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Usability&User Experience   »   About our Services    



About Our Design Services

Our goal is to help you create great interactive products: website, web applications, and web communities. We've been helping organizations world-wide for over 25 years and we consistently produce breakthrough designs with our clients.

We start with your business goals and help you come to a clear and shared vision of the product you want to develop. We design a product concept that supports your goals and engages and delights your users. We deliver a superb user experience and add value that more than covers our costs.

We're easy to work with, respectful of your budgets and always work to the highest professional standards.

How We Help

Depending on your specific needs, we can provide the following services:Sample projects we've designed

  • Work with the stakeholders to define the product
  • Develop a conceptual design for the user experience
  • Study the users
  • Create personas
  • Design wireframes
  • Create style guides
  • Perform usability tests
  • Perform expert (heuristic) reviews

Our LUCID Framework

Our LUCID Framework has received worldwide attention because it works. We begin with an envision process. We start by thoroughly understanding the business objectives for the product, the technical involved, organizational issues facing the team as well as the people who will be using the product.

We listen carefully to all stakeholder ideas and sift through them to find the common ground. We develop a clear understanding of the users, their needs, capabilities and preferences. Then we create a design concept and draw screens as wireframes for your review. We also show potential users the screens to integrate their ideas and test for usability.

Click Here to See How We Conduct a Typical Project

 

Our goal is to help you create great interactive products: website, web applications, and web communities. We've been helping organizations world-wide for over 25 years and we consistently produce breakthrough designs with our clients.

We start with your business goals and help you come to a clear and shared vision of the product you want to develop. We design a product concept that supports your goals and engages and delights your users. We deliver a superb user experience and add value that more than covers our costs.

We're easy to work with, respectful of your budgets and always work to the highest professional standards.

How We Help

Depending on your specific needs, we can provide the following services:Sample projects we've designed

  • Work with the stakeholders to define the product
  • Develop a conceptual design for the user experience
  • Study the users
  • Create personas
  • Design wireframes
  • Create style guides
  • Perform usability tests
  • Perform expert (heuristic) reviews

Our LUCID Framework

Our LUCID Framework has received worldwide attention because it works. We begin with an envision process. We start by thoroughly understanding the business objectives for the product, the technical involved, organizational issues facing the team as well as the people who will be using the product.

We listen carefully to all stakeholder ideas and sift through them to find the common ground. We develop a clear understanding of the users, their needs, capabilities and preferences. Then we create a design concept and draw screens as wireframes for your review. We also show potential users the screens to integrate their ideas and test for usability.

Click Here to See How We Conduct a Typical Project

 
Thanks for contacting us. We'll be in touch shortly. Charlie & Anne

How We Conduct a Typical Project

  1. We listen carefully to your ideas and vision and to your business analysis.
  2. We talk with stakeholders you identify to understand their understanding of the project and their issues. If the stakeholders are not aligned, the product is at risk. So if we are concerned that there may be a problem with conflicting visions, we will work with you to resolve them.
  3. We study your target audience to understand the factors that are important to them. What will attract them to the product? What will engage them? How will they use it?
  4. We analyze the competition and prior versions if they exist to learn what design decisions were made, what works well and what doesn’t.  We do this by looking at the products, doing research on the web, and talking with users when possible.
  5. We develop a design for the site or product and produce it as a set of wireframes. We review the wireframes with all stakeholders and make certain that there are no issues that could become problematic later in the development cycle.
  6. We make the required refinements and test the wireframes with users to make certain that the design works as we intend.
  7. We work with your agency or our own artists to develop a look and feel that promotes your branding and is attractive to the audience.
  8. We work with your developers or our programmers to produce a clickable prototype of the site or product. We then usability test it to make certain that there are no problems with the design.
  9. We produce a style guide to supplement the prototype. This enables your developers to make appropriate design decisions when implementing the site or product.
  10. We work with your product manager and marketers to design the user experience around user support, training, startup and for interactive collateral and advertising.

 What Makes Web 2.0 and Social Computing So Difficult?

  There are Ten Barriers to Web 2.0:

  1. Fear of hostile or embarassing postings that can damage your image.
  2. Concern that staff may act inappropriately or disclose proprietary information.
  3. Cost and time required for content development and maintenence.
  4. Compliance, regulatory and legal issues.
  5. The Generation Gap: employees have different expectations and use technology differently.
  6. Requirement for deep competence in usability and user experience engineering.
  7. Cross-departmental, cross-functional, cross-hierarchical, unfiltered communications.
  8. Concerns about security.
  9. What you don't know about how the competition is using these tools to their advantage.
  10. Balancing control with transparency.

  Web 2.0 is defined by agility, transparency, empowerment, user-centricity and creativity... not words typically used to describe most organizations. Managers are not prepared to manage in this environment.

 

Picture of Charlie Kreitzberg

Charles B. Kreitzberg, Ph.D.

is founder and CEO of Cognetics Corporation, a company that, since 1982, has created award-winning interactive designs that connect people and teams with computers.

Dr. Kreitzberg has designed the user interfaces for websites, software and rich internet applications for clients all over the world.

He developed a pre-web browser, is author of LUCID – the a widely used interaction design framework, and most recently In the Know!™ -- a software knowledge and communications tool for teams and their leaders.

Dr. Kreitzberg has lectured and consulted at corporations and universities worldwide. He has served as an expert witness in software interface patent disputes. He is Founding Editor of User Experience magazine; he has authored numerous articles and has served on the national boards of the Usability Professionals Association and the Society for Information Management. He holds advanced degrees in computer science and psychology. Dr. Kreitzberg serves as the Technology Director for Einstein’s Alley.

Download Charlie's Detailed Vita

Vista users -- if you are using an older version of Adobe Reader, you may have a problem with the PDF. The solution is to upgrade your version to version 9 (or better). This is an Adobe problem and we appologize for the inconvenience.

Download The First 10 Seconds as a PDF

Our Workshops

Our workshops are customized for you.people gathered around a laptop computer

Here are some sample agendas:

Higher Education

Marketing

HR

IT

Business Leaders




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