User Research
- Know your users and your customers
- Identify their tasks and the flow of those tasks along a continuum
- Tailor the approach to the context
Knowledge is Power
Can you visualize the person who will use your product or application?
That's the intimate knowledge you need to guide the design and development process.
With it you can deliver successful interactions, avoid mistakes and execute correctly. Without it... well, maybe you'll get lucky.
A client of ours was sure that e-mailing information home from a kiosk in a public setting would be very popular. Setting up a prototype and observing users convinced them that this "wow" feature was actually under-whelming. That insight made them reconsider the value of implementing a costly feature.
Tasks Continuum
Why is the focus on tasks so critical?
This is the work your customers are doing — whether it's shopping or finding information or entering data, tasks are the building blocks of their experience on your web site or application.
When they complete a task easily and quickly, they come away satisfied.
When you look at task interactions along a timeline, you'll also see changing requirements and needs, and will be able to target when to introduce features and functions.
Methods and Techniques
We'll develop a research plan that gets you the user knowledge you need to inform the project. Each situation has its own requirements and we'll pick the best discovery research methods for yours.
While we perform structured usability testing, we also often do quick ad hoc testing. This is an effective and less costly option to get the feedback we need.
User research is ideally an iterative process, and we'll work with you to make it an affordable option.