Fuga Fuga Case Histories

Over the last 2 years Fuga has had the privilege of working with a few of the Northgate-IS development teams on a number of local government services.

Northgate Public Services specialises in the development of technology for public sector services and utilities. To paraphrase Northgate marketing material “Northgate technology manages over 40% of the country’s social care records, processes over £12 billion of revenues and benefits, drives the electoral administration systems for 18 million people and manages over three million local authority and housing association properties worldwide!”.

Fuga was specifically invited to work alongside the development teams to introduce an external perspective on product usability during a phase in development that was focusing of the delivery of user interfaces for their web based software.

Strategic user interface design—easy to say and harder to do!
Comment by Chris Gilbane | Northgate Public Services

“During 2007 Northgate Housing embarked on a project to re-develop our existing user interface from propreitrary Oracle technology to a HTML deployed application. As part of this project we knew we needed to make a big change in our user interface design to meet the expectations of our existing customers. In addition we were aware that we had to provide a new look and feel which would uniquely identify us in our market.”

“However, this is easy to say and harder to do! We engaged with Fuga Ltd to provide design consultancy services into a series of workshops involving technical, business and management input. The deliverables from Fuga as outcomes from these workshops were a series of HTML mock-ups for each type of screen within our new user interface design. These mockups were then incorporated as templates within our development environments, and thus have formed the backbone of our new look and feel.”

“Without the input from Fuga we would not have achieved the new forward looking user interface design that we have. We found Fuga to be an excellent organisation for Northgate to work with. It was particularly useful for us to be engaged with an organisation who could communicate across technical staff, business specialists and managers. The design ideas, advice on best practice and accessibility were invaluable; the HTML mockups produced were beyond our expectations.”

“Fuga was also able to help recently with a prototype design at short notice for inclusion in an ITT response. Even at short notice, with a limited brief, the response was fast, helpful and very professional.”

“We would have no hesitation in recomending Fuga to other IT companies looking for strategic user interface design input.”

What is Information Design?
Information Design is a very particular service provided by Fuga that doesn't receive much promotion by us yet is inherent in practically every aspect of our work! In simple terms “Information Design” is the practice (skill) of integrating human behaviour into the design and delivery of information with the goal of making potentially complex tasks easy to comprehend and implement.

Over his career Mark Fuga (Fuga’s information design specialist) has been employed in the design of signage systems for public spaces and towns, educational material (narrative design) for worldwide public exhibitions and museums, control mimics for utility companies, technical documentation and over that last decade, software.

He says: “the discipline of information design is also an essential ingredient in every successful marketing & advertising campaign, brand development programme, software, website and brochure as without the ability to connect a specific message (information) with a targeted recipient, the likelihood of eliciting the requisite actions is minimal” and that “to be a good designer you need to understand the nature of a particular communication and empathise with it’s recipient — creativity then becomes the delivery mechanism”.