Web and Mobile Design, Consultation, and Development
Courtney Tiberio & Associates offers services in multiple collaborative modes including full digital project design and build, standalone services and consultation, and staff augmentation.
We support environmental stewardship and social justice work with websites, web and mobiles apps, and a spectrum of design solutions.
Human-centered design for planet-centered solutions
Connection and facilitation for innovation
Project management for efficiency and alignment
User Experience Assessment for Websites and Apps
Have you wondered why visitors don’t go beyond your homepage? Do you wonder if the users of your app are frustrated, and how you can improve their experience with your product?
Great design is as much a matter of finding problems as it is solving them. It’s important that we fully understand and articulate those problems so we can determine what the form and the criteria of a solution ought to be.
Usability Evaluation of Websites and Apps
A heuristic evaluation of your website or app is a quick and affordable UX research method to find and assess problems with the user interface. We perform heuristic evaluations using a methodology based on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.
After defining a scope for the study, we will apply the heuristics to each screen, including edge cases, errors, and help systems. You will be given a full report of the findings with severity, priority, and recommendations for each of the findings.
This type of usability evaluation is valuable as a standalone study for existing websites and apps, as well as part of an iterative design process along with user testing.
Heuristics Evaluation
A heuristic evaluation of your website or app is a quick and affordable UX research method to find and assess problems with the user interface. We perform heuristic evaluations using a methodology based on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.
After defining a scope for the study, we will apply the heuristics to each screen, including edge cases, errors, and help systems. You will be given a full report of the findings with severity, priority, and recommendations for each of the findings.
This type of usability evaluation is valuable as a standalone study for existing websites and apps, as well as part of an iterative design process along with user testing.
User Testing
User Testing observes how users interact with a product in order to prove that they need your product. The result is feedback that helps determine if your new or existing product is actually useful to your target audience.
User Testing should take place before a design phase or at any time when design questions or problems arise. The assessment can address important considerations before designing the solution:
- Why would people want to use the website or app?
- How do people actually use or not use the website or app?
- What do people dislike about the website or app?
- What else might people want from the website or app?
Usability Testing
Can users easily use your product?
If not, why?
What user needs did we miss?
Usability Testing consists of qualitative and quantitative research methods to gather insights into how users use your product, and to uncover and define usability specific problems through targeted user feedback. There are a number of common practices used in this type of testing:
- Moderated interviews
- Unmoderated tests
- Surveys
- A/B tests
Usability Testing should be used throughout the iterative design and development process, and after product launch.
“The key to making things understandable is to understand what it’s like not to understand.”
—Richard Saul Wurman
Digital Product Strategy and Design
Often when people talk about design they are talking about the way something looks, the decorations it has, or the form it takes. This is a very narrow use of the word “design”. Design is a plan for solving a problem, and when it comes to websites and apps there are methodologies to achieve different aspects of the successful plan.
Beginning a digital product with systems thinking and holistic design offers exciting opportunities to effectively implement the value proposition. A clear design process with proven methodologies serves to architect a system that empowers end users, product managers, and other stakeholders.
“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I’ve finished, if the solution isn’t beautiful, I know it’s wrong.”
—Buckminster Fuller
Usability Evaluation of Websites and Apps
A heuristic evaluation of your website or app is a quick and affordable UX research method to find and assess problems with the user interface. We perform heuristic evaluations using a methodology based on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.
After defining a scope for the study, we will apply the heuristics to each screen, including edge cases, errors, and help systems. You will be given a full report of the findings with severity, priority, and recommendations for each of the findings.
This type of usability evaluation is valuable as a standalone study for existing websites and apps, as well as part of an iterative design process along with user testing.
Early Product Discovery and MVP Shaping
Planning for a successful app launch and great user experience for any digital product is a responsibility shared by business owners, UX designers, developers, management, and end users. All of these domain experts should be included in the discovery and early strategy process. It is our job to draw out wisdom from these domain experts, partnering with you to craft a shared vocabulary and roadmap for success in the context of your unique business strategy.
A professionally facilitated Technical Design Workshop will guide your team to understand end user needs, align stakeholders, define MVP (minimum viable product) features, and work with developers to produce a technical spec ready for project kick-off. Together we identify challenges, explore opportunities, and build a plan for success.
This kind of technical and design planning is critical for a successful life cycle of the project, but we also offer it as a highly valuable standalone service.
To learn more about how and why this works, read Case Study: A Mobile App Technical Design Workshop.
Ideation, Wireframing, Prototyping
When designing features for a web or mobile project there are many opportunities for creative solutions to complex problems. Sketching, wireframing, and prototyping are efficient processes to explore new ideas, frame and validate assumptions, and allow for designs to fail quickly and early so they can be improved before the more costly investment in development begins.
Leveraging research from the discovery phase, sketching and wireframing keep UX designers and developers aligned in terms of functionality and user flows. These sketches and wireframes are then made into clickable prototypes that can be tested for product owner and user feedback.
Web and Mobile UI Design
Creating polished user interface designs based on successful prototyping is icing the cake. Whether creating something brand new, or updating an existing website or mobile app, your vision will come to life in beautiful pixel-perfect mockups ready to hand off for development.
The design software we use allows for easy sharing of mockups and prototypes, threaded commenting directly on the design, and tools for efficient collaboration with developers.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer, that the designers are handed this box and told ‘Make it look good’, but that’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
—Steve Jobs
Web and Mobile Development,
Project Management
Working closely with our clients and their domain expertise, we build beautiful websites and apps that educate, inspire, and result in positive action.
We have a network of talented developers and will put together the right team for your project. Throughout our work together a dedicated project manager will keep tasks organized and on track.
The kinds of digital products we build include:
- Websites leveraging CMS, CRM, and LMS platforms
- Web apps with back end tailored for management
- Mobile apps for Android and iOS
We also offer Digital Project Management as a standalone service, working with your designers, developers, and clients in a staff augmentation capacity.
This article describes how I work as UX Designer + Project Manager:
The Intersection of UX Design and Project Management in Small Teams
“Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change.”
—Muhammad Yunus
Do you want to discuss how to get started with, improve upon, or support your web or mobile project?