Define the product
The field is littered with products that had a larger feature set or better price point than their competitors. Users need an intuitive interface and a design that resonates with their underlying values to ensure that a product doesn’t become obsolete.
Put Design First
Designing before you build seems like a straightforward concept. When it comes to building cars or houses, this is the exact process that is followed. However, too often software and application development processes skip over this step – or do it in parallel with development. This can lead to complicated and expensive bug fixes much later in the development cycle, with deep impacts on time to market. No matter the development approach – agile, waterfall, hybrid or other – a focus on early low‐fidelity concepts helps lay a solid design foundation and leads to big dividends in the end.Iterate, iterate, iterate
Rapid, user‐centered, iterative design using wireframes, demos and prototyping help you get to the bottom of user‐experience design issues quickly and efficiently. It helps you gain a deep understanding of the usability of your product – not just from a design perspective, but also how the overall features and value propositions resonate with your target audience. Empirical helps its customers with information architecture, interaction design, and prototyping. We also help to design the user sessions, facilitate activities, and bring our expertise to interpret the information back into the next iteration of design. We do this both for sessions with users, as well as for internal sessions with team members and stakeholders.Play with your toys
Empirical focuses on participatory design, tactile activities and hands on creation whenever possible – and not just when it comes to the users. In one instance, rather than doing a traditional competitive analysis and then bringing the results to the team, we brought the team to the analysis. We brought an array of products into the lab and invited all internal team members – from the marketing folks to the software engineers – to come and play. This spawned spontaneous, collaborative design sessions in the room and helped focus the entire team – not just the designers – on the experiences they wanted to enable rather than the list of features they were building.
