We make digital experiences for humans.
Actionable wireframes. Functional prototypes. User research.
Artifact is a user experience (UX) firm in Minneapolis.
We can help you create or improve your website, mobile app or web-based application. We deliver customer insight, empowering user experience designs, and clear-cut blueprints for building an optimal digital product.
SERVICES
Prototypes
Wireframes
Usability testing
User personas
Journey mapping
Heuristic evaluation
EXPERTISE
Responsive web design
Mobile first
Web applications
Agile methodology
INDUSTRIES
Sports
Intranets
Financial services
Event management
Medical products
Non profit sector
All ideas begin analog.
Early in a project ideas flow quickly, so pens, paper, and Post-its are the capture methods of choice. This is what we call the bar napkin phase, where all of life’s greatest schemes are hatched.
Sketching teases out many potential solutions, and enables the best ones to surface. Iterating in this way saves a ton of time, and treads lightly on your project budget.
We Make Wireframes
Wireframes are the workhorses of a UX project, and an essential early step in defining the user experience.
A wireframe’s purpose is to arrange all of the required elements in a logical and orderly way that suggests their hierarchy and functionality.
Wireframes are plain vanilla, just the facts, no branding or styles are applied. This keeps everyone’s focus on the functionality for now.
We annotate wireframes with detailed functional descriptions to give developers crystal clarity about what needs to be baked into the code – and what doesn’t.
We Make Prototypes
A low-fi e-commerce prototype.
Prototypes do stuff
Prototypes are interactive. They enable you to can click through use cases just like a finished website. This is the ideal way to conduct usability testing before you invest in a series of development sprints.
Prototypes come in two flavors: low-fidelity and high-fidelity. Low-fi means even though you can click around, they still look plain vanilla, similar to wireframes. High-fi means we can make some parts of the prototype visually indistinguishable from the finished product – colors, fonts, the whole nine yards. Check out or blog post on this topic.
High-fi prototypes can be useful in evaluating complex user interactions in a mobile app, or to demo a service for the top brass when you need a little help selling your concept up the chain of command at your company.
The only way to test usability
There’s no better (or more cost-effective) way to conduct usability testing on a new product than to create a prototype with which users can actually interact. You can observe as users seek, learn, mess up, and self-correct. We use that insight to improve the product design.
With prototypes, you can test first, build later, instead of the other way around. You learn from your mistakes before you make them.
Getting started
We can start slow by gathering intelligence about what needs to change.
Heuristic evaluations
Your website or app is scored against rule-of-thumb principles (the heuristics), usability best practices, and our expert opinions to generate a laundry list of near-term incremental improvements you can make.
User research
We conduct interviews with users, stakeholders, and subject matter experts to capture data used in the creation of personas, user stories, and customer journey maps. These artifacts lay a logical foundation for product strategy and UX design direction.
We’ve worked with some pretty cool people.
