Very simply, User Experience, or UX Design, is about designing digital products that people enjoy using.
For Blonde this is about employing a user centred design (UCD) philosophy that prioritises learning about the user's needs, and then designing a product that best meets their requirements.
We've done UCD projects for clients such as ScotRail and Nandos with some great results.
What we do
For an organisation, digital design used to constitute aligning the product and interface to its business objectives. This is still sometimes the case.
This approach doesn't work.
Designing a digital product, say a website, to reflect your internal business processes and structure isn't going to make sense to your customers.
Think about it...
Your customers don't want to navigate through reams of company information to get to what they need. In the bad old days of the internet they'd have to navigate through reams of pages and never find the information they needed.
What they do want is to visit your digital property for a specific purpose: to buy a ticket, look at a menu, check a listing or a time, perhaps update some information.
At Blonde we help our clients to get to the 'Why' of building something by defining the purpose of the project right at the outset. This approach allows us to readdress the problem with a solution, test the hypothesis and then build the right stuff to solve it.
How we do it
Any software (an application, a website, a tool) lives and dies by how much it is used, and by how much people enjoy the experience.
To ensure that what our clients task us to build is a joy to use, and fit for purpose, we follow a rigorous approach to UCD that is not usually found in the agency world.
We begin by defining purpose. By talking to our clients about the commercial problem that they are looking to solve at the outset. Through this approach we are able to clearly define the purpose that this piece of product design needs to fulfil.
Once we have a well defined brief to work with we go straight into the research phase. This includes interviews, surveys, usability studies, and a deep look into a client's current analytics and any other relevant company, industry, and wider data.
Our approach is thorough and iterative. We test and refine constantly. At the concept stage we test our hypotheses. This is when we answer the question: Is what we're creating of actual use to the customer? And we continue to test and tweak right through the design and build process to make sure that we get every click right, until we're sure everything works as it should.
At the front of mind at the start of any project is: Does this solution solve the problem?
And this question stays front of mind right through the UX design process, until we answer it.