Technological innovations often rely upon user interface design to elevate their technical complexity to a usable product. Technology alone may not win user acceptance and subsequent marketability. The user experience, or how the user experiences the end product, is the key to acceptance. And that is where user interface design enters the design process. While product engineers focus on the technology, usability specialists focus on the user interface. For greatest efficiency and cost effectiveness, this working relationship is commonly maintained from the project's beginning. This being so, we provide substantially more testing of application interfaces than designs for them.

When applied to computer software, application interface design is also known as user interface design or human-computer interaction (HCI). While the focus of our testing and design is related to software and computers, the term "user interface" (UI) also refers to many products where the user interacts with controls or displays. Military aircraft, vehicles, airports, audio equipment, and computer peripherals, are a few products that extensively apply UI.

Optimized User Interface Design requires a systematic approach to the design process. But, to ensure optimum performance, usability testing is required. We have the experience required to provide this this empirical testing and provide data about what does work as anticipated and what does not work. Only after the resulting repairs are made can a product be deemed to have a user optimized interface.

The importance of good UI design can be the difference between product acceptance and rejection in the marketplace. If end-users feel it is not easy to learn, not easy to use, or too cumbersome, an otherwise excellent product could fail. Good UI Design can make a product easy to understand and use, which results in greater user acceptance.

A.S. Noe Consulting can assist your company in making your products easy to learn, easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, and marketable. Our expertise covers a wide range of products including web-based and application software, commercial and consumer products, telephony and communications software.

Our User Interface Design experts specialize in website design and software as a service design. We apply a systematic technique to design and evaluate Internet applications for maximum effectiveness, easy navigation, and enhanced user experience. Let us provide the fresh look at your software products to make sure they meet the expectations of your customers.

Some people consider business process reengineering (BPR) a nice way of saying "downsizing." In fact, BPR is the analysis and redesign of workflow within and between enterprises, which may or may not point to downsizing.

The idea is simple; sometimes radical redesign and reorganization of an enterprise (wiping the slate clean) is necessary to lower costs and increase quality of service. And consistently, information technology is the key enabler for such radical change.
 
And while BPR had its corporate boom in the early 1990's, many of the profits that businesses enjoy today are a direct result of reengineering undertaken in the past five years. Workflow designs have a much shorter shelf life today. The assumptions about technology, people, and organizational goals that motivate designs are more dynamic, making periodic assessment more critical than ever.

More specifically, the seven principles of reengineering to streamline the work process and thereby achieve significant levels of improvement in quality, time management, and cost are:

1. Organize around outcomes, not tasks;
    
   
2. Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency;
    
   
3. Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces the information;
    
   
4. Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized;
    
   
5. Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results;
    
   
6. Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process, and;
    
   
7. Capture information once (at the source).

BPR failures can almost exclusively be attributed to a lack of sustained management commitment, unrealistic scope and expectations, and/or a resistance to change that often prompts management to abandon the concept of BPR. (Many large corporations that were unable to realize the benefits of BPR ended up embracing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) methodology.)

Small and medium-sized business (SMBs) have always had a tactical advantage in implementing BPR, since they do not have as many business and political units to syncronize. Large corporations are cumbersome to manipulate, but small businesses in particular can implement changes almost immediately.

Similarly, large BPR consultancies have an overhead that, for all practical purposes, prevents them  from assisting small businesses. Our consultancy specializes in BPR for SMBs and we invite you to consider us when you're ready for a fresh look at your business.