Well managed, user centred projects, and training
for
What we do
Managed User Research
We partner with your team, invest time in understanding your organisation, co-design with your stakeholders, and adapt our approach to fit. Our primary offering is managed user research. Which divides into two main services: Discovery, and Agile UX research. Both use behavioral science methods to observe, analyse, and report actionable user insights. These insights are used by our clients to make strategic business decisions; at any stage of the product or service design process.
Service # 1 Discovery (UX) research
Get a foundational view of your users
Markets, technology and your users change. Observing and understanding people and how they interact with products and services provides a solid foundation for decision making. Our ‘Discovery’ research approach will help you decide where you want to go.
We can help you with:
- Understanding your users’ behaviour: wants, needs, goals, and motivations.
- Validation of assumptions,
- Ideation for product and service design strategy.
Methods
Semi-structured interviews with anyone who has an interest in a project’s success. They identify constraints, build trust, open communications, and drive alignment.
Collect user behaviours, activities, and experiences over time.
Get answers to specific project team questions.
Gain insights over time by observing users in their everyday experience.
Identifies the jobs your users are using your product or service for.
Ideate, or interpret data as a group e.g. brainstorming, affinity mapping, artefact creation.
A workshop with a mission to take its participants into a real service experience. Where they observe, take notes, photos, recordings, and share findings with the group.
Requirements gathering is the process of eliciting requirements from stakeholders and refining their quality. Early-stage to stimulating creative ideas, the middle stage adding assumptions and constraints.
Outputs
Fictional characters that highlight the key types of behaviour, needs, experiences, and goals of target users.
Built into a persona, we expand on what each persona values?
By grouping our data we show the common issues, themes, and scope of the customer problems and needs in one place, we become closely connected with the voice of the customer. The issues become the basis for user requirements.
A visualization of an individual’s relationships with a product/brand over time and across different channels. Answers the question ‘How do people actually use our product?’ Motivations, channels, actions, pain points.
Illustration of one part or route in the user journey. They are an efficient way to establish context and common ground for all the team members working on a specific problem.
Clarify how components in a service process interact with each other. This allows employees and managers to better understand their role and possible sources of customer dissatisfaction within a service experience.
A high-level summary of findings with integrated snippets of media, themes, and statements.
Service # 2 Agile (UX) research
Insights to solve specific problems
These short studies are small experiments in usability and desirability. Conducted closely with the agile team to answer one specific question, or validate a hypothesis. Contained within one or more sprints. The output is a specific yes/no answer, or a ready-to-implement recommendation.
What we can help with:
- Highlight pain points in the user journey e.g. with information architecture, user journey
- Benchmark usability and desirability to see impact on KPIs
- Test specific contexts of use e.g. hardware, software, location
- Build and test user stories. As a < type of user >, I want < some goal > so that < some reason >.
- Insights into usability, desirability of a concept or new feature
Methods
Identifies user frustrations and problems with your existing product, or prototype, through one-on-one sessions where a “real-life” user performs tasks.
A quick way to translate high-level design concepts into tangible and testable artefacts. To check and test functionality rather than the visual appearance of the product.
The user panel is divided, each group uses a different variation on the design. Their experiences are then compared/ contrasted to inform future design.
Asks users to organize items into groups and assign categories to each group. This method helps create or refine the information architecture by exposing users’ mental models.
A 3-5 day workshop process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype. Good when there is a sense of urgency, or when the problem we want to solve is well-articulated.
Outputs
Covers: background summary, methodology, test results including analysis.
A combination of quantitative data: a metric for each task scenario e.g. Success rates, Task time, Error rates, Satisfaction questionnaire ratings, participant demographic data.
And qualitative data: observations about user routes, problems experienced, recommendations, answers to open-ended questions and concise problem statements e.g. clicked on the link to Research instead of feature x.
Generates information architecture recommendations e.g. using the similarly grouped cards to inform related topics in your experience, using the x,y,z top categories to inform the overall structure of the website.
Illustration of one part or route in the user journey. They are an efficient way to establish context and common ground for all the team members working on a specific problem.
A description of a feature from an end-user perspective. As a < type of user >, I want < some goal > so that < some reason >.
‘Pay as you go’ project management
Agile, Waterfall, Lean, no problem.
Our consultants will pick up where needed and regularly report status/risks. Managing on budget, and time. We understand digital technology, and content projects. Our value is our ability to collaborate, and make things happen. We specialise in the following types of projects:
- Blended learning and development
- Business change transformation
- Apps, websites, Ad media
Free advice
Understanding our clients and their challenges is at the core of our business. So we keep the door open to you. We’d be happy to run a free 30-minute advice session. If that sounds useful, choose a time that works for you. We look forward to talking with you soon.