Do customers leave your Web site without so much as a backward glance? Are your customer-service calls headed through the roof? Do your employees complain that they can "never find anything" on your intranet?

Usability means creating products that people want to use, products that make their lives simpler, not more complex. Usable products help people reach their goals quickly with minimal frustration and fewer calls to customer service.

Comtech Services has been in the usability business for more than 20 years. Use our experience to help

• build usability in from the beginning of your development life cycle
• develop and test early prototypes of interface design ideas
• get user feedback before designs become solidified
• evaluate the usability of help systems, documentation, and training

Does your team need coaching in usability methods? We can work with you to develop a culture of usability that reduces costs of developing user-centered products.

With a coaching engagement, we help your staff members perfect a new skill. They learn to conduct on-site customer visits, plan and run usability tests, navigate through the user-centered design process, develop a strategic plan, and conduct other activities. The coaching enables you to enhance staff skills, improve performance, and avoid catastrophes. You get results faster with our help.

Usability Testing

Learn how to plan, design, conduct, and evaluate a usability test. We coach your team through an initial usability test, ensuring that results are reliable. Build paper prototypes and early design ideas and test them immediately, building usability into the following cycle:

Usability Evaluation

Add the expertise of our staff to yours. We conduct usability evaluation of Web sites, product interfaces, help, and documentation and provide you with a comprehensive report of the opportunities for improvement. Our evaluations are based upon real-life customer use scenarios.

Usability Methods

Your design teams need a new way of working. By learning to create scenarios of use, user profiles, prototype interface designs, and interface specifications, you ensure that you have a smooth handoff between interface designers and product engineers and programmers.

Read more about usable design in User and Task Analysis for Interface Design by Comtech president, JoAnn Hackos, and colleague, Ginny Redish.

Visit SAP's Design Guild Web site and review JoAnn Hackos's latest article on usable design, Creating reporting structures through information modeling.

Visit the Download Center to read Hackos's keynote speech, An Application of the Principles of Minimalism to the Design of Human-Computer Interfaces, presented at the German HCI conference, Software Ergonomie '99, and reprinted in the Usability Professionals' Association's Common Ground.

Read our case studies.

If you would like to learn more about any of our consulting services or you would like to talk to a representative about scheduling an activity, please email or call 303-232-7586.