Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design

Its been a while since my last post, due mainly to the intensive project work currently underway with my user experience agency PRWD, as well as an excellent holiday in New York (check out the new header image which captures 1 aspect of the unique Big Apple) for my 30th birthday.

Best Practice Driven E-commerce Platform

At PRWD we are really excited about the e-commerce platform we are currently developing for a client from the ground up, which is based very much on e-commerce best practice and is using considerable amounts of my past experience from Littlewoods Shop Direct.
Some of the key features which are being incorporated into the scalable platform for phase 1 are as follows:

• an information architecture which was derived from user input and card sorting exercises
• a dedicated tag engine which will allow visitors to navigate through the products in a fluid and dynamic way
• a user interface which started from paper prototyping, all the way through to final interaction and visual designs
• a personalisation engine which will provide returning customers with personalised products and offers
• a layer of richer user interactions to enhance the user experience, whilst remaining cross-browser compatible and fully accessible
• a checkout process derived very much from research, awareness and understanding of best practices in ensuring checkout abandonment rates are reduced where possible, and therefore providing the client with greater conversion rates
• intelligent methods of targeting product promotions to specific target customers, which we have established by working very closely with our client in fully understanding their existing and potential client needs

Along with this platform development we are working for one of the largest direct marketing agencies in the UK to deliver their new online marketing platform, which is generating huge enthusiasm between the clients project team and PRWD’s team, which I am heading up along with providing the user experience and managing the user centred design process.

These current projects follow some high-end user experience consultancy based work which I personally have been providing some large design agencies in Manchester, which I intend to provide some relevant posts on in due course.

So coming back to my blog, unfortunately content has been very sparse over the last few months, apart from the well received user experience review of the new House of Fraser e-commerce site, but at least the lack of posts aren’t due to the lack of work being put in on the key areas of usability and information architecture recently!

User Experience Training and Knowledge Sharing for 2008

Looking ahead to 2008, at PRWD we will be starting to provide User Experience and Online Marketing Training, at both our modern Manchester offices and in-house working directly with clients and their employees. We have seen a considerable demand from our clients, in particular blue chip retailers and established design agencies, to up-skill their in-house staff and therefore ensure user centred design processes are adopted on large projects, whether transactional or informational.

This blog will certainly be apart of the marketing strategy for promoting these new services during 2008 and in addition I’ll look forward to continuing with posting articles on all aspects of online user experience.

Tags: PRWD, UCDcommerce