Interactive
Web Design & Development
“It’s all about the user experience”, that’s the mantra of our Interactive Department. Many companies can build a website for you but we believe in building sites for your customers. Looks and personality are equally important and our people develop sites that deliver on both counts.
We have pooled the vast knowledge and experience of our team and polished our build methodology so it shines. It is for this reason that our clients gain competitive advantage and report impressive R.O.I. from our Internet solutions.
Application Design & Development
Markets are constantly changing, which keeps us all on our toes. Portfolio is good friends with change, and we love to show clients how a business issue can often be a real opportunity to get ahead of the competition. Our Interactive Department utilises the latest in emergent technology and can develop a bespoke solution, from content management systems to user authenticated databases, to ensure our clients stay ahead.
Search Engine Placement & Optimisation
The jewel in the crown for any website… to be top of the list and rising. Portfolio’s Interactive Department use proven optimisation techniques to enhance our clients’ online presence and get them noticed. We like to think of it as bringing together the lost and found!
Focus Group / Usability Testing
Stop press! If you want to see how your website stacks up, we are one of the very few companies in the UK to offer usability testing in a purpose built state-of-the-art facility. We will recruit members of your target audience, place them in a controlled environment and watch how they interact with your website (or prototyped site if it is under construction). We then spend some time with participants and encourage them to speak freely about their experience of using the site. The process highlights success and failure points of the design, and identifies barriers that prevent the site from fulfilling user goals.
This allows us to be 100% confident when we present our recommendations and underpins our approach to building websites for your customers.
Interactive Design
We love nothing more than getting to grips with the newest ‘toys in town’. Portfolio uses the latest techniques to create stimulating CD ROMs, Videos and 3D Visualisation for our clients.
Interactive Best Practices
As one of Portfolio’s many business assessment techniques, an Interactive Best Practice Analysis serves the proposal end of product development by benchmarking the attributes of a large number of associative product competitors and function comparable comparators. Creating such a control baseline is useful to end product design in that a quantitative assessment may be made in regard to the usage of features, functions, navigation, media, and content.
User Research
Loyal customers = profitable customers. So, we work with our clients to build long and fulfilling relationships with theirs. Portfolio believes in using tried and tested techniques to really get to grips with your customers’ goals, their brand perceptions and user experiences.
We believe passionately in the power of research and have had a number of our reports published AND praised for their relevance and insight.
Focus Group Discussions
Great for throwing ideas or your actual products around! We can recruit participants that fit within your target profile and get them talking. The result is data with depth… research can not survive on numbers alone!
Surveys
We have designed questionnaires for use on and offline, remotely and face-to-face, and work with third party specialists to extract the key findings for our clients. If there is a trend emerging, we’ll find it!
Heuristic Evaluation
Our Interactive team know what looks and feels good to web users. They can examine a website and identify the heuristics (best practice components) that it has, and those that it lacks, to point clients in the right ‘correction direction’. Website heuristics include memory loading, search engine friendliness, user feedback and visual balance, and are used as assessment components for all websites.
Cognitive Walkthrough
Typically undertaken as part of the web development process, participants ‘walk through’ a series of usage scenarios to test the usability of a site’s design and layout. This can identify mental and physical obstructions through interaction with the navigation arrangement, content layout and language. If a website is underperforming, this process can often pinpoint why, and better still can be used to ensure a new site is built in the most efficient way.
Update Analysis
Markets change, expectations change… ‘cute and cool’ can quickly become ‘dated and dull’. Portfolio’s Update Analysis sharpens the refreshment process and allows websites to be refined without detriment to their best features. We gather feedback from users to highlight frustrations, and analyse site usage to identify any ‘empty rooms’ that you preserve but nobody visits. We believe that staying close to your audience (customers, staff or suppliers) is the way to get loyalty and competitive advantage to boot.
