A better user experience is guaranteed to improve your business.
If your digital interfaces aren’t clear, engaging, and easy to use, you’re probably losing people. When you understand and design for their needs, you’ll leave them curious, enlightened, and ready to take the next step with you.
How I work
1. Understand the Opportunity
First, I take a look at the business case and ask questions to make sure stakeholders are aligned. Once we’ve established a clear and unified vision, I audit the usability and content of the existing experience to identify improvement areas. I also assess competitors to understand what others are doing well, and what opportunities exist in the market.
2. Understand the User
It’s easy to get so focused on project goals that we forget to consider how it will benefit our customers. Looking at the project from the user’s perspective helps us identify solutions that will be most effective. I take a look at demographics and psychographics to uncover potential customer problems, desires, behaviors, and attitudes. The findings help us surface opportunities to improve the user experience.
3. Develop a Strategy
Once the business opportunity and user needs are identified, it’s time to establish a course of action. I help you create strategic guidance and tactics that will both solve the customer problems and meet the business needs.
4. Design Solutions
With a strategy in place, the design process can begin. The first step is to outline key messages and desired content. Next, I create wireframes that show how the experience could look and function. The wireframes serve as a working draft, allowing us to focus on the structure first, iterate quickly, and identify development risks early.
5. Test & Iterate
It’s hard to evaluate how useful and desirable a product is without trying it out on real people. I facilitate user testing to see how users respond to prototypes. We use the findings to make improvements before the development team starts building.
6. Refine the Details
I rely on input from creative, technical, and business teams throughout the process. When my work is done, I make sure the deliverables are useful and usable for the people I’ve partnered with. I document wireframe specs, content guidelines, and experience requirements so that teams have the details and records needed to move forward.
What I offer
From discovery, to planning, to polishing, let’s make your user experience click.
Product Strategy
Vision Refinement
Workshop Facilitation
User Research
Personas
User Experience
Experience Maps
User Flows
Wireframes
Clickable Prototypes
Refinement & Documentation
UI Libraries
Requirements & User Stories
Content Inventory & Tracking
User Testing
Who I’ve worked with
The word on the street
“The way Laura engages both business and technical leaders, and takes them on a deliberate march, is fascinating. She’s very gifted.”
“Laura Horan is curious, engaged, driven and accountable. Her strength, clarity of thought, integrity, and communication allowed us to hit important deadlines with great work.”
“Laura is a calm hand on the wheel. She strikes a Goldilocks balance between questions and facilitation.”
“Laura created and executed an editorial calendar, landing me a spot on a TV morning show, launching an eye-catching website, and interviewing a top-selling author for my social media.”