How does your service work in general?
Our goal is to ensure that a website is operating at peak performance from a user’s point of view. We accomplish this by either optimizing certain aspects of an existing website (e.g. page speed), completely revamping a site, or building one from scratch with user-centered design principles (also known as human centered design or people-centered design).
Who needs Constant UX?
If you’re looking for a service like ours, it’s most likely because your website is important to your business, your passion, or your vision, and you want it to be better at achieving your goals. In the big picture, that could mean increasing sales, raising your brand awareness, or simply crafting a unique voice for your audience.
We help you get there through a variety of tactics that focus on the needs of the user in a sustainable way.
Forging a relationship
Once you contact us, we’ll start a dialogue to determine the best way to proceed. Do you have a clear vision of what needs to be done? Do you need us to take the lead and apply our experience and know-how? No matter how the journey unfolds, you’ll be interacting with a dedicated individual from our team that will ensure things move along and stay on the right track.
Even though our service involves technical skill, our focus is always on people – from our clients to the users that make their businesses thrive.
Asking the right questions
You might feel that you need to get more out of your website, but you might not be sure how to go about doing it. How do you know where to start, or what to improve? We start by asking the right questions. Some general questions could be:
- Who is your audience?
- What are they looking for when they visit your site?
- What do you want them to do on your site?
- What face/voice do you want to present to your users?
And so on. Asking the right questions ensures the journey starts off on the right foot. As we execute a plan, there can be adjustments made at any step, but we’re always focused on achieving your goals in the most efficient way possible.
User research
The core of our service is about aligning your goals with the needs of your users. In order to achieve this, we strive to understand who your users are, what they need, and how they behave on your website.
We do this by conducting user research. This can typically include in-person interviews, ethnographic studies and user journey analyses. We create personas for your audience and determine how they interact with your site. This takes the guesswork out of designing a website that performs better for your visitors.
Site audit and strategy
Once we determine your goals and have understood your users’ needs, we perform a site audit. We thoroughly analyze your site in order to determine where it could be improved and provide a clear plan of action. This usually entails an overall strategy supported by a combination of services. For example, our plan could include:
- Conversion optimization
- Re-branding (logo design, copy revamp)
- User interface (UI) design
- Landing page creation and testing
- Information architecture (IA) optimization
And more. Our site audit will be presented to you in a detailed package that would include an analysis of the current strengths and weaknesses of your site, suggestions and fixes, and possible re-design examples illustrated by mock-ups. Our team can then either implement the plan of action, or we can act in a supporting role with your in-house development/design team or other web service providers to ensure the plan is carried out effectively.
Once a project is completed, we offer a follow-up service a few months down the line to ensure everything that was done is working as intended. As part of our dedication to forging long-lasting relationships, we also offer sustained maintenance packages to help ensure your site’s user experience stays in top shape.
Targeted fixes
In some cases, you might come to us with a very specific issue that you need fixed. If you know that all you need is help with your page speed for example, we can go ahead and just work on that. In some cases, all you might need is a new menu layout, navigation menu, or to tweak a landing page.
We’re here to solve any website-related problem you might have, no matter how large or small. Whatever the scope of the project, our team will scale with it as needed so we can bring you maximum value.
Sustained service
We strongly believe that improving user experience on the web involves sustained effort. We can always fix a specific issue, but UX is about more than just turning dials and plugging holes. The web is in a constant state of flux, and users are always interacting with it in new ways that require both adaptation and anticipation.
While it’s important to maintain your site’s performance in the face of changing technology and trends, you also need to stay ahead of the curve and envision new possibilities for user interactions. As such, we are here to develop a sustainable partnership to help you achieve long-term success.
What is user-centered design?
User centered-design is a set of concepts that focus on the usability of a product or service, taking into account the user’s needs and goals in every step of the design process. While it could be applied to any product or service, user-centered design gained widespread popularity when it was applied to software and web development. In an effort to sound more appealing, it’s now sometimes called human-centered design or people-centered design (this is a good example of verbal design).
User-centered design is a philosophy that can guide the development a product (such as a website) to ensure that it provides a clear, intuitive and pleasant experience. There are more layers to the science of user-centered design, but that’s the essence of it.
Maintaining user experience
While it’s important to keep the end user’s perspective in mind when building a website, improving a site’s user experience is an ongoing process that should be maintained after the site is launched. In reality, very few websites are built with a focus on user-centered design, so the idea of post-launch optimization and maintenance is even more important for those looking to improve their site’s performance. And that’s what we do.
Our approach
Our service is built around three fundamental aspects of web user experience: performance, design, and content. While tackling each aspect requires specialized knowledge and skills, we always maintain a big-picture approach to each project. Whether we are improving an existing site or building a new one, in the end it’s about ensuring the website performs well for you and your audience.
What does UX stand for?
User experience. It’s an aspect of marketing concerned with how people experience products and services, and it’s used as a guiding principle in all stages of design and development. The focus on user experience represents a shift from creating a product and expecting the consumer to adapt their behaviour to it, to designing the product with the user’s needs in mind.
The science of user experience is based on knowing your audience, and can involve disciplines such as psychology, anthropology and biology.
Focusing on the user’s experience can be applied to any product or service, but UX has gained widespread attention in recent years as applied to software applications and websites. In the case of the latter, there is also growing evidence that improving UX can bring rewards in the form of better search engine rankings – see the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.
What’s the difference between user experience and usability?
User experience refers to all aspects of how a person interacts with a product or service. It includes how they feel before, during and after experiencing something (such as a website). It’s essentially a measure of how happy or satisfied someone is in relation to a brand, a product, or an environment.
Usability simply refers to how easy a product is to use, or how efficiently it solves a specific problem for a user. Think of it as a key aspect of a product’s overall user experience.
The UX question: “Did the user have a delightful experience while using this product?”
The usability question: “Did this product help the user accomplish their goal?”
The two terms are often used interchangeably, which can get confusing. It’s enough to remember that usability is a specific aspect of user experience. While they are distinct concepts, they can’t really be separated – usability is crucial to a delightful user experience, especially for websites.
Why Constant UX?
We’re skilled, experienced, knowledgeable, and dedicated to our vision of improving the web one site at a time. We are focused on people and relationships, from the care and attention we devote to our clients to the empathy we have with your needs and those of your users.
Our services are informed by a variety of backgrounds, including software engineering, web design/development, digital marketing, anthropology and the arts. We combine academic, artistic and real business-world experience to offer a unique approach to a new and exciting field.
Constant UX is more than a name. It reflects the idea that improving user experience is an ongoing task that requires constant vigilance, from testing to refining to adapting and re-tooling.
Do you do SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
We focus on improving websites’ user experience, which helps SEO in the long term. In fact, what we do is part of “white hat SEO” or SEO best practices according to Google. These include:
- Readable, quality content
- Fast page speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- Clear layout and easy navigation
- Descriptive, keyword-rich meta tags
Our work is informed by experience in the digital marketing and SEO world, so we’re always conscious of how search engines will respond to your site. It’s part of UX as much as choosing the right colours for your design.
Remember, even if you manage to achieve great rankings on Google, it’s not going to help your business if your website is performing poorly once people land on it. It’s tempting to focus on getting visibility on search engines at all costs, but that’s approaching things backwards and can create a vicious cycle of headaches.
Focus on getting a website that works for your users (Google is a user too!), and you’ll reap the rewards. Otherwise you’re just wasting your money.
Can you build me a new website?
Absolutely. If you don’t have a website at all or your existing site is beyond salvage, we can build you a new one from the ground up with the same focus on user experience that we provide in our optimization services. Our team has extensive experience in building websites for a variety of clients, and we know how to make websites that bring value to you and your audience.
Do you offer consulting services?
Yes! We are here to lend our guidance and input to help you achieve your goals. If you prefer to put our plan(s) into action using your own resources, we’re happy to partner with you in a consulting role. Our team’s strengths are not only technical – we have experience in asking the right questions, working with a vision, and forging a clear path through any project.
Get in touch.
If you have any questions or just want to connect, don’t hesitate to reach out.