UX Consulting & Design Services

Appnovation’s User Research Approach

We conduct user research in various project stages and for different purposes. Whether our task is website redesign, new app development or internal system launch our experts do it all. The user research is the foundation for sustainable and effective design solution.

Appnovation values a pragmatic approach and will assess what knowledge and data already exists. Based on that we will come up with the user research plan that answers the right questions and is delivered on time and budget.

Audience Research

Any digital development starts with the understand for whom it's being built: understand your audience, uncover the solution. Through audience research, our team formulates who your end customers are, what they need, what their expectations are,  and how they engage with your products or services.

Based on these insights, we craft bespoke and informed user personas, designed to develop customer/client connections.

To understand how users use your digital product to accomplish various tasks, Appnovation’s experts conduct task analysis and investigate use cases. Knowing the context and environment that user is in when interacting with your product, helps us discover mental models that impact user's decision making processes and, ultimately, the online actions. This all  allows us to predict how technology can, and should address user needs in the most helpful manner.

Common audience research methods we employ include:

• Scripted and unscripted user interviews
• Ethnographic studies and contextual inquiries
• Observations
• Surveys and questionnaires
• Focus groups
• Customer reviews

Content and information architecture research

In concert with marketing strategy that will feed the digital application, content and information architecture research can be instrumental to ensure users get the content they need, and are able to find it easily and intuitively.

Our researchers use content and IA research to validate hypothesis about information hierarchy, structure, terminology and findability.

We often use these, among other, research methods:

• Card sorting
• Tree testing
• Keyword analysis
• Content analysis
• Analytics review

Usability Research

A critical step in our experience design process is understanding what are pain points of an existing application, or testing design for a new application. In this case, usability research and usability testing can help us discover how users interact with an application and what issues they experience.

Similarly, Appnovation has dedicated teams who conduct usability tests to validate design and information architecture on a new application. Based on goals and KPIs, we prepare user scenarios and help recruit participants.

Through user testing, we identify flaws and difficulties in usability and iterate as early as possible. We test users performing real tasks when using your application according to scenarios that we set, and observe their actions.

We measure completion of tasks, time it takes to perform them, and record their attitudes about information architecture, content and design. Based on this direct user feedback, we make recommendations for improvements based on the evidence.

Depending on the scale and size of the project our researchers choose on-site or remote usability tests. Using wireframes and interactive prototyping we also test usability on various devices.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey maps are visual representations of how your customers experience and engage with your brand and product across touchpoints through the entire customer lifecycle. At Appnovation, we create comprehensive customer experience maps that don't focus on a single layer of interaction but visualise the entire relationship your customer has with your brand or product.

Typically, customer journey maps illustrate all interaction points between the customer and the brand or organisation, from customer discovering the product or brand, to customer research on the product or company, to first purchase or contact, to becoming the brand ambassador or loyal customer.

Sometimes customer journey maps are also called service blueprints, customer interaction maps, or experience maps. All of these are built on slightly different viewpoints , but share similar characteristics and goals.

Where customer experience maps are customer-centric, focusing on experiences external to your company, blueprinting exposes the internal working of an organisation and how those interact with your customer experience. Essentially, it's a combined visualisation of backstage operations and front stage experiences.

Customer journey map, backed up with data and insights about personas, is an effective tool to identify crucial pain points and positive experience moments in your CX process. In this process we putting the customer at the centre and view the experience outside-in, looking from the customer's perspective.

Our CX consultants will help you map out customer experience to:

• Identify gaps between existing customer experience and the desired one
• Uncover moments of truth that impact customer satisfaction most and impact expectations and perception
• Empathise with your customers to understand what they actually feel and experience using your product or service
• Brainstorm about opportunities to improve customer experience at a specific customer lifecycle stage or touchpoint
• Create a shared understanding of the customer experience across the organisation
• Define a vision and strategy for CX
• Detect and improve conversion and build customer loyalty
• Determine goals and KPIs to measure and quantify customer experience and business results.

When to do Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a critical method to understand your customers and empathise with their experiences. If you have a new product or service or you don’t have insights about your brand experience from customers’ point of view it is an effective method to learn how your customers interact and use your product.

We can also  show you how to use customer journey mapping to learn about your own organisation’s processes, and what your employees' or stakeholders' experiences are. This way you can identify existing pain points and challenges to improve internal processes and operations.

If there are issues in the customer experience of your product or application, customer journey mapping can pinpoint specific areas and reveal what your customers may think and feel at different interaction moments. This human-centered design method is a great way to also identify the delight moments that you can emphasise in your branded experience.

Once our expert designers have mapped out the experience, and created a visual narrative, they move on to creating a roadmap for application development and improvements.

Appnovation's customer journey mapping and UX expert consultants will make specific recommendations on how to improve CX strategy, based on discovered challenges and opportunities.

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Our UX experts treat wireframes like an architectural plan for a house. They are a visual depiction of pages and page sections that help us imagine how users will use and interact with your product.

Just like the architectural plan shows the layout of the house and the flow of movement through it. Wireframes visually show how different elements form key pages: copy areas, images, menus, videos, forms, Call-To-Actions (CTAs), and more.

For developers, wireframes serve as a blueprint of how the product should be built to ensure content is in the right place and behaves as it should.

At Appnovation, wireframe design is one the most critical deliverables by which we make sure that the entire project team is aligned and shares the project vision. It provides clarity of what needs to be built and how. During wireframing our designers consult development team to ensure technical feasibility and determine the most effective technical solution.

Wireframe Design

Our approach to wireframe design is two-tiered. With empathy and deep understanding of user behaviour we define the big idea and design conceptual wireframes. This first step is high level wireframing - defining conceptual structure for the site including navigation, user flows and information architecture without going into details and functional description of each component.

Customers experiences are then further crafted through storyboards, content modelling and user interface design. After testing and validating conceptual wireframes we create detailed wireframes depicting website mockup with annotations that later constitute briefing for the development team.

We do this in two phases to ensure time and resources are spent efficiently and that the envisioned product addresses needs and requirements of users and business.

Prior to conceptual wireframe design, we learn about your audience and create personas to get an thorough understanding for whom we’re designing. Then our UX designers and architects conduct a user story mapping workshop together with our customers. During the workshop we brainstorm about user activities and related tasks they would need to perform.

By doing that, we collect ideas about features and functionalities to support those activities and tasks. At the same time, we identify core content types that will form the body of the product. The outcome of the user story mapping workshop is a backbone of activities and list of tasks that we can translate into the basic building blocks and components of the product.

Depending on your audience, we determine viewports for which wireframe designs are required: mobile, desktop and/or tablet. In the detailed wireframing stage our UX designers create wireframes including fine details that visualise the breakdown of each component, placement and how they interconnect and relate to each other. We deliver wireframes in a format that works for our clients.

Because wireframes are easy to revise, we encourage our clients to participate in the process by commenting and providing feedback on regular basis.

We annotate wireframes to include the functional breakdown describing features and components, input data types, and relational data models.

Collaboration and participatory design

At Appnovation, our UX designers engage information architects and UI designers in the process early on. First, we want to make sure your specific and defined marketing and content needs are addressed. Second, in the wireframing phase we typically determine core interaction design principles and ideate about interface design that tells your brand story and communicates your brand experience. Third, we ensure the final end result is in line with your brand and is an organic extension of it.

We believe in a highly collaborative way of working together with our clients and in the practice of rapid prototyping. That means we generate as many ideas as quick as possible to define the components and their order on different devices.

By iterating and improving on these ideas we design your application in a way that enables, guides and supports your users in achieving their tasks effortlessly and quickly.

Wireframing for UX

During our wireframe design process we use different tools and methods to document ideas and possible solutions and to test them.

Based on the iterative design approach we use tools that allow for maximum collaboration, quick feedback loops and design changes.

Whether it's using basic post-it notes to kick off ideation and collect different perspectives or wireframing software for detailed wireframing, our UX designers will communicate and engage you in the process and share the work in progress.

For more efficient workflow our team follows atomic design principles. In the wireframing stage it means we create an interface design system that is modular, reusable and scalable. Our UX designers create a pattern library that we use in building features, components and create page layouts. This library can be easily modified, thus updating automatically all relevant design elements.

Using tools such as Figma, Sketch, Realtimeboard, and Justinmind enable us to communicate directly with our customers to get their input and feedback. Designs created in these tools are easily exported into prototypes for usability testing.

Our wireframing services intend to give a clear overview in the right format of:

• Structure: How the solution will be structured in terms of content and flow
• Aesthetics: How it will look
• Functionality: How it will function

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Our UI design team believes that collaboration leads to better results and better solutions. Good UI design starts with a a solid UI knowledge, something our teams have in abundance.Clear and logical designs will help to avoid any adverse impacts and avoid any confusion during implementation.

Our design phase is the first step to achieving a great UI for our clients.

UI design experts lead the way in interface design development, creating websites and applications that are visually appealing, which are easy and intuitive to use. There is a strong collaboration among UX designers, IA specialists, and front-end developers to ensure the solution is functionally, structurally and technically solid.

We are guided by the following principles in developing UI design:

• Usability & Reusability
• Consistency
• Flexibility
• Functionality
• Individuality
• Accessibility

Depending on your needs, we will create interface design that is in line with your corporate visual guidelines and supports UX strategy.

That means we will base the UI design solution on certain design principles that guide all design decisions we make - from the concept to the smallest detail and interaction element.

For example, if the primary purpose of your website is to sell products or services we will prioritise elements that drive conversion. Or if your digital application is about the community building, our focus will be on user engagement and storytelling with the emphasis on content types.While we strive to maximise reusability of components, our UI experts can deliver device-specific design solutions. Our UI designers create bespoke interfaces following the best practices specifically for native apps.

Equally, we deliver interface designs that work across the board - on mobile, desktop, tablet and even custom in-house screens or other devices. In some cases, we will use the adaptive design approach to tailor UI design to the user needs on a specific device and use case scenario.

At Appnovation, we believe that creativity must work in favour of functionality. Therefore we think first about how to make a solution easy and intuitive to use, and only afterwards about the look and feel. Working in cross-functional teams, where UI designers collaborate closely with front-end developers, ensures we can create inspiring and engaging user interfaces and be sure we can build them technically.

Our UI designers are experts in applying visual design to wireframes, building prototypes to test the UI designs and building delightful interactions to facilitate the branded experiences for your customers.

For example, if the primary purpose of your website is to sell products or services we will prioritise elements that drive conversion. Or if your digital application is about the community building, our focus will be on user engagement and storytelling with the emphasis on content types. While we strive to maximize reusability of components, our UI experts can deliver device-specific design solutions. Our UI designers create bespoke interfaces following the best practices specifically for native apps.

Equally, we deliver interface designs that work across the board - on mobile, desktop, tablet and even custom in-house screens or other devices. In some cases, we will use the adaptive design approach to tailor UI design to the user needs on a specific device and use case scenario.

At Appnovation, we believe that creativity must work in favour of functionality. Therefore we think first about how to make a solution easy and intuitive to use, and only afterwards about the look and feel. Working in cross-functional teams, where UI designers collaborate closely with front-end developers, ensures we can create inspiring and engaging user interfaces and be sure we can build them technically.

Our UI designers are experts in applying visual design to wireframes, building prototypes to test the UI designs and building delightful interactions to facilitate the branded experiences for your customers.

User Testing & Research Experts

For the past 10 years, Appnovation has put clients first, with our results driven approach to every single project. Our dedicated teams deliver streamlined, functional, superior and trusted products and services.

Our experience spans multiple industries, incorporating  research and design projects, delivering development, digital solutions and support for websites, mobile applications and physical devices.

Research services:

• Usability Testing
• Expert Usability Evaluation
• Exploratory User Research
• Customer Journey Mapping
• Persona Development
• Information Architecture
• User Experience Design
• User testing
• Live or remote moderated usability testing
• Rapid iterative usability testing
• Prototype testing  
• Comparative usability testing
• Benchmark usability testing

Whatever your industry, or whatever your digital strategy, we believe that the user-experience should be the drivers, and that your online platforms should be intuitive, responsive, and engaging for your target audience.

Usability testing forms the foundation of any user-experience, with the need to test a wide range of user-behavioural patterns across multiple devices as the starting point.

Appnovation offers first-hand testing of your products and services, across your various target audiences, where participants are compelled to perform the most common user actions before delivering direct feedback about problems encountered, the overall user-friendliness of their experience, and their overall impression of your platform.

Usability testing, along with user acceptance testing, helps our UX experts evaluate if, or where your platform meets user expectations, how it is perceived and how simple and intuitive it is to use.

Ultimately, this provides us, and you, with a detailed, defined, and unbiased set of results, which allow us to help you iron out problems, and deliver the user experience both you and your clients demand.

Appnovation also includes, as part of usability testing:

Device testing

Ensuring that your app works across all targeted devices, with optimized displays, resolutions, network types and operating systems

Marketing surveys

Appnovation will target audiences based on your preferred demographics, including considerations of gender, location, age, income brackets and more. Again, we will collaborate with your team to ensure focused surveys, saving you time and money.

Negative testing

Used to check the application performance levels, in case of invalid inputs or any kind of unusual or unexpected user-behaviour patterns or actions. Our UX testers are able to unearth and identify weak points, and thus alleviate potential issues for end-users.

All of our usability testing is undertaken with the goal of not only delivering a superior user experience for your consumers, but saving you time, money, stress and problems down the road.