one or several cases of real life process as stories. The process flowcharts are prepared around these stories to get logical flow of the different screens .
The storyboard helps business users and developers in understanding the context (with help of the story) and the application which will carry that story through.

Prototyping
A first step in usability test, we create prototypes that is mock application without underlying functionality support (like database integration etc.) to allow business users to have a feel of how the interfaces would behave when they will use it. We use tools like several design tools like Flash, HTML/CSS, PDF, Silverlight etc.

Agile is the way to go
All pre-implementation techniques are no guarantee that the design will meet optimum user expectations and functions requirements. We recommend Agile approach to have continuous validation and feedbacks from users. In Agile, we create a collaborative team of developers and business users who interact regularly and as frequently as on daily basis to get review the progress of the implementation and the implemented application so far. The users get access to the work in progress solution without latency and they are able to comment and give feedbacks for design or requirement changes to rectify anything that may not be correct.

Techniques
We use several techniques in the design of a web solution to ensure that they leave rich user experience without compromising with security and functionality concerns.

Information Architecture tries to answer the followings:

• Can your users find the information they need on your website?
• Is information easily accessible or the website is jungle of information?
• Is information classified and arranged properly?
• Is navigation based on preference and importance of information?
• Do the users have quick access from home page to the information they frequently use?

Contextual Inquiry
Contextual Inquiry allows users idea is to navigate to related information from where they are. We use advanced techniques of hyperlinks and cross-links to ensure that users get context based navigation.

Site Map
Site Map somewhat like charts is roadmap of a website. It allows users to search for information and pages quickly.

Search
Search powered by Google or custom development allows users t get information or reach to a page quickly without having to remember navigational path.