Semantic Foundry forges a visual framework to communicate through multiple channels creating a holistic user experience. We organize and give form to dialogue in a way that adds context & power.

Design plays a primary role in the interpretation of your message. It creates the crucial persistent impression. It encourages examination and generates interest. Accessible, findable, understandable information and beauty of form can engage observers and arrest their development.

Our expertise in information architecture and interaction design functions to organize, clarify, and add drama while engaging in a conversation with your customers.

Semantic Foundry helps organizations accelerate progress toward a better future. We work alongside a broad spectrum of leaders seeking to establish or increase their relevance in people’s lives.

Innovative companies are finding that direct contact with customers is the key to creating an experience that leads to business results. But how do you ensure that your web site actually gives customers what they need? What are the best ways to understand your customers’ goals, behaviors and attitudes, and then turn that understanding into business results? You are not your user!

Personas bring customer research to life and make it actionable, ensuring the right decisions are made based on the right information. At Semantic Foundry, our approach to persona development draws from an array of quantitative and qualitative tools and methodologies, including internal stakeholder analysis, customer interviews, customer and prospect surveys, and statistical analysis.

With a full set of analyzed data, Semantic Foundry enumerates the findings into crisp personas based on behavior trends. These realistic character sketches document the specific goals, behaviors and attitudes of each customer, and are ultimately used to guide decision-making throughout the site design and development process, as well as other strategic business decisions.

Our combined qualitative and quantitative approach to persona creation offers several key advantages over more traditional methods including the ability to map the personas back to existing marketing segmentation, financial, and demographic data. While this is not always possible, this correlation between the personas and the segments provides a three-dimensional picture of customer behavior; the segments revealed what customers are deliberating, desiring, doing, and the personas revealed how and why.

“Creating positive customer perceptions is particularly important for businesses that are increasingly relying on the Internet to attract, convert and retain customers.”

Brands are advanced online based on the actual experience users have interacting with the brand. At Semantic Foundry, we apply proven methods and techniques that help interactive initiatives take advantage of the new opportunities offered by ever-changing technology. The expectations of online consumers are quite high, and the difference between a positive brand experience that creates a lasting relationship and poor brand experience that destroys equity both online and off is embodied in the user experience.

“companies are accelerating efforts to change their cultures, foster innovation, and serve customers more effectively. Innovation, or ‘design thinking,’ is, we believe, something truly important and enduring”

Through a thorough user experience audit, we document every aspect of your customer’s total experience of your brand, because every touch point with your customers can enhance or destroy brand equity.

Our user experience process is intended to study customers goals, expectations, and requirements as it relates to your service, product, physical as well as virtual location, and then we feed that information back into the information architecture process to enhance future decisions about design and flow.

To design an interaction you must commit to writing a narrative of human behavior mediated through time and space.

Interaction design (IxD) is the branch of user experience design that illuminates the relationship between people and the interactive products they use. While interaction design has a firm foundation in the theory, practice, and methodology of traditional human-computer interaction and user interface design, it’s focus is on defining the complex dialogues that occur between people and objects of many types—from computers to mobile communications devices to appliances.

Our practice of interaction design is grounded in an understanding of real users —their goals, tasks, experiences, needs, and wants. Approaching design from a user-centered perspective, while endeavoring to balance users’ needs with business goals and technological capabilities, From Lotus to Kayak.com; Gather.com to Pillsbury, Semantic Foundry has designed some of the most compelling solutions to complex design challenges, and define new and evolving interactive products and services.

As we understand it, good interaction design:

• effectively communicates a system’s interactivity and functionality
• defines behaviors that communicate a system’s responses to user interactions
• reveals both simple and complex workflows
• informs users about system state changes
• prevents user error

Information Architecture is the foundation of all great human(e) interactions with information spaces. All other design aspects: form, function, metaphor, navigation, interface, interaction, visual, and information systems - build upon the groundwork of information architecture. Initiating the IA process is the first thing you should do after a thorough process of user research.

Typically, we begin with the business needs and organizational goals. After listing and discussing these aspects, we address the needs, expectations, and goals from the customers perspective. This is referred to as the “Top-down” information architecture — beginning with the abstract, and slowly narrowing down to clear objectives to drive the implementation.

The next step involves an exhaustive content inventory: cataloging of all your existing content as well as all the content which needs to be created garnered from the Top-down IA process. Correlating the underlying relationships in the content with people’s expectations and behavior, we develop a new overall information structure. This is typically referred to as “Bottom-up” Information Architecture.

We then extensively document the new site structure using a rigorous diagramming methodology, carefully selected labels, and a controlled vocabulary of key terms. Using these assets, we create a navigation design that allows people to move easily and quickly around the information, helping them find and use what they’re looking for. We can do this because we understand the cognitive science behind information seeking as well as the art of findability design.

Creating an emotional overlap between what’s good and true about your company and the aspirations your audience holds dear is the almost-magic formula behind great brands. We work with organizations and their audiences to uncover the messages, values, and character traits that will create the overlap. We then execute visual interactive designs that make brands and their stories vivid and appealing.

Focused on simplicity
Simple interfaces are easier to use, easier to understand, more intuitive, faster loading, and easier to maintain than their flashy, image laden counterparts. Our work proves that simplicity doesn't have to look cheap, feel plain, or be downright ugly.

What makes our designs simple and effective?
We use text and standard interface elements instead of heavy images and homebrewed, confusing interface widgets. We don't use seven words when four will do. We use text sizes that don't require a magnifying glass to read. We believe design should serve the customer, not insult them. We believe usability should take precedence over "cool."

Will Evans is Director, Experience Design for Semantic Foundry with 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy. His experiences includes directing UX for social network analytics and terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Prior to Curl, Will was an interaction designer for Dataware working on various search (Northern Light) and KM related product suites including KM Suite II and QueryServer.

Will earned an MBA as well as master’s degrees in human-computer interaction and cognitive psychology. His passions include design and critical theory, information architecture, information visualization and red wine. He lives in Philadelphia, PA, drinks far too much coffee, wears only black, and was Design Co-Chair for the IxDA Interaction10 conference in Savannah, Georgia in February, 2010. He was recently elected to the board of directors of the Information Architecture Institute.

A distinguished speaker, Will provides lectures and seminars on such topics as user experience, strategic design, social interaction design, and findability. Will's work has been featured in numerous publications including Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, MSNBC and the Wall Street Journal.

Will's current activities include:

• Founder, Experience Designer at Semantic Foundry
• Director,Information Architecture Institute (http://iainstitute.org/)
• Design Co-Chair, IxDA's Interaction 10 Conference (http://interaction.ixda.org/)
• Founder, IxDA DC Local Group (ixdadc.ning.com)
• Contributing Editor, Johnny Holland (www.johnnyholland.org)
• Member: ACM SIGCHI, UPA, IAI, IxDA , AIGA