Who is Goode Design
We are a boutique Australian based user experience and web design consulting company.
Original focus
Our original focus when first incorporated in 1989 was training and instructional design. Much of this training and instructional design work was to build computer based training material to support computer system rollouts for large corporate clients.
Move to user centred design
However, we saw what we considered to be a disturbing trend with the system rollouts that we were involved with. That is, we were called in to develop training materials and user documentation for systems that users couldn’t use. While conducting training needs analysis it became quite obvious to us that the process and tasks that these systems were meant to automate in most cases were not inherently difficult. The actual problem was that the systems had been designed so badly that they did not any way match how real users actually thought about or did their job.
No amount of training could ever fix such a problem, systems would always be clumsy and difficult to use as long as they didn’t match the way people actually worked. We shifted our focus to the root cause of the problem and concentrated on improving the usability of systems.
Shift to web technologies
There has also been some organic shifting in our focus and expertise. As system implementation technologies have changed we have shifted our skills. Much of our current work is focussed on web site design, web base application design, information architecture analysis and intranet design.