Creating The Perfect User Experience
User experience (UX) research gives you one powerful advantage – the ability to make informed decisions. We are focussed on providing first-class user design and apply best-practice UX research on every development and design project. In this context, we’re proud to feature our new user testing lab, recently opened at Arekibo HQ in Windsor Place, Dublin 2. This is a development and testing environment which is specifically designed to put the user at ease.
Our new location in Dublin 2 means we can do more for our clients. With bigger premises, we can run more seminars and workshops. And the addition of a user-development lab has defined our commitment to applying only the best UX advice and consultancy for our customers. The lab features designated workstations working on the latest testing and tracking platforms. Our tracking software ensures we can record and assess user behaviour in real time. We analyse user habits and approaches according to demographics and other variables. When it comes to sourcing the users, we have a number of options. In some cases, our client will provide the people or we can use a third party service provider to recruit them. We can also consult our extensive database and choose user testers on that basis.
Three step product development process
Our product development process is based on three core stages and we apply user-testing research throughout the project. Let’s take the example of app development..
- Find out - first of all, we’ll find out who our intended users are. We’ll examine what they need from an application or service. Is there something specific that no application is providing?
- Improve – once the users’ needs have been established, it’s time to focus on the design phase. When the first design prototypes have been developed, can they be improved so that people use the digital application in the volumes required to make it viable?
- Perfect - now we are getting to the validation stage. We’ll tackle any major problems that have arisen and fix them. Are they using the app as we have expected? If not, what do we need to do to make the app easier to use/navigate or simply make it more appealing?
Engaging an experienced UX specialist can offer you so much. When all design decisions are based on solid data, you will have complete confidence in the functionality of your site or application. You’ll also be more confident in converting more visitors and in the longer term, it means you will avoid having to make expensive fixes.
At Arekibo, our focus has always been on the end user and the opening of our user-testing lab confirms this. By completing user-testing at every stage of the product development process, our research will ensure we make design and functionality decisions based on hard data. Creating the perfect user-experience is now a real possibility for you and your brand.
“Doing user testing is an invaluable part of the web design process. When you are so close to a project from inception through to development, it is invaluable to get completely independent feedback from fresh eyes and to understand how prospective customers might interact with your proposition. We have undertaken it on a couple of projects with Arekibo and each time it has thrown up some interesting and unexpected results. It has steered us in a direction or path that we might otherwise not have gone down and we have ended up with a better user experience and proposition outcome because of it”