Maskery - Human Interaction Engineering
Maskery is a usability consulting company that works jointly with organizations to deliver effective technology solutions through strategic and tactical human interaction engineering. Maskery staff is expert in the field of human factors engineering with specialty domain-expertise focused on designing and evaluating the product and stakeholder value chain response as it pertains to the acquisition, integration, implementation and use of technology and technology-delivered process.
Maskery effectively helps companies usability test, design and deliver highly-effective, energy-charged and purchase-positive customer experiences using the science of Usability.
Company Details
Year Established:
2001
Total Sales ($CDN):
$500,000 - $1,000,000
Number of Employees:
10
Company Information
Tedde Van Gelderen
Title:
Partner/Associate
Telephone:
(613) 820-2179
Fax:
(613) 820-3084
Email:
Click Here
Helen Maskery
Title:
President
Area of Responsibility:
Government Relations
Telephone:
(613) 820-2179
Email:
Click Here
Melanie Rodney
Title:
Partner/Associate
Area of Responsibility:
Research/Development/Engineering
Telephone:
(613) 820-2179
Fax:
(613) 820-3084
Email:
Click Here
Scott Plewes
Title:
Partner/Associate
Area of Responsibility:
Research/Development/Engineering
Telephone:
(613) 820-2179
Email:
Click Here
Products
Usability Training
Services
Usability Design
UI design is one of the key functions of successful Human Interaction Engineering. Our high level UI design enables you to de-risk the core of your products User Interface. While detailed UI design is necessary and important, the initial foundation of delivering business value through the User Interface lies in the High Level UI Design. Creating the fundamental flows, structure and UI elements and their relationships provides the basis realizing an effective and efficient product. Our skills and expert knowledge in this area will enable you realize that value.
Human Factors - Human Reliability
Business-critical systems spend significant amounts of time considering hardware and software reliability, developing disaster recovery and contingency plans. One of the often neglected components in the system is the human and their ability to both cause and deal with problems. Maskerys human reliability assessment process is geared to assessing the potential
Market Research
With a positive product opportunity analysis completed, Maskery will complete one or more market research activities targeted at validating the possible market opportunity. The research techniques may include focus groups, one-on-one interviews (face-to-face or remote), questionnaires or surveys. The goal of the activities is to answer the following questions:
- Is the problem as defined by the team, perceived to be a problem by the potential customer? If not, is there a related problem that could still be addressed by the product idea?
- Is the problem serious enough that a potential customer would want to do something about it? If so, would they buy a product to deal with the problem?
- What barriers to the acceptance of the product idea might exist in the potential market?
- Is this a direct sales market or a channel market? If so, whats the value proposition for the channel(s)?
Usability Testing
Usability testing puts your users in the drivers seat to test drive your product or website as they would typically use it. Intended users of the product or website are asked to complete a series of tasks and the product is evaluated based on how successful users are in effectively using the product. This technique identifies potential obstacles for users based on performance rather than opinion and helps target design improvements to increase the effectiveness of your product. Usability testing can be used at any stage of development, including existing products and websites.
Usability Walkthrough
Testing your product or website with potential users early in development can save needless churn and eliminate unnecessary features that cost time and money to deliver. A usability walkthrough uses preliminary design concepts to walk users through typical tasks and uncovers conflicts with the proposed design and how users would expect to use it. A usability walkthrough can also identify high-value features that should be part of the product in time to include them in the current development cycle. Usability walkthroughs can be completed with paper prototypes or screen-based designs before coding begins, so there is no delay in the development cycle to complete the test and test results can be incorporated into the code plan.
Usability Assessment
A quick way to evaluate the usability of software, hardware and website designs at any stage of their development is to have our experts evaluate the user interface for you. Our analysis identifies possible usability problems and recommends priorities for re-design based on solid design principles and user interface standards appropriate to the intended target market and user population. Remarkably, a usability evaluation will catch between 60 75% of the usability problems that will be experienced by users when the product is released. Usability evaluations combined with usability testing are effective methods for capturing all types of usability problems, including nave user problems.
Clf And Web Guidelines
CLF and Web, Accessibility guidelines and standards are an extremely effective tool for the development of consistent websites, web apps or desktop software applications. Standards and guidelines will provide a consistent, predictable experience for the end user, reducing the need for training, support and re-design. Expert user interface design skills and a comprehensive understanding of user interface design principles drives our approach. It focuses on ensuring that new or evolving user interface guidelines can be pragmatically integrated into your existing software development processes. Combined with other proven user centered design techniques, guidelines will help deliver a high quality user interface and effective end user experience.
Success Metrics Definition
One of the keys to successful technology projects is the ability to define measurable targets that if met, will result in a success. These success metrics need to be business-focused yet technology independent and they need to encompass all aspects of the system the hardware, software and human performance. This requires a task-driven, system performance orientation that can be directly linked to the delivery of the organisations strategic plan. Complementary to organizational success monitoring programs such as the Balance Scorecard, Maskerys flavor of success metrics includes the human aspects of system performance to ensure no surprises when a system goes live or product is sold.
Public Opinion Research
Web Design
Accessibility Design
On-line Surveys
Focus Groups
Information Architecture
Graphics Design