Latest Articles on Design by Our Team

We’ve recently run usability studies on an application for a financial product where, after a user inputs a couple of screens worth of data, a tailored product solution appears. We had a nice prototype, and all was well except for one thing…

During the usability study, we received the following feedback: the recommendation arrived too fast. Wait, what? Yes, the results arrived too quickly after the user hit send, which made people think that it wasn’t real. Some of the user feedback was “there’s no way it could’ve looked at my data in such short amount of time…”, “I don’t think this is real, because it hasn’t spent any time thinking about it…”, “I wouldn’t trust this product, it made me fill in screens of data but then ignored it all when giving me the recommendation…”, or, in some cases, people were expecting to continue filling in more data and didn’t entirely believe that the screen they were looking at was the solution and not just another screen requiring more information.

Dashboards are often the backbone of a good web app as they can be used to present large amounts of data in a condensed and visual form. In general, the more complex the app is, the more it can benefit from a well-structured, clear dashboard that helps users understand at a glance what the system and the underlying data is doing. We all use dashboards in our day-to-day lives, from the dashboard in our cars to the display on the thermostat that controls our air conditioner. In this case, I prefer to focus on the web ones.

So, how can we, as designers and developers, make sure that our web app dashboard is efficient?

Recently our website has undergone a massive design upgrade. It was a very large undertaking involving a team of designers, front end developers and copy writers. Everyone was very eager to get it out the door, so, as with a lot of websites and applications, making sure it was accessible was not made a priority. While there was nothing major wrong, it missed a fair amount of small accessibility features that improve the usability of the site. So I made it my mission to find them all and upgrade as many as I could.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) guidelines for accessibility has a large checklist, so I got to work testing each one to see if we passed or failed. Starting with level A and when that was done level AA, following the same steps I undertake for our clients when we perform an Accessibility Review.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) rightfully gets a bad name, because it’s historically been more associated with various methods attempting to trick a search engine or finding loopholes in their algorithms to make your brand more visible.

We take it from a different perspective at reinteractive.