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Usability and User
Interface Design
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Colombus UI Design Principles
Colombus highlights and unites the core
principles of a highly usable solution, and practically realizes them on
practice in application UI:
- Effectiveness & Visibility — each user’s action should
produce a result. Effective UI increases customer satisfaction and
employee productivity, so we carefully treat both frontend and backend
usability. Colombus adds maximum visibility to
objects, so that users can easily identify the function and take a correct
action spending minimum time to accomplish a task.
- Performance — in addition to careful
software architecture design which is vital to the application
performance, our experts tune the application
interface for quick response by implementing RIA technologies and
features.
- Consistency and predictability — once a function is learnt
users reasonably anticipate that the next time it will behave identically.
We ensure that the similar looking functionality produces similar results
throughout the entire application.
Process
We utilize a highly
transparent iterative approach that allows achieving better usability results
and increasing application productivity. The following 4 phases describe how we
handle UI design tasks within the development process:
Requirements and
Conceptual Design
Colombus delivers
user-centered UI design paying great attention to the analysis of use cases and
business scenarios, highlighting target user groups and identification of
critical success factors.
At this stage Colombus develops data models, entity relationship schemes
and workflow diagrams to eliminate possible vision gaps and serve as guidelines
for further project stages.
UI Prototyping
Depending on the business
goals, functional scope and complexity level of the project Colombus
delivers a number of prototype artifacts:
- Static Mockups
- Clickable Wireframes
- Fully Designed Prototype
The professional software
prototyping is also available at Colombus as a
separate service.
Construction
UI Programming Approach
At the development stage
the Colombus’ goal is to deliver functional
interfaces as early as possible to leave enough space for possible changes and
improvements.
Technology factor
Actual interface
implementation depends strongly on the chosen technologies, so Colombus strives to cut project costs by utilizing
best-practices for the particular technology and get maximum technology
benefits / comply with restrictions at the earlier conceptual and prototyping
phases.
Usability and UI Testing
The Colombus
QA team executes business scenarios and use cases to detect interface issues or
inconsistencies that distract and mislead users from arriving at their goals. Colombus utilizes several testing methodologies and options
in order to minimize possible issues at the earliest project stages, enable
quick response to changes and organic refinery.
- Prototype
Testing
- Iterative Testing
- Acceptance testing
The professional software
testing is also available at Colombus as a separate
service.
Visual Design
In most cases (for some
types of web apps UI has a very minor importance or even doesn’t require UI at
all) visual design is an integral part of web application development project.
Colombus always keeps in mind that visual
design is a vital tool to increase usability by fastening interface learning,
memorability and consistency, and provide additional value to the application
making its usage enjoyable.
The Colombus graphic design team works in close collaboration
with analysts and usability testers, providing high quality results.
All the layouts, forms and
their elements and controls produced by Colombus
designers are tailored to easy HTML slicing, thus avoiding expensive efforts
for implementing visuals to the application engine.