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Our design philosophy center around doing whatever it takes to create a better user experience. Our goal is to design interfaces that are both simple, unique and achieve the overall business objectives.
We focus on how users will actually use the product, and try to eliminate any unnecessary functions.
We start by examining the key functions of the application, and focus our designs on simplifying and highlighting these functions.
We focus heavily on designing applications that look good, an interface must look nice since style often dictates perception.
We have extensive experience designing both web based and software user interfaces. These include content management/portal applications, healthcare applications, product lifecycle management applications, real estate applications, non profit solutions, online retail, and HR performance systems. |
Functional requirements are usually one step above technical requirements, and can often save countless time and money in the product development life-cycle. These documents serve to better organize the transition and quality of output from the design to the development stage. At iLink-systems, we work closely with our team to develop functional requirements that satisfy the business objectives and eliminate any confusion in the development of the product. To achieve the above, we try to do the following:--
- Know the user and objective
- Implement familiar behaviors the users can easily mimic
- Create Consistent behavior across all aspects
- Reflect apparent changes in action appropriately
- Create shortcuts to do repetitive tasks
- Easy to understand icons and language
- Provide easy access to help
- Make users feel safe and secure about their actions items
- Have a well-defined context to all actions
- Make the UI aesthetically appealing
- Focus groups to test and help refine the application
- People cost a lot more money than machines, and while it might appear that increasing machine productivity must result in increasing human productivity, the opposite is often true. Users determine the life and death of your product. If you understand your users' needs and how they actually use the product, then you have the information necessary to make improvements.
- At iLink-systems, we try to understand our target audience so that we can determine what they are looking for in the product.
- Our standard practice is to have status mechanisms to keep users aware and informed at all times, keeping status information up to date and within easy view.
- Keep the user occupied. Since, typically, the highest expense in a business is labor cost. Any time the user must wait for the system to respond before they can proceed, money is being lost.
- To maximize the efficiency of a business or other organization you must maximize everyone’s efficiency, not just the efficiency of a single group.
- The system should provide the users with all possible signs and directions so that even with the least brainwork they are able to sail get their job done in the least possible time. However, there should be details available for those who want to research and find more from the system.
- We conduct a full assessment of user’s proposed or existing product, and identify the strengths and weaknesses. From these strengths and weaknesses, we develop a targeted plan for how to improve the overall user experience. We examine both how existing screens and processes can be repurposed, as well as what needs to be redesigned.
- Our entire design process is iterative, where we rely heavily on user and client feedback to determine which direction to steer. It is rare that we get it right on the first try and even after years and years of experience, we are constantly improving and challenging ourselves.
- Make user interfaces highly explorable
- Offer users stable perceptual cues for a sense of "home”.
- Make Actions reversible
- Always allow “Undo”.
- Always allow a way out.
- However, make it easier to stay in.
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Product Development Life Cycle
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New product development stage which is very expensive has no sales revenue and may contribute to losses. |
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Market introduction stage that has high costs, low sales volume, little competition, again certain losses and the demand needs to be created and customers need to be prompted to try the product. |
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Growth stage has reduced costs due to economies of scale. In this phase, sales volume increases significantly, there is greater profitability and public awareness and competition may now begin with new players in the market. |
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Mature stage: After being well established in the market with little or no need for publicity, costs are low now, sales volumes are at peak. There is a rise in the competitive offerings so prices tend to drop due to the proliferation of competing products. At this time, there is a need for brand differentiation and feature diversification as each player seeks to differentiate from competition with "how much product" is offered. This is the most profitable stage in the product development. |
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Decline or Stability stage: Costs become counter optimal, sales volume either declines or stabilizes. At this stage, profit becomes more a challenge of production/distribution efficiency than increased sales. |
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User Experience and PDLC
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| The user experience group is an agile, interdisciplinary team formed by people who will always be looking out for the user when developing new products, and are also versed in the intricacies of various user-centered design methodologies. Instead of relying upon engineering and product specification teams to weave UCD methods into their development cycle, the user experience group would be called in to assist on many projects at any given time, and at every stage of development. This new user experience group would not sit atop the product development lifecycle, but would be integrated inside of each phase and would give “go” or “no/go” decisions at each milestone. |
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When we talk about user experience versus product life cycle we need to follow the below themes:-
One: A successful product must be balanced: marketing, technology, and user experience all play critical roles, but one cannot dominate the others.
Two: There is a big difference between infrastructure products, which we can call non-substitutable goods, and traditional products, substitutable goods. With traditional goods, a company can survive with a stable, but non-dominant market share. Coke and Pepsi both survive. Cereals and soaps have multiple brands. With infrastructure goods, there can be just one. MS-DOS won over the Macintosh OS, and that was that. MS-DOS transitioned to Windows, and the dominance continued. VHS tape triumphed over Beta. Most infrastructures are dictated by the government, which assures agreement to a single standard.
When there is no standard, as in AM stereo or digital cellular options in the US, there is chaos.
Three: Different factors are important at different stages in the development of a technology. In the early days, technology dominates. Who cares if it is easy to use? All that matters is better, faster, cheaper, more powerful technology. In the middle stages, marketing dominates. And in the end, mature stages -- where the technology is a commodity, user experience can dominate. As in watches, Swatch sells its watches for their emotional appeal, not their accuracy: accuracy is taken for granted.
We have full range of usability services wherein we do:
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User profiling - gather all known information about the audience so we can build user profiles or personas. |
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Task analysis - to analyze what a user is required to do in terms of actions and/or cognitive processes to achieve a task. This helps us to understand the application and the information flows within it. |
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Use case development - to document the different ways to use your system, which we can then test directly with customers.
We specialize in rapid prototyping, which results in a much more refined version of the product to bring to market. Prototypes are also great tools for usability testing, sales presentations, and for streamlining the development process. We utilize the latest technologies to make the prototyping process as efficient and cost-effective as possible. User experience activities play an important role in each phase of the product development life cycle. Many rapid, low-cost methods can be employed throughout the life cycle to dramatically improve usability, increase user adoption and decrease time to market. The speed of the market has accelerated manifolds and is an important constraint. The marketplace no longer permits the luxury of 12 to 18 months product lifecycle; today cycles are measured in weeks. In this emerging market, providing a wide range of enriched users is one of the keys to success. We therefore develop, deploy and integrate an ever changing array of services that enrich user experience. |
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