Overview
"If you don't get the requirements right, it doesn't matter how well you do anything else" Karl Wiegers (2004). This is the most critical and crucial phase in a software development lifecycle as one can end up building a perfectly wrong product. This is an highly iterative and incremental phase to uncover the detailed requirements of the system to be built.
Elicit business challenges and goals
The first step is for us to listen and collaborate with our clients to elicit all client questions and product objectives. We understand that every project is as different as its users and our strength lies in our research, clever planning and sharp analysis to uncover the most important goals and challenges for your business.
Identify the user needs and goals for the project. Research spans across understanding, analyzing and recording the requirements from functional (product features) and non functional perspective (usability, performance). User experience storyboards, based on the use cases, add the process and techniques necessary to design and build a user interface that will meet requirements and allow users to exercise all the system behavior described in the use cases.Tools for research:
- Stake holder interview
- User interviews
- Contextual inquiry
- Surveys
- Focus groups
- Formative usability testing
Personas
Personas are all round descriptions of such possible customers and they serve the purpose of helping designers and information architects best identify the needs and expectations of each potential target customer group.
Personas identify the user motivations, expectations and goals responsible for driving online behaviour, and bring users to life by giving them names, personalities and often a photo
Scenarios
Identifying the most important scenarios in the system and modeling the ones which are of the highest value to the users and ensuring they are prominent in the system.
Software requirement specification
Understand and formulate complete behavior of the system to be developed. It describes project goals, scope, project features and constraints, functional and non functional requirements along with usability requirements.
UX storyboard
Also known as UX model. This starts with identifying primary and secondary users and creating personas and scenarios based on the requirement specification. It specifies user experience elements, screens, and screen content.
Overview
It is the foundation of the software. Good design adds value. We create a holistic experience for users of our customer's products through scientific, data driven design. We use data obtained from iterative research to inform our designs. We iterate over the designs to ensure the software design covers the goals and objectives noted in the previous stage.
Technical design
With a rapidly iterated design we ensure the user goals and needs are met, it integrates with the backend processes and is dynamic enough to accommodate changing business demands. We achieve this using multi-disciplinary people, agile design practices. Decisions regarding the technology and frameworks to be used for the captured requirements are made. Our architects prepare a technical design with an understanding of the whole system: its scope, major functionality and non functional requirements. This is captured in the under the following:
- Design Analysis Review
- High level technical design
- Low level technical design
Interaction design
Through quick iterative ideas and use of scientific rules of interaction design, we provide design solutions that satisfy both- business needs and user expectations, equally. Our approach of creating task flows and navigation diagrams (part of the UX storyboard) prior to wire framing helps us build a framework that fits the user's mental model.
- Information architecture
- Task analysis and redesign
- Conceptualization & high level design
- Wire frames
Visual Design
For many organizations the look and feel of the software used by their customers and employees "IS" the company and needs to present a carefully orchestrated "brand experience". To build this experience, one has to consider the sensory, conceptual, reactive and usability aspects of the design. We have made User Experience-Visual Design with the creation of web content, web design and user interface design our specialty, and offer high-quality solutions to our clients.Our deliverables under visual design:
- Conceptual design
- Visual system strategy and branding
- Animation and production graphics
- Icon design and Illustrations
Detailed Project Plan
We are committed to quality and add value to the client businesses through well-established methodologies, tools techniques backed by stringent quality processes. A project plan is documented to ensure adherence to customer expectations and exceeding it and ensure the risks associated to the projects are covered. Our detailed plan is updated as the project progresses providing a yardstick to measure against the plan.
Overview
Our development phase coordinates parallel coding and technical development with rapidly iterated design to ensure that a UI can be efficiently built, meets user needs, integrates with backend processes and is dynamic enough to accommodate changing business demands.
Short iterative agile development
The pressure felt by our clients in today's market is palpable. Whether a CIO, VP of development, or development manager, each needs to justify project costs with early and frequent wins. A focus on user experience and agile techniques achieves this with substantive, incremental deliverables and continuous refinement and integration. This methodology for application development enables companies to get out releases quicker, and be confident that those releases will be well received by existing and new customers.
Clickable prototype
As part of the buildable blueprint for rapid application development we typically provide a full clickable prototype using dynamic data of exactly what that software will be like when it is released. Clickable prototypes provide development teams, customers and potential users with a rich understanding of the experience and functionality a software application will provide.
Testing
With smaller sprints newer pieces of the system are developed frequently and hence testing needs to be embedded as part of the development. We follow automated testing methodology for continuous quality checks and metrics for each sprint providing high visibility to the end customer. Along with the following testing practices we follow practices such as coding standards,
Types of testing:
- Unit testing
- Functional testing
- Performance testing
- Summative usability testing
Quality of deliverables
Along with the above testing practices we follow agile software engineering practices for ensuring high quality of all our deliverables. We follow metrics based repeatable process encompassing continuous integration that integrates tools for code analysis, unit testing, code coverage which helps to catch defects early in the development cycle. These metrics also serve as insights of our quality for our end customers.
Overview
We work with many software providers to offload maintenance work from the core internal engineering team. The engagements range from resource augmentation all the way to product roadmap ownership, depending upon the needs of the customer.
Maintenance
We work with software providers to offload maintenance work from their core internal engineering team. Our engagements range from resource augmentation all the way to product roadmap ownership, depending upon the needs of the customer.
Training and user support
We build high-quality training materials which are often passed from our customers to their channel and technology partners and other stakeholders. As a result, each individual who plays a role in the solution is equipped with a clear understanding of how it works, and can extract the most value from the solution.
Documentation
Technical documentation is an important part for any software product development strategy. We can produce clear, unambiguous information for operations and maintenance manuals, user guides and support documentation.
