USER INTERFACE DESIGN

The Collaborative Craft of UI

From product strategy to User Interface prototyping to developing User Interface specifications, we offer a full range of UI solutions. Our objective is to create User Interface designs that meet the needs of users, address the company’s business goals, and fully utilize the product’s technical capabilities.

In order to meet these goals we become integrated with your development team, ensuring that the work we do merges seamlessly into their development environment.

Typical areas of User Interface Design focus:

• Product Strategy Consulting
• Expert UI Review
• User Research
• Paradigm Design
• User Interface Design
• Usability Testing

Product Strategy Consulting

Rocket works with our clients to turn their ideas into reality. Napkins and yellow sticky notes scribbled with ideas really are some of the starting materials our clients have brought to us. We rolled up our sleeves to brainstorm and innovate with those brilliant clients and helped them create real products from their sketches. To our team, nothing is more fun than creating something new. If you have a great idea, we can help you bring it to life.

User Research

Sometimes even your users don’t know what they need. We work with our clients to create research strategies that allow us to truly understand what your users need from your product. This may include observing them at work, or at home, or even driving in their car. We manage the research, analyze the data, and turn what we learn as tangible feedback and pragmatic design concepts. What we learn gets documented and conceptualized into real GUI solutions.

• User profiling
• Task analysis
• Work flow analysis
• Use case development
• Ethnographic research
• Market research

Expert UI Evaluations

You and your team have finally decided that your product needs professional GUI design assistance, but you’re not ready for a full re-design. Rocket provides evaluations of existing products to determine how they meet the needs of their users and how well they comply with standard usability conventions. We provide you with GUI feedback and information that is tangible and actionable.

Typical Deliverables

• Heuristic reviews
• User work/task flow analysis and modeling
• User profiles
• Feature and functionality specifications

Paradigm Design

Prior to designing the detailed User Interface for a product, it’s important to take a 50,000-foot view of the task at hand. This high-level product strategy includes the creation of role-based navigation, workflow based on user task analysis, major content groupings, and high level page layouts.

Typical deliverables

• High-level screen designs
• Revised or new work flow diagrams
• UI Paradigm specifications

User Interface Design

User Interface design is where the rubber hits the road, resulting in the design of screen layouts that include all the key content and components. Rocket designs the product screens as grayscale wire-frames (interactive or static). wire-frames can be used for Usability Testing and/or user validation. While wire-frames are not the final product, they are feature complete gray-scale representations of the product. Once the wire-frames are approved they are ready to receive a Visual Language, which will enhance the usability and establish the product brand identity.

Wire-frames include:

• Interaction behavior
• Screen flow and layout
• Widgets and controls
• Data display

Typical deliverables:

• Static or dynamic wire-frames
• User Interface specifications for use by engineering

Usability Testing

To ensure our designs are meeting their ease of learning and efficiency of use objectives, we offer a comprehensive set of services to validate our solutions. Our observation methods allow us to understand what is working, what is not working, and what could be improved. Our approach is to ensure we receive user feedback that will validate or influence the product design. We are well versed in the following usability and testing methods:

• Contextual inquiry
• Remote testing
• Focus interviews