User experience or UX for short, is the overall experience a person has when they interact with a product or a service. It encompasses everything they hear, see and feel.
At Art & Science, UX is an integral part of the work we do. We work on projects that range from digital to physical and web-based to experiential, for clients across various industries including retail, fintech and healthcare. Our ability to take complex and often ambiguous problems and find meaningful, creative and innovative solutions is something our clients value.
A Holistic Approach
By having a clear understanding of our client’s sector, engaging stakeholders to better understand business goals, and designing based on the needs of users, we ensure our work is not only usable, but also impactful.
Art & Science approaches UX with a holistic lens that takes into account three key pillars:
- Discovery
- Collaboration
- Iteration
Discovery
Discovery is an essential phase in our approach to UX. Our goals are to understand our client’s business objectives through user and stakeholder research, such as interviews, surveys and competitive analysis.
This phase also helps our team get familiar with the brand, uncover insights about target consumers and their needs, and identify best practices particular to the industry.
For website projects, our SEO team typically does a deep dive into the Google Analytics of the existing site, as well as an SEO audit, uncovering insights unique to the sector, while finding opportunities to grow organic search traffic.As a result, we are able to design experiences that are intuitive, simple and enjoyable for users, and that also balance business goals, brand attributes, SEO insights, and best practices.
Collaboration
A key pillar of successful UX design is collaboration, both internally and externally.
Collaborating with clients ensures we understand their overall needs and goals, and that our solutions meet these at every step.
There is high value in client feedback, so we take an iterative approach to UX design that allows us to refine our solutions over time in collaboration with our key stakeholders. Internally, collaboration between our different teams—such as creative, technology and performance marketing—allows us to take a holistic approach to each creative problem, ensuring we uncover opportunities for improvement and innovation while keeping scope and budget in check.
Iteration
Internally, we work with our developers to confirm technical feasibility and discover opportunities for further iteration. Externally, we are flexible and agile when encountering new information, or accommodating unexpected changes from clients.
For all our due diligence and collaboration, we still believe that everything is a hypothesis. So when we launch a project, we don’t assume that it will be a success. Instead, we measure the effectiveness of our designs through testing and analysis to learn how users are actually engaging with products, ensuring future iterations are based on real data and statistics.
Our approach balances creative thinking and scientific insights. The importance of learning through discovery, collaborating with clients and team members, and iterating based on new findings ensures we are approaching our design process in a holistic way.
Want to learn more about our UX design process? Send us a message.
Authors: Hanieh Khosroshahi, Kirk Clyne, Gabrielle Anagnostopoulos
