If we’ve learnt anything over the last 20 plus years of delivering thousands of software solutions of varying forms and scales, it’s that a robust, resilient, proven and effective delivery process is absolutely critical to success.

We’ve been fortunate to work with some ‘best of breed’ partners in many of the projects we’ve worked on, from the UK’s largest Sage business partner, to Hewlett Packard Enterprise one of the world’s largest software companies. Through working in these partnerships we’ve seen what best practice looks like and we’ve learnt from it.

From Waterfall to Prince 2, and Agile to DevOps, we’ve incorporated the best of these methodologies into our own delivery process model which we’ve refined over more than twenty years of successful project delivery.

But it’s also about continuous improvement and we’re always looking to learn and improve our processes and we invest heavily in our team with continuing professional development, attending industry events and training programs so that we keep abreast of new ideas and bring them into bd2 where we can see it will add value.

Users and the user experience should be at the centre of our thinking at all times, from the interface to the way the software works, otherwise the user will just get frustrated and simply look for a better solution - which is generally just a click away.

“Quite simply: if your product is not usable, its Ux will be bad and users will leave for your competitors... and for websites and apps, alternative solutions are abundant.”

Andreas Komninos
Interaction-design.org

Sometimes, notably in business to business situations, there may be reasons why the user is tied in by a commercial relationship that means they can’t simply click away like a consumer would. That shouldn’t be an excuse for a poor user experience though as it will become an annoyance and inevitably colour their opinions when it comes to contract renewal. A clunky and inefficient system wastes the user’s time and in a B2B scenario, where it’s used intensively and frequently but is business critical, those seconds spent with unnecessary clicks add up to minutes a session, hours a week, days a month.

Efficient, intuitive and, where possible, delightful user experiences will keep customers happy and keep them coming back.

Our brains are hard-wired to see structure, logic and patterns to make sense of what's around us.

Gestalt theory proposes that when our brains form a perception [a gestalt] the whole has a greater reality of its own, independent of the separate parts. This has direct relevance to Ui/Ux design in terms of cognitive recognition:

"When people perceive complex objects consisting of many elements, they apply conscious or subconscious methods of arranging the parts into a holistic organised system instead of simple objects."

We use just some of the very basic principles of parts of Gestalt psychological theory as it helps us understand how visual perception influences the minds of users.

We use these principles to help us direct users around the interface and on their journey through the application, to design and develop user experiences that are intuitive and friction free.