User Experience.

User experience.

Looking for ways to improve user efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction? Our design and development teams work closely with user experience (UX) specialists to optimise the end user’s experience.

We consider best practices across a variety of fields such as design, usability and information architecture to create intuitive user interfaces. From finding specific information quickly, and instinctively being able to understand how to interact with a site, a site designed with UX at its core will avoid unnecessary features and complication, balancing user expectations with business objectives.

UX considerations.

Ensure your design communicates brand proposition at a single glance, so users know they’ve arrived at the right place.

Plan for the user experience you want to build and allow for the different segments within your base.

Compromise on testing at your peril! You risk undermining the whole project if the UX is poor.

Take time to talk to your site users. You need to understand not only ‘what’ they want from you, but ‘why’ as well.

Make your websites accessible. Make your site easy to use for all users.

Visual design.

Engaging creative is at the heart of everything we do at Fireworx but it has to have a purpose.

We will not be aiming purely for an aesthetically pleasing site design but rather:

• for a solution that communicates brand proposition at a single glance
• is functional – making it easy for users to find the content they need
• is contemporary / relevant – site creative should be timeless
• is future proof – we aim to produce a design that can adapt and change with the changing needs of the company.

Information architecture.

The Information Architecture Institute defines information architecture as “the art and science of organising and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability”.

In practice, our usual IA process takes in a number of different stages. Firstly, we define audience and map out user journeys and goals. This helps understand how different users flow through a website using navigation and search tools towards their intended destination. Secondly, we look at the labelling of content and how accessible it is to users as they traverse the website. Finally, we translate this into wireframes, sitemaps and prototype designs that reflect the learnings gleaned from the previous stages and user testing and focus groups.

Accessibility.

Fireworx aims to build all of its sites to be as accessible as possible, achieving compliance with web accessibility and usability guidelines best practices.

Our templates are designed and built in accordance with current guidelines in order to achieve a minimum of the WCAG AA (European) standard to ensure DDA compliance. Our developers use a suite of testing tools throughout the development lifecycle to achieve this.