Creating Experiences the Human-Centered Way

We specialize in HCD to deliver the best digital experiences for your customers. citizens. users. employees. taxpayers. patients. subscribers.

Strategy

The Experience Studio engages people across a wide range of digital interactions to design experiences

We are experts in:

  • Service Design (SD)
  • Customer Experience (CX)
  • User Experience (UX)

Places

We provide user observation labs, configurable to meet diverse needs: usability testing, focus groups, and more

We provide:

  • Physical locations
  • Participant recruitment
  • Facilitation

People

Our creative staffing team both finds highly qualified, hard-to-find specialists, and works with talent to find their dream gig.

We provide:

  • Focus in the Experience space
  • Perks
  • Expert practitioners

Who We Are

Mediabarn’s customer-centric philosophy defines who we are.

In its simplest form, we are committed to applying Human-Centered Design (HCD) methods to understand customer needs, collect feedback, and use that feedback to improve services and products. Whether it’s for customers, citizens, or employees, our Experience Design Studio creates research-informed designs to improve the experience of every human involved.

In addition to our research and design studio, Mediabarn also provides creative staffing and research lab facility rentals.

Mediabarn

Why Us

HCD SPECIALIZATION
We are specialists, not generalists. Our approach involves applying uniquely specialized talent across the disciplines of strategy, customer research, experience design and service design. Utilizing the industry recognized expertise that our specialists bring enable us to provide the best possible experiences for our clients and their customers.
DEDICATED RESEARCH LABS
As one of the first CX consultancies to build their own in-house research lab facilities, we were early to embrace the value of involving actual users and customers throughout the design process. With full lab operations and dedicated recruitment teams (LabOps), our modern state-of-the-art facilities support a wide range of research studies.
TECHNOLOGY INDEPENDENT
Because HCD is all we do, we are not tied to any one technical solution, and have no inherent bias that might exist if we were also selling a specific software product or platform. While there is a right time for solutioning and technical coordination, this approach enables us to focus on designing the right experience that will drive value for users and the business.
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How We Think

From where we sit, Human-Centered Design is the methodology that prioritizes and directly involves actual customers and users in the design solutioning process by which we create experiences. These days, terms like CX, UX and Service Design are abundantly used, quite often interchangeably. We provide them all and think it’s important to explain their differences. This is how we view them:

Customer Experience (CX)

CX is the entirety of a customer’s journey with a product, company, or brand. Seeing a message on a billboard, making an online purchase, and calling a help desk are all examples of a customer experience.

User Experience (UX)

UX is the digital channel of CX since the interaction with digital products and services is often a significant component of CX. Because so many products we work with are mainly digital, we have gravitated to a focus in UX research and design.

Service Design (SD)

Service Design unifies the entire system. It integrates the front-end touch points and interfaces with which customers interact with the back of the house elements involved in delivering services and content.

What We Do

We offer a full range of strategy, research and experience design capabilities which include:

Strategy & Planning

  • Product strategy
  • CX / UX strategy
  • Agile ceremonies
  • Content strategy
  • Design thinking & elaboration
  • Project management

Research

  • Persona development
  • Usability testing
  • Card sorts & tree tests
  • Participant recruitment
  • Ethnography
  • Heuristic evaluations

Design

  • Journey mapping & Service blueprints
  • Information architecture
  • UI & interaction design
  • Interactive prototypes (Figma, XD, InVision, HTML/CSS)
  • Design systems / Governance
  • Accessibility / 508 Compliance

This is just a partial listing, so if you don’t see what you’re looking for, please ask us and chances are it is also in our wheelhouse.

Case Studies

Read some of our success stories and how we were able to help make an impact with our customers and their users.

Clients

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After 20 years and countless engagements, these are just a small sampling of current and past clients we’ve helped over the years. 

Meet Our Leadership

Keith Deaven

CEO and Co-Founder

Jason Pentecost

Principal and Co-Founder

Mauro Scappa

Vice President, Placement Services

Greg Herring

Vice President, Strategy and Operations

Heather Gay

Vice President, UX Research

There’s little substitute for experience. Our management team average 20 years each in the field and have held positions in a diverse number of high profile digital companies. They are responsible for identifying, managing, and challenging talented digital professionals to create winning solutions for our clients.

How can we help

Always up for a challenge, we take pride in the work we do and satisfaction in the results we achieve for our clients. Contact us to start the conversation to begin your partnership with Mediabarn.

Get In Touch
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