Our services

We can help you with...

Usability testing

Flow can run usability tests on software, websites or mobile phones. We work with you to create a brief, recruit the users and run the tests in a specialist research facility. We also have a mobile usability lab that can go to users' own work environments, or to your offices. At the end, we deliver a detailed presentation about our findings, including suggestions for short-term and long-term improvements. You also get a DVD of all the tests. More about how we do usability testing

Interaction design & wireframing

We can help you with the interaction design of a brand new product, or with improving the interaction on an existing product. (Interaction design is the design of how something works, rather than how it looks.)

From wireframe to finished design: University of Stellenbosch Business School

Information architecture

Information architecture (IA) is all about how a site is structured, and the bigger the site, the more important it is to design the IA. Which categories would make sense to your users? Should pages fit into multiple categories? How can you structure your navigation so that users can easily find the content they want? These kinds of questions will be addressed by the IA. Flow can design your site's information architecture in collaboration with your team. The output is a detailed spreadsheet that can be used by developers to start building the site.

An information architecture spreadsheet

Form design

Improving the usability of your signup form or purchase process can transform your online business. The easier it is for people to buy, the more people will buy, which means more revenue for your business. Flow has particular expertise in form design.

Ethnographic research

Flow ethnographers can spend time with target customers in their own environments - doing interviews, taking pictures, or just hanging out with them to start understanding the complexity of their behaviour. For example, to improve the Pam Golding intranet we started with an ethnographic study at different estate agents' offices, to understand how they work and what their frustrations were with the intranet.

Expert evaluation

During an expert evaluation, a consultant spends a day or two analysing your product. We then generate a report based on a set of pre-defined usability criteria. This will point out some of your usability problems, but it will never give you insight into your customers' behaviour, or help you get the bigger picture about how your customers use your product.

Working on site with your team

If you are working on a long-term project, you can engage a Flow consultant to spend one or two days per week on site with your team. That means you have regular access to someone who looks at your product from a user-centred point of view. It also means you can run rapid usability tests on the stuff you're building, and your team has access to UX training and mentoring.