Recognizing a great user experience is simple, it makes an unfamiliar process easy, even pleasurable. Creating them is a bit harder, and takes balancing strategy, analysis, design, interaction, and technology. Function consulting has been helping clients make ideas into experiences for over 11 years. Take a look at these previous projects and let’s start talking about yours.
Art © Eboy
For a company founded by the creators of Yahoo for Teachers, our design for Edtuit (now Learncentral) took lessons on the feedback from that site. It helped us focus on how the teachers gain the most value as quickly as possible. They start by using our lesson plans. Over time they begin to form a commuity, gaining status, reputation, and soon grow into contributors of lessons, helping the new group of teachers.
For Mercer Human Resources, creating a portal to engage with their clients was the main goal of this project. Our insight was not to try and replace the experience of talking with a representative, but to help guide the conversation with events and strategies that could be communicated online. Then when meetings took place it helped each party communicate more effectively, and save time and money for each both client and consultant.
For Bright Outcome, we deal with the problem of replacing paper. In health care, it is still the primary way of communicating. Adding the ability for patients to add to this data set by reporting symptoms overloads the data you can effectively visualize on paper. Our project comes up with new ways to allow physicians to view, trend, and correlate their decisions with that data to help provide better care.
The goal of Japan’s NTT IPv6 project was to provide thought leadership around the subject of conversion to the new IPv6 protocol. The site architecture, with it’s corresponding back-end content management system, allows for 3 kinds of engagement with users. Viewing case studies, subscribing to feeds of current IPv6 news, and by providing a forum for industry leaders – conversation.
How does a company like Martha Stewart Omnimedia leverage their content in the new environment of social media? In this concept, by sharing the editorial process with their fans. By co-opting the digg metaphor of submitting stories and voting on them, Stewart can use their writers to present and promote stories about their core values from all over the internet, as well as let their users join in the process.
Voir dire can be a painful process. The information that helps counsel pick jurors comes in printed questionnaires or queried aloud by judges. It all comes in at once and making sense of all this in the few hours allotted to the process overwhelms even experienced lawyers. The jurrisimo tool attempts to make the process both easy to capture all the information, but more importantly shows key indicators interactively to help drive decisions.
The City of Chicago and the State of Illinois had a goal to create a system to report, investigate and adjudicate all crime in Illinois. This meant handling the processing of everything from DWI, theft, money laundering to murder. We validated the information architecture, design and workflow within JAD sessions where we changed the interface in real time in response to end user suggestions.
For the seven years directing internet development at DePaul’s school of computer science, our growth was over 30% a year. We became the major revenue source for DePaul. However, keeping up with such massive interest, and showcasing our mastery of new technology meant using the internet to it’s fullest. Almost every aspect of the running of the school and conveying all the pertinent information to students, faculty, and administration was handled online. This use of technology driving innovation is still our motivating force.
Mercer HR Consulting was replacing their text-based valuation system with a suite of tools to provide actuarial valuations for their customers. Over the course of a year engagement our biggest achievement was to help visualize and prototype different ways to achieve this process, test with real users, and validate our designs before a single line of code was written. This achieved a 40% increase in efficiency over the previous system.
The client division of Information Resources was having trouble communicating internally. Outdated intranets and shared drives were not helping manage all the daily needs for collaboration for this global company and their clients. Using a custom sharepoint portal, we built the IQ portal and trained one manager at a time until they embraced this new way of doing business.
Aspen Marketing delivers a personalized marketing message for each of their clients customers. The problem we were tackling was the cost of explaining the system and handling all the customization orders. It took highly trained groups of salespeople to create the product personally for each customer. Our design reduced the complexities and made it possible for each customer to build their own rules online.
For the Benedictine monks of Chicago, increasing donations, reaching out to new constituents, promoting their business (B&B) and creating an online community were some of the goals of the project. The Wordpress CMS system allowed us to integrate podcasting, blogging, twittering to help them reach outside of their small neighborhood and provide their message globally.
Your goals will differ from the ones presented here, but the outcome should be the same – engaging your customers, meeting your goals. More of my writing on specific problems solved, lessons learned and more is at my blog at www.michaeldain.com. Contact me at 773-655-0525 or email michael.dain @ gmail.com to start a dialog.
