Usability & Usable Design

What distinguishes a great product from one that is mediocre is the quality of the experience it delivers to the end user. For 10 years, Fredrickson’s usability team has helped our clients design, evaluate, and test hundreds of websites, applications, and other products to ensure they deliver a superior experience to their users.

The benefits of usability have been well documented. Usable systems can save money and generate revenue by helping to:

• Increase productivity
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Increase sales and revenues
• Reduce development time and costs
• Reduce maintenance costs
• Decrease training and support costs

Taking proactive measures to ensure usability in the design phase of the product lifecycle can greatly reduce extensive redesign, maintenance, and customer support requirements later. As noted on usability.gov.:

• 63% of all software projects overrun their budgetary estimates, with the top four reasons all related to unforeseen usability problems.
• 80% of maintenance is due to unmet or unforeseen user requirements, and only 20% is due to bugs or reliability problems.

Factoring usable design and usability evaluation into the product development lifecycle pays dividends many times over.

We offer three main types of usability evaluation services to assist you:

Expert Usability Evaluation

One of the most popular of the usability inspection methods, a heuristic (expert) evaluation is a systematic inspection of a user interface to (1) identify deviations from commonly accepted usability standards and (2) provide recommendations to address these issues as part of an iterative design process. Read more …

Usability Testing

In a usability test, a representative user of a product such as a website or an application attempts to complete common and critical tasks while thinking aloud, sharing their thoughts as they interact with the product. Read more …

Focus Groups

We use focus groups to generate ideas, concepts, and opinions from representative site and application users about brand identity, design alternatives, and content prioritization and organization. We often supplement focus group discussions with card sort exercises and surveys. Read more …

To learn more about these services and how your organization can benefit from usability and usable design, call 612-746-1752, or email .