User Experience – Usability

Overview

KOHL is expert in designing systems/products to be easy to use, useful, safe and attractive to the people that use them.  Our unique multidisciplinary blend of expertise lies in the intersection of Cognitive, Organizational, Social and Educational Sciences; and Computer Science, Engineering, Systems and Marketing disciplines.

  • We tailor the User Interfaces and features of systems/products to be compatible with users’ needs, knowledge base, culture, physical and mental skills and capacities. Thus, less documentation and training is required to use the system/product, fewer errors are experienced, it is faster and safer to use, and the user experience is high.
  • We define features for system/products for efficient manufacture, installation and maintenance.
  • We design and test documentation, work process, training and organizational structures to optimize the introduction and impact of the new systems/products, and to derive excellent user acceptance and usage efficiencies.

Our efforts establish high-fidelity channels of communications between the traditional development process and the prospective users.  This locks the product/system in step with the needs and characteristics of the user and usage environment, and enhances the likelihood of product/system success.

Our applications areas include web-based applications, mobile devices, telecommunications network architectures and associated support systems, consumer and enterprise customer care, banking & financial systems, consumer electronics and home media systems, and enterprise business systems.

Our User Experience Team is comprised of seasoned professionals with advanced degrees in Cognitive Science, Experimental Psychology, Statistics, Visual Design, Ergonomics, Industrial Design, Interaction/Visual Design, Engineering, Computer Science, Marketing and Systems Analysis.

 

Localization-Globalization

Language and cultural differences between countries can sabotage the usage of Systems/Products transferred outside their country of origin.  For over a decade KOHL has helped design and test for systems/products targeted for countries and cultures around the world.  These countries include:

  • Brazil and Mexico
  • In Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, UK
  • China, South Korea, and The Philippines

 

Services and Facilities

  • User Experience Research: IDI usability testing, contextual inquiry/ethnography, card sorting/taxonomy, heuristic evaluations, persona development, diary studies, and hybrid methods
  • Research facilities, participant recruitment, and incentive management WORLDWIDE
    • In the US, we provide full or specified testing services in most major cities
    • Internationally, “in-country” we provide local culturally fluent UX Researchers, local facilities and services, as well as professional simultaneous translation overlay to the audio/visual capture (we service most major cities in Europe, Central & Latin America, and Asia)
    • Remote and online testing in the US and Worldwide
  • Interaction and Visual Design
    • Translate user research into design concepts, turn design concept sketches into a working wireframe prototype
    • Create/adhere to design style guides while adding pixel perfect style to new elements/controls; optimize the deliverables of the development teams by guiding towards the style specification
  • Front-end and Prototype Development with attention to:
    • Speed of completion – “may I have a first pass on this tomorrow?”
    • Quality and Complexity of work – “simple is better”
    • Structure of the HTML/CSS/JS, Performance, Level of Behavior/Fidelity
      • Style (color/branding/typographic) Multi-theme CSS
      • Connection without Refresh, Websockets/Ajax
      • Offline storage / Local storage / SQLite
      • Infographics, Canvas, Frameworks: gRaphael, jqPlot, Processing.js
      • Multi-Thread JavaScript – Browser Agnostic, Parallel Processing
    • Componentization capabilities
  • Statistical Analysis: Structuring rational and useful analytical approaches for complex research results – these could be large data sets resulting from contextual inquiry testing or task analytics; or fuzzy results from more subjective testing; or anything in between.

 

Why Usability and User Experience Design

Most system design includes little expert treatment of the people who will use the system/product. Designers and developers, though skilled in the technology and engineering fields, have typically only perfunctory training and experience in the User Experience disciplines. Too often this uneven mixture of technology versus human factors expertise results in designs that do not meet the users’ expectations or needs. The result is a failure of the system/product to meet business, performance and/or market expectations.

 

Usability at KOHL

  • KOHL is expert in designing systems and products that people find intuitive, easy to use, useful and attractive. Our unique expertise lies in the intersection of the Psychological and Social Sciences, such as cognition, perception, learning, memory, problem solving, organizational, social and educational psychology; and the Engineering and Systems Disciplines, such as, computer science, software, electronic systems, telecommunications, operations and systems analysis. This multidisciplinary blend of expertise is the mixture required to blend successfully the system/product design with its users.
  • We employ our knowledge of how people function, to design the functions and features of systems/products that work best with the intended users. We employ the most appropriate and advanced techniques to derive from people and their environments the optimal set of system/product functions and features for success. Then we design and test the physical and informational interfaces through which people use the system/product. The interfaces are designed such that the users learn and use the functions easily and without error. We design jobs and organizational structures to optimize the impact of the new products and systems. We design the documentation and training, in concert with the interfaces, so that the user support features of the product are coordinated totally with the design.

 

For more information on our Usability- Human Factors Services, Please contact us at usability@kohlgroup.com