Corporate overview
What we do: Founded in 1975, we are among the most experienced international consulting firms focused on helping world-class clients and leading startups solve business-critical problems related to the usability and interactive quality of their products and services. In short, we help make complex products simple and simple products empowering. We are proud to have solutions that are running at the heart of the world economy.
Our 3 primary consulting services: usability testing, user interface design and new media strategy are focused on solving the following types of critical business problems:
- How to deepen user engagement with business-critical applications
- How to optimize your entire customer experience front to back
- Determine how to reduce training time and costs
- How to make hidden or complex features accessible to customers
- How to create highly usable products across competing development silos
- How to create standardized usability testing across product categories
- How to expand the quality of your brand by employing usability testing
- How to achieve "C-level" support for usability testing
- How to propagate usability science across complex agendas
- How to make a powerful infrastructure empowering for customers
- Determine which features and functions customers value
- Determine which features and functions customers do not value
- Determine which features to fix and exactly how to fix them
- Determine what new features to add
- Determine which features to remove
- Determine how to reduce call-center and support costs
- Determine how to reduce legal liability and risk
- Determine how to reduce operational complexity
- Determine why your development team is in conflict
- Determine what constitutes success in your customers' minds
- Determine how to deliver success on time to core customers
- Determine what management actually wants you to build
Why New York: Since our founding in 1975, we have been based in New York. Clients often ask us why a company so deeply involved with technology is not based in Silicon Valley. Our answer is simply that we are not a technology company but a technology research and development company. We know from extensive professional experience that New York has more world-class research agencies, testing labs, educational institutions and highly motivated and experienced research professionals than any other city in the world. We thrive on this amazing environment where research drives the development of world-class interactive brands. Clients benefit from our extensive network of allied research professionals and partners. We firmly believe that where we live and work determines how we solve problems, develop client relationships, and deal with an increasingly complex business landscape.
How we got here: The firm was founded in 1975 by Charles L. Mauro. He believed in one overriding principle: that making complex products and systems understandable and usable demanded the formal application of professional human factors engineering during all phases of product development. His vision remains central to our mission today. We were the first non-military consulting firm to create a formal usability testing lab (1976), the first to create a highly structured and repeatable research methodology (1977) and the first to employ web-based usability testing methods (1995). We have provided critical usability research for systems currently running at the heart of the world economy.
What we believe: On a conceptual level, we are guided by three principles:
- Data does not equal information
- Features do not equal functions
- Easy does not equal empowering
These principles embody three of the most difficult problems executives face today when dealing with the development, marketing, and support of high technology products and services. Our views on these three principles and our role in addressing their underlying conceptual issues define how we think about problems and what we believe to be central to our business mission.
