Ptype helps new businesses, struggling businesses, and small companies looking for new growth directions.
You have a web designer, a business coach, a marketing person… or you’ve been trying to do all of those yourself.
We’re different. As UX experts, we approach problems and solutions completely differently. To us, nothing is more important than your user’s experience.
We offer product and service design and improvement. Whether you make and sell beauty products, run a restaurant or cafe, are the town dentist, are a consultant, offer online courses, we can help businesses of every size.
But enough reading. Check out our short video to learn more about how we work with businesses like yours.
We offer two custom reports that can help you immediately.
UX Optimization Report
2-Week Website Tune Up
UX experts can help businesses of all types at all stages of creation or growth.
Fully Auditing Your Business
Your products and services. Your company values and mission. The business mood and personality. Your internal processes and tools. Your pricing. Your time management and motivation. The expenses draining profit the most. Your outgoing voicemail. Your business card and marketing materials. Your staff.
We will get to know everything that touches your customer.
Competitive Analysis
Who are your competitors? What do they offer and (if the information is public) at what price? Let’s also audit their website. Perhaps there is something they’re doing on their site that might inspire us.
Marketing Audit
We are partnered with San Francisco marketing agency known for its results. We can bring them in to audit your current marketing and social media efforts and suggest changes.
Instructional Design
Many service businesses offer online courses, webinars, and workshops. We can review both the internal materials you may have used to train your staff as well as presentations, courses, and other materials that you give away for free or sell to your customers.
Instructional Design is about more than the copy writing and selection of photos, charts, or media. It’s also about the organization and taxonomy of topics, the order information is presented, keeping people’s attention, creating moments of engagement, and finding the right level of detail and explanation for your audience.
Customer Research
We can interview current and potential customers to learn more about how they chose you, why they love you, why they stay, and anything they might not have liked.
You can ask your customers how they like you. But we have found that we often get a lot more truth, input, feedback, and details when we (as an outside company) are doing the interviewing… and your customer is guaranteed anonymity. Not only will these interviews give us insights into ideas for your services but also ways to improve customer satisfaction.
We will find moments of opportunity to both save your customer from frustration and to deliver a delightful experience.
Tools and Systems
We recommend and set up tools and systems that will help your business run more efficiently.
Whether these are customer-facing like an online appointment system or eCommerce… or are more behind the scenes like your accounting/bookkeeping, email mailing list system, HR system, or project organization, we’re happy to help match you with the right tools for your needs, company, and budget.
Struggling? Stop making excuses and stop asking the wrong people the wrong questions.
Everybody tells you your business is great and has excellent offerings and a super website… so if you’re doing everything right, why is there a problem?
Let’s start with the difficult truth: if “everybody” is sure you’re doing everything or most things right, then you are asking the wrong people or the wrong questions. You need better and more honest feedback, especially if your business is struggling. There is always room for improvement in any business. No friend and certainly no professional or expert should tell you you’re doing everything right.
Hearing yourself say, “But…” will hopefully help you realize it’s time to act. These ways of thinking could be holding you back, could be working against you.
- “But my…” website is great, my PR is going well, my social media is active, my writing is really good, my online course is great, etc…
- “But I like…” my website, that photo of me, the way I’m doing things. It’s potentially harmful to your business to fall too much in love with how you’ve been doing things.
- “But I’m… and people like me.” The business is an entity and you’re a part of it. Your personality can be part of the business personality until it sacrifices or sabotages professionalism or clarity. We have to find the right balance.
- “But I’m copying someone who is successful.” Do you offer the same services to the same target audience? Copying him may not be right for what you do, how you do it, and for whom.
- “My expert said to do it that way.” We all know about experts who aren’t experts. Or just not as good at things as they like to imagine. Or they are too focused on their one area of specialty without seeing the bigger picture. You can’t go wrong getting other expert opinions.
- “But this used to work just fine,” or, “I was doing so well last year/past time period.” Times change, people change, tech changes. Don’t rest on success. Always look for ways to grow and improve.
How can I fix my problems or go in the right direction when I don’t understand what’s wrong?
A UX agency is your expert team of problem finding and problem solving specialists. We will find the problems and create solutions. You don’t have to know what’s wrong. You only have to know you’re ready for a fresh set of eyes and some change.
Small businesses often try to do everything themselves. We’ll build our own website. We’ll write all the copy. We’ll take the photos. We’ll write our courses or training materials. It’s rare for someone to be great at everything. What you did might be OK but it’ll be ever better when you bring in experts.
New business? We love to solve your problems before the public sees them. You may only have one chance to make a first impression. Let us help you refine what your customer sees and how they perceive you before your website, service, or product launches or re-launches.
We have extensive experience with websites, mobile responsive websites, and mobile apps for Android and iOS
We specialize in all aspects of the user-centered design process. This means you can turn to us for as much or as little as you need.
- Auditing your current product or experience from a UX perspective.
- Analyzing what competitors are doing well or poorly.
- User research and interviews.
- Defining your target audiences with personas.
- Content inventory and analysis.
- Structure, hierarchy, and taxonomy.
- Brainstorming ideas, solutions, and features.
- Clickable interactive prototypes for product design, redesign, or just to show off to potential inventors.
- User testing.
- Visual design.