When it comes to ensuring the success of any online activity, it’s essential that your business has a clear set of objectives. It’s also very important to ensure that the views of all stakeholders are considered and consolidated.

If you are having trouble bringing all stakeholders together, or need a third party to provide guidance or contribute new ideas or resources, our stakeholder workshops can help.

What’s involved?

We will perform interviews with stakeholders to understand your business goals and the context of your project. We also hold workshop sessions in which we reveal and discuss a preliminary design concept with opinion leaders.

How does it help?

Most importantly, stakeholder workshops ensure that the high level considerations of all your key stakeholders are covered off in the early phases of a project. They can also help us understand your strategic direction and online marketing goals – as well as address any specific content management requirements and any technology constraints.

Knowledge is a powerful thing. By reviewing your competitors’ sites, you gain valuable insights which may help you win business over your competition. Analysing competitor services provides the opportunity to discover what is working well for them, and exposes potential tools and strategies for your business.

What’s involved?

Our competitor review service involves looking at other best of breed services or products that have something in common with your own – so you can learn from their successes and failures.

How does it help?

This method stops you from re-inventing the wheel. Where possible, you can ‘borrow’ good ideas about implementation from those that have done it well.

It’s very important to know how your website compares to your competitors’ online presence. It enables you to understand your comparative online performance in reaching and engaging customers, convince decision-makers in your organisation about the strategic direction of your website and set directions for your optimisation and redevelopment activities.

To help you do so, Bienalto has developed a competitive benchmarking tool called Position Pundit, which performs an in-depth analysis of the user experience on your website and those of your key competitors.

What’s involved?

Our website benchmarking service ranks your website against your competitors, and against a scorecard of best practice criteria applicable to your business objectives.

We perform key tasks on all websites, scoring as we go and we provide you with a benchmarking and overview report as well as a presentation covering key areas for consideration and recommendations for optimising your website. We consider both user experience as well as audience acquisition and retention mechanisms.

Recognising that every business has unique objectives, we can customise Position Pundit to add additional criteria specific to your business; and we use weighted scores to place more emphasis on the criteria that really matter to you.

Too often, websites are designed based around assumptions on what a user wants and needs. However, to ensure the success of a website, it’s very important to consider how users actually interact in the context of their daily activities. By doing so, you will ensure that your site is truly user centric.

What’s involved?

Our one-to-one contextual inquiries service can help you understand the needs and goals of specific users – including their behaviour and tasks in the context of their life and daily activities. It involves first hand observations of real users in terms of how they interact with your business.

How does it help?

Contextual inquiries provide a framework that outlines both the real and contextual behaviours of your audience – ensuring that your site is not based on assumptions about what they need. In particular, this activity can help us generate and refine design concepts and create personas.

To deliver a successful website, it’s very important to know who your website is targeted at. Similarly, it’s very important to know what exactly is important to a specific audience. Many websites are designed based on the needs of broad market segments rather than on how specific users actually behave and perform tasks. And often, different stakeholders within a business will define target audiences in a different way.

What’s involved?

To help you understand your target audience in greater detail, we develop a set of fictional, representative user archetypes based on the behaviours, attitudes, and goals of your users. These personas are very user-friendly and easy to grasp – and they can help project stakeholders immediately understand and appreciate the importance of user-centred deign.

How does it help?

Personas can help you to understand and stay focused on your target audience. You can use personas to explain your website functionality to team members – and can use them as a continual reminder to create a design that’s user centric.

Do you find it hard to convey the vision for your website or other online assets? Are you looking for an engaging and non-technical way to communicate your goals? Would you like to communicate information architecture strategies and design concepts to an audience in a story-telling format? If so, user scenarios can often help.

What’s involved?

User scenarios are stories that describe specific activities of your users or customers: how they behave in a work environment, for instance, or what their typical day involves.

How does it help?

Scenarios help ensure that all stakeholders in the business understand and agree on key design principles, without discussions being too technically complex.

Regardless of what your business is hoping to do online, or is already doing, there are typically some key insights we can share to help you improve the experience for your users.

In some instances, problems that you may be experiencing with your website may be fairly obvious – however, you should count yourself fortunate if this is the case. Many problems go unnoticed or undiagnosed – and too often, this equates to missed opportunities.

What’s involved?

Bienalto can perform an expert evaluation of an existing website to determine where it is succeeding, and where it is failing. We perform a thorough review of your website - including your information architecture, user experience design, content, brand proposition, product offering, usability and search engine essentials.

How does it help?

We step into your customers’ shoes, and walk through your site. As we go, we take screen shots, and make notes regarding what works and what doesn’t. We identify points of failure, explain and rate them, and outline steps to remedy them.

Ensuring your website delivers the right content, in the right places, is an essential element of user-centric design.

What’s involved?

Our content inventory service involves mapping the hierarchy of all pages in your site or intranet. It helps us – and you - understand how content is currently organised and how it should be organised for the best possible results.

How can it help?

Our content inventory services can help you ensure that you have captured all of the information that your customers need. It can also help you perform a ‘spring clean’ of your website – removing any redundant information, and correctly grouping any remaining content. It can also help you uncover hidden, duplicated or unnecessary content and put it where it belongs.

If you need help defining the structure of your website – or if you’re having difficulty making decisions about where certain content belongs, our card sorting service can help. It can also help if you have performed a content inventory of your website and are overwhelmed with the multiple ways in which your content could be organised.

What’s involved?

Card sorting is a human-centred design method that informs the organisational structure of content. It is quick and inexpensive way of ensuring that all content is accounted for. We start by writing down individual topic areas on index cards. We then hand a set of topic cards to a number of users and ask them to group the cards into piles based on how they think the information should be grouped. Once this is done, we collate the results and use the feedback to inform how we structure our proposed information design.

How does it help?

Card sorting can very quickly help add order and logic to your site. At the end of the card sorting activity, we generate an overall structure of your content including suggestions for navigation and possible taxonomies.

Wireframes are an important and very valuable part of any online design. They can help you envisage how your site will come together before any time-consuming design or development has taken place.

What’s involved?

Wireframes are essentially blueprints for each page of your website – outlining all of the content and functionality that will be included. They enable you to quickly evaluate the appropriateness of each page, and make changes as and if required.

How does it help?

Wireframes offer a quick and efficient way to ensure your content is accurately structured – before you have invested in any visual design or development.

Flash prototyping offers a fast and relatively inexpensive way to trial the design of your website – ensuring it is aligned with your objectives and expectations before extensive design takes place.

What’s involved?

A flash prototype is an interactive and working version of your site or application which is designed to minimise risk, and which is produced early on in a project. It demonstrates key user scenarios, interactive behaviour, and initial ‘look and feel’. It also includes dummy content.

How does it help?

Flash prototyping allows you to discuss and revise your website or application in the very early stages - hence reducing risk associated with implementation and revision costs. Your prototype can also be used to effectively communicate interaction principles to your project team and potential users before implementation.

The success of any online application relies entirely on real users – and as such, it’s vital to get their feedback at every stage of the project lifecycle.

What’s involved?

Bienalto uses flash prototypes, wireframes or online systems to conduct user testing. We watch how users interact with these early developments and we record their screen and speech to highlight any potential usability issues.

How does it help?

User testing enables us to determine how a website will work with real users. It can also help us identify tangible issues, or areas where improvement is required, before any extensive design or development has taken place. In addition, it helps you confirm new design decisions or discover unknown usability flaws in existing systems.