1. An Short Welcome & Introduction
Welcome.1
Pointpath Studios is a dedicated team of professionals focused on creating high quality, interesting and sustainable digital products.
Our products are the result of concept and research, information architecture, design, development and finally, iteration. This process continually informs our work, including websites, applications and our very own content management system, Contour Content.2 You can find out more about us and our work at http://pointpath.co.
While the exact form of our process varies greatly from project to project, common threads emerge: the why and the hows.
2. A Singular Why
Why are we here, creating digital media?
To say “We love what we do, we’re good at it or we wouldn't think of doing anything else ” would be true, but trite. Superficially it’s a mix of the above, but more profoundly: why is Pointpath a studio and why do we engage in our process?
Because of the user.
Typical project goals of “increasing traffic,” “updating visual appeal” or “streamlining content management” all relate back to the user, be they visitor or admin. Ultimately it is the user who invests in an interaction, and ultimately that is who we want to engage. But who is this user?
A bit about the user…
This user is typically nameless, faceless(fig. 1) and human.3 They're usually goal oriented, they have an expectation of what their experience will be and their own rubric of whether that experience was ultimately a success. Each user interaction is influenced by a staggering array of variables: time spent, annoyance level, delight, confusion, perceived success and so on. What a user considers a single “interaction” can be broken down into many smaller experiences – navigating, clicking, searching, stumbling upon – each contributing to the overall perception, positive or negative, of the entire experience.
fig. 1
The typical web user, as it appears to a web server. An IP address, a time & a request.
We are all constantly users. You are a user right now – of this website, the device you're accessing it with and even of the chair you're sitting in.
Typical perceptions of the user…
Unfortunately users are easily relegated to being a metric, a bounce, a unique visit without considering how they experience the interaction. Internal users are also often forgotten, the content manager who enters news items or the developer who sets up new page templates.
It's easy to consider users isolated events, each one using the product we carefully craft in strange and unexpected ways. To whisper ever so quietly that users are, well, dumb.4 This is easy, but self-defeating. The audience as a whole is comprised of these individuals.
This broad group is who uses the internet – interacts with your site, participates, engages, buys. They are who we need to be cognizant of and who we need to improve the experience for.
The users are the why.
3. The Many Hows
The Hows are the methods that we employ to improve the user experience. To make the user experience more efficient and more effective, to make our users engage and enjoy.
In the earlier introduction we went over our process steps – research, information architecture, design, testing, development and iteration. While these steps represent our process, they are not unique to us. They are the fundamental ways that any organization can evaluate, inform and address the user.
4. The Pointpath Papers
In future papers we'll go into more depth on each of those steps. For now they serve to illustrate the broad approaches to accomodating a user. Learning more about them and their interactions, hierarchically presenting information, displaying this content, testing the experience, developing for efficient use and finally incremental improvement.
Methods are available to improve their experience with your products. These methods should be discussed and dissected, and this is our aim with The Pointpath Papers. The subjects will be wide-ranging and hopefully free-form. We will continue to be user-centric in approach.