Model and Understand Users for Validated Application UI

The key to making software applications and UI development pay off is to ensure they are easy to use and efficient for everyone including employees, customers and partners. Software designed without user modeling and validation eats up the incremental dollars to our customer's bottom line.

Unlike the back end of applications that run behind the scenes in the form of business rules or financial calculations, the UI for a project cannot easily be changed after deployment due to issues with user training and productivity loss. It is essential to understand the users and get the UI right, before any code is developed. This is particularly true for applications that are used continuously, such as online banking, data entry systems, and call center applications.

An Agile Approach to UI Design

By modeling and understanding the most important and common user goals and making the initial interface support these goals effectively in terms of efficient navigation, appropriate feedback, and a minimum of distraction, Catalyst can quickly test the UI with real users for quick turnaround and validation early in the development process.

What is a Persona?

Personas are narrative descriptions of specific users, distilled from interview and observation data of real users, who represent the goals, motivations, and behaviors of the people who might need to use the system. Personas help our UI designer understand the flow of the user's work and how each will approach the same user interface. Usability and scenario testing validates our knowledge about users so we can quickly iterate the user interface to a point where we have confidence that our initial development effort will deliver what our customers need.

Ongoing Web-Based User Validation

Catalyst establishes ongoing user validation sessions to ensure user validation throughout the application design and development cycle.

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Conduct Ethnographic Studies

Ethnographic studies enable our clients to get a true understanding of the actual users and usage environments.

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Develop Personas

Catalyst creates personas of users to provide rich details on users characteristics, needs, goals and environments.

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Model and Analyze User High Value Scenarios

The Catalyst approach focuses on identifying and modeling the scenarios that are of highest value to users and ensuring these scenarios are prominent in the software.

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Define and Validate Relevant Real-World Conceptual Models

Modeling software around existing, well-accepted real-world models is one of the best ways to ensure minimal training and support as well as optimal adoption by users.

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Assess the Current Application UI Relative to Industry Best Practices

A comprehensive evaluation of software against commonly acknowledged best practices identifies the areas where investment will produce the greatest returns.

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Design to Deliver Bottom Line Results

Good design adds value. A user-validated and visually well-designed UI results in incremental saving in employee and organization performance, as well as improved customer relationships and loyalty.

The design phase of our methodology includes:

Information Architecture and Interaction Design

Based on the results of the user modeling phase, we develop the functional information architecture and navigation. The resulting application models, wireframes, navigation and control elements, functional views, data capture screens and rich messaging are optimized and tested for user comprehension.

Visual Design and Branding

The visual designer on your Catalyst team will create a differentiated look and feel within the constraints of your brand. As part of this, they will identify what kind of visual branding strategy is optimal for the audiences that will be interacting with your application.

Reusable and Modular UI Libraries

We define your UI specification using a customized library of UI components, data, and actions. When your distributed development teams have access to this UI library of modular, reusable code, they can save 85% in application front-end development cycles. The added benefits include increasing consistency of function across applications, a standardized look and reduced QA time.

Consistency across Multiple Applications

Mergers, acquisitions, and fast growth often leave a software company with a big consistency problem. If your software has several ways to search, and several ways to type in a phone number, and several ways to present a system message, you have applications that are costing real dollars in low adoption rates, and high support costs. Standardized workflows, a consistent visual design and a customized library of re-usable UI components will enable all applications to work the same way. When applications work consistently there is a big incentive to use them.

On-going user validation

A successful UI is both about how "intuitive" a design is and about the value it provides from extended use. At the end of this phase, we will have refined and tested the design to ensure it meets all functional, user and development requirements.

Refine Key Business Processes

When software is modeled around well-understood real-world models, and ongoing user validation, complex business processes can often be simplified.

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Screen Flow Map of UI Architecture

A screen flow map identifies the key refinements needed in the flow of your software application, the relationship of key screens to each other and how user will navigate to complete key processes and tasks. It acts like a "floor plan" for a house to give you a clear view of how your application should flow to maximize user experience.

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Visual Design / Look and Feel

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"

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Apply Visual Design to Key View Types

Using the customized, and componetized look and feel, Catalyst applies this visual design to all key view types. Theses key view screens can then be easily used as the basis for any screens in the application.

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Develop Clickable High-Fidelity Prototypes

Clickable models provide development teams, customers and potential users with a rich understanding of the experience and functionality a software application will provide. For almost all clients, Catalyst provides a clickable model in the specified UI technology for all application design efforts.

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Production Development of UI for Entire Applications

Catalyst's 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. This is achieved through the use of the right multi-disciplinary people, agile design practices, code re-factoring and user-validation-driven techniques.

A "blueprint" for how to build your application - all in 90-120 days

The primary deliverable at the end of the develop phase is a complete functional definition of the application UI. This buildable blueprint includes the definition and design of all aspects of the application in terms of everything that the user experiences - what they see, what they do, what information they have access to. And we do this all in 90-120 days so you can then deliver your software project on time and on budget.

Reusable and modular UI libraries

We re-factor UI designs into a customized library of UI components, data, and actions. When your distributed development teams have access to this UI library of modular, reusable code, they can save 85% in application front-end development cycles. The added benefits include increased consistency of function across applications, a standardized look, easier adherence to regulatory compliance standards and reduced QA time.

A lean library of highly configurable UI components can also be used for rapid customer re-branding and multiple language support.

Database schema validation for "real-world" predictability

We rapidly iterate designs and systematically incorporate feedback to expose and validate that all data elements and UI components are matched to your database schema. Working with your developer team we help ensure that when a project goes live, there is predictability in how every task, every behavior and every data element will integrate with the back end business logic and technology.

Clickable models with the working UI kernel and dynamic data

As part of the buildable blueprint for rapid application development Catalyst typically provides a full clickable model using dynamic data of exactly what that software will be like when it is released. Clickable models provide development teams, customers and potential users with a rich understanding of the experience and functionality a software application will provide.

Support

In addition to delivering the buildable blueprints for a software application UI, Catalyst provides on-going implementation support thorough out the development cycle to ensure accurate and efficient implementation. Support is not an afterthought, but part of of the process to ensure that projects are delivered on time and on budget.

Create Modular Reusable Code for UI

What creates consistency across software applications is not guidelines but the code that developers use. UI designs are re-factored into modular, reusable code that enables developers to create software views in as little as 15% of the time required when not using reusable code.

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Confirm Technical Architecture for Presentation Layer

The technical issues for application user interfaces have become considerably more complex due to the use of many different technologies. Catalyst provides in-depth expertise to define and validate proposed UI architectures with high-performance technologies.

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Provide / Validate Initial Database Schema Against UI

The UI that users interact with and the database that handles the to back-end business logic, are like the two ends of a tunnel. The tunnel isn't complete until both ends meet. Catalyst will validate that the UI and database schema will integrate when the project is released.

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Provide "Buildable" UI Specification

For all screens and interface components being developed, Catalyst provides a buildable UI specification. This includes definition of all modular development kit components, custom components, and data elements.

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Code Specified Views, Validate with Users

Catalyst can provide highly experienced UI developers to augment develop teams and reliably code screens and views.

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Implementation Support

In addition to delivering the buildable blueprints for a software application, Catalyst provides ongoing implementation support throughout the development cycle to ensure accurate and efficient implementation.

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