Customer Experience

We are in the middle of a digital revolution. Rich Internet applications and Web 2.0 technologies combined with a plethora of devices are the primary catalysts of this change. This incredible convergence of technology and user experience is changing the way your customers interact with your brand and your products. As user sophistication increases, so does the desire of these savvy audiences to build a stronger relationship with your brand, and to be more fully engaged across multiple touchpoints. This engagement needs to be integrated, seamless, and valuable to your customer—in other words, it had better be good.

A Partner for the Digital Age

Universal Mind is an integrated solutions partner for the digital age. We believe that technical innovation drives successful engagements, and this in turn informs the work we do. We are technologists, visual designers, business strategists, and above all, innovators. We have spent more than a decade creating leading-edge digital solutions. We apply our deep experience in championing the creation of impactful multiplatform applications, building highly effective solutions on robust technology that delivers.

We work across a wide range of industries, including software, telecommunications, media, entertainment, retail, healthcare, finance, and education. Our clients include Verizon, American Greetings, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, RIM BlackBerry, Kodak, and FedEx.

Offerings

Rich Internet Applications

We’ve been designing and building cutting-edge RIAs for our clients since we opened our doors in 2003.

Mobile & Tablet Apps

Mobile and tablet solutions should inspire deep customer engagement to give you that competitive edge.

Enterprise Solutions

Solutions for your employees and partners require just as much thought and care as those created for your external customers.

Digital Publishing

Sure, you can put a magazine on a tablet or share your annual report in PDF—but you can do so much more.

HTML5

The rapid proliferation of smart phones and tablets has dramatically changed the application development discussion.

Customer Experience

Better customer experience saves companies millions of dollars in unnecessary sales and service costs.
Play What We Do: Approach

Approach

At Universal Mind, the approach we take to developing digital experiences is unique from other agencies. We believe that the technical viability of a project is paramount, and that this viability—paired with strong user experience principles—is what drives a successful application and customer engagement. We suffuse this idea across all of our practice areas, and use our tools and knowledge base in technical development, business strategy, and UX design to champion the creation of impactful, multiplatform experiences.
/ Chris Rogers / TRT: 2:52

Play What We Do: User Experience

User Experience

User Experience speaks to much more than simply the design and usability of a web application or device interface. Rather, it’s the full measurement of our human participation with technology. To this end, it’s our job as user experience professionals to truly understand our users needs and motivations, and to simplify complex interactions. What would an ideal experience for this audience look like? Feel like? Act like? How would this work across media and platforms? In pursuit of these answers, our User Experience practice encompasses the breadth of UX disciplines, from upfront user research and testing through visual design, interaction design, and prototyping.
/ Erik Loehfelm / TRT: 2:35

Play What We Do:Technology

Technology

Universal Mind has long been known as an industry leader in technology services. Our technology solutions power the multifaceted and complex experiences which drive successful customer engagement across multiple systems, platforms and devices. We’ve honed our skills by solving some of the toughest challenges, creating game-changing rich Internet and mobile applications, powerful enterprise portals and transforming Web 2.0 technologies into productive, profitable results for our clients. We don’t just deliver software, we deliver technology that transcends.
/ Brian O’Connor / TRT: 2:22

Play What We Do: Delivery

Delivery

Our Delivery practice represents the central nervous system of Universal Mind. The process by which all our practices work together—and in turn, how we work with our clients—is orchestrated by our Delivery Managers, who are involved in every step of every project we do. Our DMs ensure that our practices are communicating with each other, and advocate cross-practice innovation. From concept forward, the crucial operations of your project will be well managed by senior professionals with backgrounds in account management, business analysis and quality assurance.
/ Julie Liberatore / TRT: 1:42

Our Framework

  1. Overview
  2. Discover
  3. Design
  4. Develop
  5. Deploy
  6. Flexibility
  • Solution Strategist
  • Delivery Manager
  • HCI Researcher
  • UX Specialist
  • UX Designer
  • UX Technologist
  • Technical Architect
  • Software Engineer
  • QA Specialist

Overview

We believe that clear communication is vital to the success of any project. For that reason, we created our Solution Framework in order to provide our clients with a highly supportive, integrated development experience. Our Framework is a flexible tool that allows for unparalleled degree of transparency across all of our practices, in each phase of a project—a convention not typically seen with other agencies. This highly collaborative approach results in true partnerships with our clients, creating an environment for sharing ideas to bring about new insights and innovations.

Discover

Universal Mind’s Discover Phase is a critical part of project success. We employ this research phase to gain insight into business challenges and opportunities as we work with you to define the project. Together we identify risks, align on expectations, plan for subsequent phases and begin our user experience design and technical definition processes. Our findings shape the engagement framework that carry through in Design, Develop, and Deploy.

Design

The Design Phase results in a comprehensive blueprint of how the intended solution will be architected, designed, developed and deployed. Our User Experience and Technology teams, under the direction of our Delivery Managers, work together to develop personas and context scenarios that are ultimately refined to wireframes, design frameworks and vision prototypes. Having our Design and Technology teams work together up front ensures that user experience and interface design are informed by technical infrastructure, and vice versa, allowing us to iterate “real” solutions faster.

Develop

Our experienced technologists work with an array of development platforms and environments, so no matter what the challenge, our developers are ready to meet it. Our tech team works up front with Experience Design in architecture and technical modeling in order to create real solutions that utilize the latest technology innovations. We then establish a Release Plan, a blueprint accurately tuned to the nuanced realities of delivering a best in class production solution. Our Development phase follows a highly iterative model that allows for great flexibility and transparency in the development process.

Deploy

In this final phase, all critical production release activities—including knowledge transfer, validation, performance testing and integration—are skillfully carried out to ensure successful project deployment.

An Adaptive Process

We help a variety of companies across a wide range of industries to successfully solve challenges of integration, optimization and innovation. Drawing upon our years of experience and best practices, we have created a responsive, adaptable tool that is tailored to address the unique requirements of your project. Our Solution Framework ensures that we work with our clients as a team, every step of the way.

Technologies We Use

  • HTML5

    HTML5 is a Web development language, organized by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) community. Unlike older versions of HTML, HTML5 is designed to do more things, including media playback, without the need for processor-intensive add-ons or plug-ins. HTML5 also adds new interactivity features, like drag-and-drop, as well as offline storage for Web apps.

  • iOS5

    iOS, from Apple, is perhaps the world’s most advanced mobile platform, having redefined what can be done with a mobile device. Originally developed for the iPhone®, it now also supports other Apple devices such as the iPad® and Apple TV®. With the App Store present on every iOS device, and localized around the world, iOS is an extremely compelling mobile development platform.

  • Android

    The Android™ platform is an open-source software stack which delivers a complete set of software for mobile devices: an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications. It is licensed under one of the most progressive open-source licenses available giving operators and manufacturers unprecedented freedom to design, build and distribute their own products.

  • Adobe Flex

    Flex is a highly productive, free, open source framework for building expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems by leveraging the Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR® runtimes.

  • Adobe AIR

    The Adobe® AIR® runtime enables developers to use HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash® Professional, and ActionScript® to build web applications that run as standalone client applications without the constraints of a browser. Support for Android™ BlackBerry™ Tablet OS, iOS, and TVs is also available.

  • Adobe Flash

    Adobe® Flash® Professional software is an industry standard for interactive authoring and delivery of immersive experiences that present consistently across personal computers, mobile devices, and screens of virtually any size and resolution.

  • Adobe Flash Lite

    Adobe® Flash® Lite™ software is a powerful runtime engine for mobile and consumer electronics devices that benefits both device manufacturers and content developers.

  • Adobe Flash Media Server

    The Adobe® Flash® Media Server software provides powerful delivery methods that can save significant bandwidth costs and lighten network load to help deliver the best media experiences. Improved performance and quality of service metrics enhance playback quality, while prebuilt media players make using video for your business easier than ever.

  • CQ5

    Built atop Adobe’s Java Content Repository CRX, CQ5, initially developed by Day Software, provides a suite of Web 2.0 content management applications: CQ5 Web Content Management, CQ5 Digital Asset Management, CQ5 Social Collaboration, CQ5 Marketing Campaign Management, and CQ5 Mobile.

  • Blackberry

    The BlackBerry® platform supports several different ways of developing applications, themes, rich mobile websites and widgets—HTML/HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, or Java—with easy connectivity and robust security. BlackBerry development tools also leverage industry standard development environments like Eclipse® and Microsoft® Visual Studio®.

  • BlackBerry Tablet OS (Playbook)

    Building on the incredible power of the QNX operating system that’s uniquely suited for tablet computing, the BlackBerry® Tablet OS lays the foundation for the future while preserving key investments that have made the BlackBerry platform so successful.

  • HP Web OS

    Initially developed by Palm®, webOS is a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. It powers the HP® Pre 3 and HP Veer smartphones as well as the HP TouchPad tablet, slated for Summer 2011.

  • Java

    Java™ is a technology that allows software designed and written just once for an idealized “virtual machine” to run on a variety of real computers, including Windows PCs, Macs, and Unix computers. Java can also be used to create small programs, known as “applets,” to be embedded in web pages.

  • Microsoft Silverlight

    Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device browser plug-in that helps companies design, develop and deliver applications and experiences on the Web.

  • Microsoft .Net

    The .NET Framework is a comprehensive and consistent programming model from Microsoft® for building applications that have visually stunning user experiences, seamless and secure communication, and the ability to model a range of business processes.

  • Gomez

    Gomez, Inc. provides an on-demand platform for optimizing the performance, availability, and quality of Web and mobile applications. The Gomez platform identifies business-impacting issues by testing and measuring Web applications from the “outside-in” — across all users, browsers, devices, and geographies.

  • Adobe Digital Publishing

    Adobe® Digital Publishing Suite is a complete solution that lets media and business publishers create, distribute, monetize, and optimize publications for tablet devices.

  • Adobe ColdFusion

    Adobe® ColdFusion® application server and software enables rapid development of robust Internet applications for the enterprise. ColdFusion Builder is an Eclipse based IDE for efficiently managing ColdFusion application development from concept through deployment.

  • Adobe Acrobat Connect

    Adobe® Acrobat® Connect™ Pro software is a flexible web communication system with strong security features that provides enterprise solutions for training, marketing, sales, and enterprise collaboration.

  • Adobe LiveCycle

    Adobe® LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite helps extend the value of existing back-end systems and makes it easier for people to interact with information through intuitive user experiences, improved efficiencies through business process automation, and enhanced customer service through personalized communications management.

HTML5 is a Web development language, organized by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) community. Unlike older versions of HTML, HTML5 is designed to do more things, including media playback, without the need for processor-intensive add-ons or plug-ins. HTML5 also adds new interactivity features, like drag-and-drop, as well as offline storage for Web apps.