Usability Engineering/User-Centered Design

Design Interactive offers human-centric design support for existing/legacy systems as well as new systems in the conceptual, prototype and detailed design stages. We leverage systematic methods and techniques to ensure a high degree of usability in products and systems. Our usability engineers help government agencies and commercial clients to enhance their products and services or to reform their development lifecycles by including the end users' needs into the design and evaluation process.

Through both analytical and empirical methods, we leverage a complimentary set of evaluation techniques throughout various stages of the engineering lifecycle. Our UCD process includes:

Contextual analysis: Obtain user-centered model of tasks/jobs; identify user goals, desires, behavioral patterns, usage context, competitors, technology barriers...
Competitive analysis: Identify strengths and weaknesses of existing systems
User requirements definition: Specify system requirements based on user needs.
Use scenarios: develop use scenarios that can be leveraged in design and evaluation.
Conceptual design: Decompose tasks into modular components and develop overall concept for the human-computer interface.
Prototyping: Build multiple iterations of interactive conceptual designs.
Evaluation: Conduct user testing and leverage user feedback to refine conceptual design, obtaining both quantitative and qualitative data.
Detailed design: Our final interface designs emerge in an evolutionary way from the findings of the previous stages.

Our goal is to ensure that a system, product or service is accepted by the target user community due to enhanced system intuitiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction. Targeted reporting techniques provide tangible results which imply design recommendations.

To see our methodologies in action, please read our usability case studies.