New Product Innovation • User Experience Design

LIFECYCLE

Explore

Design

Deliver

Today's market leaders acknowledge that radical innovation is critical to their long-term growth and renewal; incremental innovation and cost cutting measures are no longer sufficient to sustain corporate success. If you want to lead the market, you must be the industry leader in developing new business models and new products or services. You must be on the cutting edge of new technologies and innovative business processes.

At Primeval Atom, we explore the nature of innovation—discovering the radical, revolutionary game-changing breakthroughs in processes, products, or services that transform existing markets or create new ones. We build strategies for start-ups and established firms using a variety of online technologies to deliver new solutions that enhance and evolve their online brand, develop new offerings, and enhance their customer relationships.

Radical innovation projects—due to high levels of uncertainties—require a more flexible model than the orderly "phase-gate" process traditionally used in new product development. By focusing on strategic clarity and uncertainty reduction up-front during "Phase 0", projects transition more rapidly through development into commercialization with less expense, and less uncertainty.

In contrast to traditional approaches to project management, we subscribe to Agile principles—we do not wait for a "testing phase" to know whether our design works or whether the our solution satisfies the requirements. We constantly seek feedback from stakeholders, often going directly to the end-users. We do this early and often which drives incremental delivery and concrete, actionable plans.

The result is a coherent vision for building the right app, with the right features, targeted at the appropriate segments, delivered in an accelerated timeframe without investing tremendous amounts of time or money. From customer acquisition and retention to legacy system integration, we deliver blueprints for innovative, practical online solutions that your developers can build and your customers find exciting to use.

"Phase 0" is about asking the right questions, understanding consumer and market needs, exploring possibilities and assessing economic feasibility. Our methodology is front-end loaded, undertaking extensive homework prior to development. From the search for new opportunities, to the conception of ideas and the development of a precise concept, to establishing a compelling business case for investment, "Phase 0" shortens time to market and provides the best path to commercial success.

It takes time to build a screen in code. It takes seconds to mock it up on paper. Sketches are quick and cheap; exactly how you want to start out. Draw, doodle—boxes, circles, lines. Get your ideas out of your head and down onto paper. The goal at this point is to convert concepts into loose engineering objectives and user experience prototypes to prove the concept’s function and illustrate the solution. "Phase 0" is all about experimentation. There are no wrong answers.

But there's more to this step than simply generating ideas. This often overlooked step also establishes a clear understanding of market and technical requirements, sources of risk and a well defined business case. Developing a business plan or a formal project proposal for the new concept dramatically improves cycle time and the success probability of high-profit concepts entering commercialization. The key understandings developed from this stage are estimates of market size (overall demand), customer needs, investment requirements, competition analysis and project uncertainty.

Primeval Atom's "Phase 0" gives our clients a competitive edge. A clearer definition of the new product concept, market and technical requirements, sources of risk and a well defined business plan ultimately shortens the total cycle time of product development and radically improves the odds of commercial success.

Creating a user experience that is powerful and engages your customers begins with the power of observation. It is about creating a shared understanding of the problem to be solved, as well as collaboratively discovering the best solution. Every decision from this point forward will be derived and affected by these observations so it is imperative to get it right.

DISCOVER

Our solution-centered design employs an array of discovery techniques including: on-the-job observations, interviews, business process analysis and workflow mapping. As requirements emerge, we imagine user scenarios with the help of personas—caricatures that define the key user types—which helps us storyboard the alternative work flow scenarios.

DESIGN
With these discoveries in hand, we turn to the project's visual direction. Using a variety of tools, from pen and ink to interactive wireframes and many iterations of functional prototypes, we further define the user's interaction with the application and how the screens will flow. Our rapid prototype method also helps us determine the best presentation deployment model (AJAX/JavaScript, web services, RIA, widget), as well as define the application architecture and system logic.

With a strong sense of composition, typography and attention to detail, we develop visual elements, images, controls, navigation, color schemas and icon treatments—merging functional schematics with visual treatments.

TEST
Even the best development teams cannot entirely scope every nuance of user interactions. Once a project is in production, user testing will be useless; it will not be possible to address user issues. Instilled in our process and core to the Agile approach is the regular feedback cycle, giving us timely information and effective controls that ensures users are realizing their goals.

ARCHITECTED DESIGN

We deliver the completed design through a variety of media including: final prototype, pixel perfect XHTML/CSS page templates for each screen of the user interface design, functional specification, interface specification, code-ready digital assets and the production matrix, which determines the production budget and scheduling.

Great specifications help your development team accurately assess the amount of work that needs to be done saving as much as half their programming time by eliminating false starts and direction changes. It also speeds up the work of other project collaborators: sales people can show a prototype to clients earlier, the QA team can write test cases earlier, and user documentation can be created straight from the specification.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT
We don't just deliver the design and wish you good luck,

but are involved during the development of the product to ensure that what was designed is implemented correctly. Frequent collaboration with developers helps us avoid surprises, so you're confident that what we deliver can built by your team, on your timeline.

If you prefer to extend your development team, we can choose from our partner network some of the industry's best software development companies that have specific industry/domain expertise and subscribe to the iterative, agile-development model to ensure that your project is fast, reliable and ready for market.

Quality Assurance—also known as component testing—is the final step. Every element and link must be checked on every page in every browser on ever platform. It is detailed, laborious work, but it is essential to delivering a commercially successful online solution.

Explore ideas. Paint the vision. Validate the business case.

• Opportunity Identification and Analysis
• Idea Generation and Enrichment
• Competitive and Market Research
• Business Requirements Development
• Business and Marketing Strategy
• Technical Architecture Evaluation

Fill information gaps. Craft the experience. Iterate and improve the solution.

• Experience Audits and Expert Reviews
• Consumer Research and User Personas
• Schematics and Wireframes
• Information Architecture
• Interaction and Visual Design
• Iterative Prototyping and Testing

Architect and develop. Optimize, test and launch. Analyze and act on results.

• Functional Requirements
• Interface Specifications
• Asset Production
• Quality Assurance
• Deployment Consulting
• Analytics and Metrics