UX consulting

Lack of communication, validation and support are the enemies of innovation. In other words: a team that can present their ideas clearly and align the right people behind them, is very likely to succeed. The challenge lies in collecting all the small ideas and combining them into a big, powerful solution.

Vaadin’s Design Kickstart converts uncertain, abstract and ambiguous ideas into solid concepts. Our tightly packed process takes you through product discovery, definition and design, and in the end delivers you the first tangible archetype of your product, showcasing its value proposition through interactive examples. It’s a great way of gaining better understanding of your opportunities and presenting the value to your team and stakeholders.

Replacing a legacy application with a new solution is a delicate process. Business critical applications have seen a lot of use, patchwork, enhancements and other maintenance activities throughout the years. This has slowly eroded the user experience, and typically the user interface has become inconsistent, the codebase redundant, and there are very few people in the development team who know why certain features exist, or if they are still valuable in today’s context.

Thanks to our unique position in design and technology, Vaadin has been a preferred choice for many teams in this kind of a situation. Bringing the user experience up to date requires a thorough review of the situation, understanding both the end users’ and business needs, and a careful redesign process which improves the UX without alienating the users.

In a typical app modernization project we do:

• Contextual interviews and observing of end users
• Business stakeholder interviews
• UX expert reviews and walkthroughs of the old application
• Remodeling and streamlining of user flows
• Responsive web application shell designs
• User interface design
• Visual design

The importance of design as a competitive advantage is growing, and so is the necessity of seamless collaboration between design and development. Even the best plans can fail, if your designs are not implemented as intended or the results are used inconsistently.

A design system defines the set of application building blocks: how they behave, look like, and fit together to form larger compositions and views. It also improves communication and collaboration by establishing a common vocabulary and single source of truth for the whole team. Reusable building blocks increase development efficiency and improve overall user experience uniformity now and in the future.

Are your users dissatisfied with your application? Does it feel somehow off, but you can’t really point out the reasons

Seeking outside opinion is very useful in these situations. Our UX Review is a careful analysis of the most important aspects of your application’s user experience. It provides you with valuable, actionable pointers and insights. The review is performed by Vaadin’s own experts - highly experienced both in design and in web technologies – and it consists of:

• Initial briefing to understand the needs and primary use cases of your users
• Identification of usability issues, bottlenecks and improvement opportunities
• Assessment of your application’s performance on other areas of UX
• A scorecard to help you identify the areas that perform well or need improvement.