Our User Experience Design philosophy is customer centric. There are six crucial areas to a truly customer centric UDX, and it is very important that all stakeholders understand and agree to this and agree to follow a decision based on these six areas.

1. ALIGNED BRAND: For companies that have grown through acquisition, companies with multiple strong product/service brands, or companies with strong division structure stakeholders must agree what the combined and aligned brand positioning is for the whole of the customer base, including media and investors.
2. SOLUTION DRIVEN CONTENT: The content should be organized so it’s grouped according to customer relevant and industry standard solutions. Many times solutions are not naturally grouped or placed in sequence because of internal structure. We want to implement an outside in view of content to enable maximum up sell and cross sell.
3. INTUITIVE ACTION PATHS: Brand and purpose should be built along action paths. For large complex companies there can be dozens of top-level action paths starting from a search engine search or arrival on company homepage. For the user, the complex process behind selecting the hierarchal structure of these paths should be invisible and the nature of the path natural.
4. LOAD SPEEDS & PERFORMANCE: Online today discussions around load speeds no longer refers to single page loads – it is assumed that best practices are applied so that the amount of content pulled from the content database or XML file happens in an optimized fashion. There are no time-based parameters, but rather a best practices approach based on highly visited best-in-class websites. Customers benchmark site performance based on websites they like and visit frequently. For a large corporation with massive content and functionality the goal will be to match up with sites such as CNN, yahoo, airline sites, hotel sites, newspaper sites, etc.
   The load speed discussion today is mostly centered around customer acceptable load speeds for Flash content, audio and video files and the smoothness of JavaScript components including navigation.
5. EXPECTED BUSINESS CONTEXT: Visual design for websites should adhere to brand and differentiate from competition, but stay within business context. If a website is designed for a large knowledge based B2B organization, the website‘s visual language should reflect that sentiment and functionality should make the visitor feel welcome in a familiar business context.
6. ADHERE TO STANDARDS: This covers a broad field from browser compliance and W3C HTML to navigation and content descriptions that should follow industry standards. Verbal and visual language and tone must be targeted to customers and their seeking of solutions and products. If a company wants to change an industry, the corporate website is not the place to start for most companies. That will only serve to confuse and irritate your customer base.

We believe that a well designed website should drive action and that the path towards that action should build your brand. This is an approach to user experience (UX) design that we call Branded Path to Action (BPA). The principal is simple—build brand while increasing conversion.

We use the personas developed in Discovery to define the online action paths needed to satisfy our customer’s online audience. The personas are used for role-play during the project to control check that the positioning, website, and BPAs are hitting home and that we have all segments covered.

Our thorough UX design phase enables us to communicate online brand strategies clearly with our clients regarding their industry to meet their business goals and move solidly forward based on mutual understanding of:

• Information architecture
• Workflow scenarios
• Wireframes
• Functional specifications
• Design comps
• Conversion driving copy
• Technology framework
• Content management system
• Administration of site as it grows
• Brand design standards

Please contact us for more information on our approach to UX design and Branded Path to Action.