Research
Analysing users is a key part of the design cycle of a product. In order to understand your users, you’ll need to look at the activities that they engage in, the context that they are acting in and listen to their needs. We adopt a range of methods to be able to achieve this.
Interviews and Workshops
No method is more effective than simply speaking to your users. The best way to understand what they may do and any expectations they may have, is to put them in the real-life situation and watch how they behave and react.
Interviews for individuals or workshops for groups allow us to collect qualitive information on users’ habits, opinions, frustrations or individual requests. During workshops, the group dynamic encourages creativity and research about new products or services to flourish. We run interview sessions for internal stakeholders, as well as for external clients; this helps us establish general expectations and create a vision document which defines and outlines the company’s UX strategy.
Benefits
- Allows you to get users’ opinions
- Based on our experience, even a small number of people can produce satisfactory results
- Allows you to compare assumptions with the reality on the ground
Deliverables
- Persona sheets
- User journey
- Research report that includes the key learnings and insight
Contextual Observation
Contextual observation means observing user behaviour directly in their environment- at work, in their sitting room, in a shop- or when on the move – in public transport, in a road. This method allows us to understand the users’ thought process and their activities, whilst taking the cultural dimension into consideration within the context.
Examples of contextual observations
- Processing customer files within a business
- Agents’ performance within a call centre
- Effectiveness of caregiving staff in a hospital setting
Benefits
- More detailed analysis
- Opportunity to watch users in their natural environment
- Allows you to compare what is said with what is done
Ethnographical Studies
An ethnographical study also allows you to collect qualitative information on your users, but over longer periods of time- from a few days to a few months. For the “diary study” method, participants are asked to write down their experience through a diary logbook. Smartphones have made this method easier as they can now include photo, audio and video content.
Benefits
- Provides a deeper understanding of your customers, their environment and their mindset
- Most comprehensive analysis, out of all of our studies
- Long-lasting insight and learnings, offering greater continuity to your strategy
Deliverables
- Edited research report during the research
- Report with logbook diary, video and photos from the study.
- Strategic angle after the findings
Persona Development
Personas are archetype users, who have been created based on the research from interviews and/or workshops. Here we can represent the different types of users, products or services that we design.
Benefits
- Easier to identify what you would like to target
- Communicate a shared vision for customers internally and refer to it
- Writing out user journeys will help to design the product
Deliverables
- Map of different personas
- Prioritisation of personas based on your requirements
- Persona based on qualitive research
- Persona based on our research and your customer data
Multi-channel User Journey
The user journey describes the path that a customer will follow, based on their relationship or interaction with the services of a business or organisation. We’ll present the user experience visually through an experience map, where we’ll map out all touchpoints and pain points for the user. This representation method allows all of the user’s activities to be presented in one image on all of the brand channels.
Benefits
- Identify the pain points in the overall experience
- Increase colleagues’ empathy towards your users
- Improve collaboration between different departments
- Ensure consistency of the experience across all of the channels
Deliverables
- User experience map
- User scenarios
Which challenge are you trying to solve now?
Select the most appropriate need:
- I need to create new concepts and test them out regularly
- I need to continually test our services out on our customers
- I need to understand how our customers use our products or services
- I need to completely re-think my product and/or service
- I need to explore new horizons
- I need expert advice on my customer experience
- I need to optimise an existing product or service
Not finding the need that fits you?
Get in touch and we will advise you to understand better your needs.
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