User experience (UX)
User experience design is central to any technology engagement because the technology is built for human beings to use.
Integrating user experience activities into your engagement is key to your technology transformation’s adoption, ongoing usage, and overall effectiveness. Our User Experience specialists engage with clients and project teams to ensure the individuals who will ultimately use the technology are front and center when it comes to creating the architecture and design of that technology.
Understanding business goals
Most projects begin with a Project Goals and Vision Survey to efficiently collect input from a wide swath of internal stakeholders. The survey uncovers differing and unified opinions, goals, and attitudes about the current user experience and the desired outcomes for the new experience. This activity fosters alignment between Fíonta and your team on the vision and goals for the project outcomes, quickly surfaces new and clarifies existing requirements, and serves as a roadmap for the rest of the engagement.
UX research
Founded with the core belief that all good technology starts with a deep investigation of what the users need and want, and to learn how they best operate, our User Experience team puts the user of the technology ahead of the technology itself. This human-centered approach leads to better design, system architecture, and overall technology.
This critical but often overlooked work allows us to anticipate user needs and potential difficulties before spending money on development. An upfront investment in research helps us plan for upcoming change management needs and can significantly reduce the time and money needed to fix usability issues later.
UX research activities include:
- Information architecture (IA): IA focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling content effectively and sustainably. It serves as a high-level content map and provides all users with a clear, consistent navigation structure. The decisions we make while constructing the IA are informed by the organizational goals, user research, an audit of the existing content, site analytics, and usability best practices, and ultimately determine the overall architecture.
- Wireframes and prototypes: Wireframes define the hierarchy of information, task flows, interactions, layout consistency, and navigation. Decisions made during the wireframes task support making the site more intuitive for users regardless of the device. We use wireframes and prototypes to finalize the desired functionality and structure of the experience we’re building before moving into creating polished user interface designs.
- System audits: When the core of a system works but you know things can be better, a system audit is the right solution. Whether adoption, usability, or accessibility are vital problems, or you want to understand why your audiences aren’t finding the content you want them to access, this type of engagement puts user experience up front. We pair our audits with a technical backend assessment to create a visual and functional improvements roadmap.
Website focus
- Who the audience is, and what their goals are
- Analytics and audience behavior
- Adherence to usability best practices
- How the website architecture, design, and functionality is or is not supporting organizational goals
- Whether the website is using outdated technologies or custom code that is contributing to technical debt
Salesforce focus
- Uncovering reasons for low adoption and barriers to entry
- Perceived trustworthiness of the data
- Understanding what end users need from the system versus what it’s delivering
- Improvements to the user interface to support task completion
- Ways custom workflow development can be used to empower end users
- What training or knowledge gaps may exist for end users, and how training can remedy these holes