Adage

New positions will provide a good platform for a new growth and a development of new services. "Our customers are becoming more and more aware of the significance of the easy-to-use, pleasurable and efficient concepts and user interfaces in their own business. Adage will answer to these growing needs by adding new services to the portfolio and by improving the existing ones. Next year will give us an opportunity to better serve our customers and to offer more versatile solutions to their challenges", Sami Wilkman states.

During World Usability Day there were 31 conference calls made, connecting 10 partners and their clients between 10 different countries. It was an exciting and busy day for everyone involved.

Dr. Saravjit Rihal from Amberlight UK, explains the ideas behind the ‘Partners Panel’, “This is a fantastic opportunity for us and our clients to connect with experts in local markets. Not only that participating clients are able to find out best practice from local experts first hand, it allows them to gather information and make decisions about a foreign market with minimal risk and commitment. In turn, this can open up new opportunities for our partners to work with new international clients”.

With this unprecedented scale of cooperation between the IUXP partners and clients, IUXP is opening up a new platform for our international clients to gain valuable insights at an early state with guidance of a local expert. In the future, the “Partner Panel” service looks forward to expanding and providing regular, domain specific panels, such as health care, financial service, motor, telecom to encourage further collaboration between our industry experts.

Adage will be participating in the future events and provide a forum for its clients to benefit from the global network of UX professionals.

Read more about International UX Partners from here.

Listening to the people, whether they are customers, consumers or your own staff, is a prerequisite for successful design.

To put it bluntly, great services are created by either an omniscient designer or through a customer-centered design process. Omniscient designers do not exist, so the only option is to design services in a manner that takes various stakeholders’ expectations and needs into account.

Major mistakes are avoided, when the design process involves user observation, usability evaluation and testing. The chances of success will continue to grow, if the process includes competitor benchmarking as well as participatory workshops for the stakeholders. In our vocabulary we call this the user-centered design process. Broadly speaking, user-centered design means listening the customers, consumers and your own staff during the design.

Truly human technology

Today’s challenge for designers is to combine people, business and technology in an engaging way. We believe that technology must be human; we want to create truly human technology. The starting point for designing truly human technology is to understand people and businesses and their needs. This understanding promotes the benefits of technology for the users as well as for the business.

Products are always used in a particular environment that determines the value of the product to the user. Then why the products are not designed and tested in this environment? Reasons for this are undoubtedly many, but none of them are insurmountable. It is quite common and sad to hear from a designer that he has never met the users of the products that he has designed. We strive to be the “missing link” between the designer and user.

We differentiate ourselves by research

People demand great usability and user experiences. This has led to a situation where all the top design firms present themselves as usability and user experience experts. Unfortunately, too often the actual expertise is thin; there is no background information gathered by user studies and the products are not tested with actual users.

We differentiate ourselves from other design companies by the fact that we do research as a part of our design process. Our designers will have an idea of the ​people ​actually using the product and they’re able to make better designs. In addition, all the extensive research work increases our knowledge of the good and bad design solutions. The figures speak for themselves: last year, a total of 1 257 people attended our user and usability studies in 179 projects in 30 different cities and 13 countries worldwide.

Web on mobile devices

The use of Web services on mobile devices is growing rapidly, meaning any restrictions they have should be taken into account in the design of Web services. We have conducted an extensive study of website use with touch screen mobile devices. Our main finding was that using Web services on mobile devices is still difficult and that touch screens can further aggravate the problems. Hence, Adage’s design and research projects now take into account also the special requirements for mobile devices.

Adage is probably best known for user and usability research. Alongside our research business, we have determinedly developed our design business, and its percentage of our revenue is nearing 50 percent. In design we stand out by our genuinely user-centred design process, combined with our extensive know-how in user and usability research. We create concepts and design services where business requirements meet with user expectations.

Aiming for long-term cooperation

One of our long-term clients is the Finnish Tax Administration, with whom we have developed their electronic services since 2004. The success of the Tax Administration’s electronic services is a good example of the significance of long-term and constant cooperation in user-centred design.

The overall grade of Adage’s project feedback on a scale of 1–6 is 5.51, which can be considered excellent in the IT business. In a constantly changing environment, we are still required to not only produce top quality but to also work cost-efficiently, which takes constant evaluation and measuring of cost benefits of design and research along with regular feedback on the results of our work. Thus, we promise to be in contact with you at least every six months, and more often if need be.

The quote in the title is from project feedback from a client.