Our team is: Alan Benington, an engineer with an appetite for technology, always up for an intellectual challenge; Hayley Komen, a communicator with an appreciation for systems, the environment and beauty; and Garth Shoebridge, an architect with an artist’s eye and heart.
We operate a professional, client-first practice, using our individual expertise or combining our skills to address our clients’ needs, as required. Our flexible business model makes us efficient and effective and we pass the benefits of this approach on to you.
Browse through our full list of services.
For the last 5 years we have partnered iBurst in their website design, build and maintenance. Read more …
37 years of experience squeezed into those 2 little words. You’ve gotta love it but yes, we do do web design. Read more …
We are extremely proud of our web development offer. Alan Benington has, over the last decade, developed a framework – EngineX. Read more …
For the last three years, we have built and maintained a web application to help The Loerie Awards administer South Africa’s biggest advertising, communication, design and experiential media awards. Read more …
We have been helping our clients with online customer self-service for over a decade. We’ve dealt with all the complexities of balancing what a mammoth back-end system can (or can’t) do, and what customers need to do and how they need to do it. Read more …
Plain language specialists Simplified carry out detailed audits on all of Discovery group’s communications each year, including web consulting for their website. We have over the years, helped with the user testing and the analysis components for these projects. Read more …
We absolutely love customer profiling! Any website, intranet or mobile website is a communication with the visitor. Just like a real-life discussion, knowing who it is that you are talking to can change everything from what you say to the person, to how you say it and how they do things. Read more …
We have a refined and appropriate methodology for the user testing of websites, mobile websites and documents. Read more …
GCIS, or the Government Communication and Information System approached us to do web consulting to help them understand how the government website was being used by visitors and how they could improve this experience. Read more …
Use website analysis to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your existing website, intranet or web application. Especially if you want to focus your maintenance efforts or inform a redesign process. Read more …
To manage risk and ensure you are meet the needs of your business and those of your customers, prototyping means you build a version of the solution for everyone to see as early as possible in the design process. Read more …
I just helped my 8 year old daughter set up her first Gmail account. I’m always amazed at how interesting and valuable watching someone else use a website is – even a child. Here are some things I saw: There is ALWAYS a case for plain language. Even on Gmail’s very short registration page there were terms that could have been easier to understand. For example, ‘Desired login name’ could have been ‘Email address’, ‘Re-enter’ could have been ‘Type again’, ‘Word verification’ could have been ‘Type this’. The Gmail interface relies on you knowing that navigation happens at the top and left-hand side of the screen. Background colours could have chunked this up so that when my daughter was looking for ‘New email’ she didn’t have to scan the entire page, but could have done a first scan of 3 sections. IT took her a while to find out what to click to write her first email. The button was labelled ‘Compose email’. This is another overly complicated term for writing a new email. User error is always a problem. So much of your visitor’s experience happens when they make mistakes. Often, instead of spending a lot of time and effort on the communication, this area is left to the developers. For the second time in as many weeks, I’ve watched my children spend more time on making the Gmail interface look pretty by playing with the built-in themes than they did on using the website itself. Nevertheless, she is up and running and sending emails to everyone. That, and being pursued around the garden by her bigger sister who is trying to get the scrap of paper that has her username and password written on it.
Over the last decade, we are proud to have worked with:
We provided intranet consulting to African Bank stakeholders so that could prepare for the redesign of their nationwide company intranet. Read more …
As part of their on-going attempt to help students grow their careers, Varsity College needed a web application to help students find part-time work. Read more …
Together with plain language specialists Simplified, we carried out web consulting to train the Liberty web and intranet team on user-focused design principles and techniques.