When beginning a new app, website, feature or idea there are often many unknowns. How will it look? How will it work? Will customers like it? Will they understand how to use it? One thing is for sure though, launching something that doesn't work for customers is risky, and expensive.

When designing a website, app or system, it is crucial to consider the users we are designing for and their different needs. It is for this reason that we build benchmark usability testing into our early design process. It is a quick and effective way to identify the common and distinct problems people experience, as well as to understand some the common and distinct needs that they might have.

The Light Shifting Display is a low-resolution lighting display that can present real-time data through an ambient lamp. The prototype, created by Marius Hoggenmüller and Alexander Wiethoff features a discrete and continuous display mode to support a wide range of visual representations designed to explore the boundaries between data display and luminaire design.

Our client is a startup that has developed a unique mobile scanning technology which can be used to deliver and authenticate tickets, coupons, loyalty identities and payment credentials to any type of mobile device, including feature phones.

With a small but brilliant team of engineers and developers behind this app, the technology powering it was sorted. The real challenge was, “How do we get people to love this product? How do we get them to change their energy behaviour?”

Our client had created a code, delivered to any phone (smartphone or feature phone) which allows you to make purchases and accrue loyalty points simultaneously. But if they wanted to make the scanning process faster, easier, cooler, where would they begin? By asking the users of course!

Over the past twenty years working in visual design I have crafted many logos. So many logos. Some I loved, others I didn’t. Almost all were asked to be made bigger at some point. This is the life of a designer.