"Customer experience will be THE defining success factor in business for the next twenty years." *

Customers are unequivocal in their call for more usable products; in fact this is where many online battles are being fought and good user experience is now often seen as THE critical success factor for businesses to sustain a competitive advantage.

We believe the first requirement for an excellent user experience is to meet the needs of the customer so that the interface they are presented with is intuitive and engaging. At a very basic level the product or interface should be usable and useful, and not forgetting attractive. There is much research that suggests there is an 'Aesthetic-Usability Effect' whereby users perceive more aesthetically pleasing designs to be easier to use than less aesthetically pleasing ones.

However, exemplary user experience goes beyond giving customers what they say they want, as the famous Henry Ford quotation aptly illustrates: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." So we strive to go further than merely providing a checklist of features, and therefore seek to merge the skills and services of a variety of ioko's key disciplines including engineering, marketing, graphical and interface design and usability.

* Tanya Lidstone, Director of User Experience, ioko