Most of the Taptu team works outside of the spotlight, creating and testing many design iterations or crawling the web to grow our index, but this week, Matt, one of our User Experience designers, is taking the stage to talk about his role. – Vero

I’m Matt, one of the User Experience (UE) designers at Taptu. I work with Marc who you’ll hear from next month.

So what do we do? In short we design the look and feel of the user interface that users experience as they use our products. Our aim is to create usable, engaging and aesthetically pleasing products across the wide range of devices Taptu works on.

We spend a huge amount of our time thinking about the needs of our users and talking to users direct. We feed this user-centred approach into each prototype we create. Eventually those prototype designs make it to a public release that you’ll see.

In future posts we’d like to give you insight into our process and some of the design issues we’ve faced. Is there anything specific you’d like to hear about? Let us know. A good place to start for this first posting is with our users. How do we get to understand the target users of our product? A key method we use to evaluate our designs is User Experience Testing (aka Usability Testing).

On a monthly basis we find a set of target users and meet them face-to-face, one-to-one. We ask them to try specific tasks and ‘think aloud’ as we observe the way they interact with our prototypes. Our observations help us identify design elements and ‘flows’ that work for users and those that don’t. We feed our learnings directly back into the next prototype each time we test. If you’ve ever watched real users trying-out your product for the first time, you’ll know exactly how insightful it can be.

By interacting with our users directly and regularly we reap valuable knowledge about their behaviours and expectations with our products. We learn what makes them ‘tick’ cognitively and experience a ‘reality check’ about what users really want when using Taptu.

We run our UE testing sessions in London, where we can source the varied demographics of users that we need. In future we will run studies in other countries, as we develop the product for those markets. Our aim will be to understand the cultural differences of each country or region.

Ok, that’s a quick overview of one of the processes we use. Again, if you have anything you’d like to hear about let us know. We aim to listen and react to our users and that includes you…

[tags]taptu, taptology, web design, mobile design, usability, user experience[/tags]

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