User research

To design a product or service with an outstanding user experience, you need a deep understanding of target users.

User research equips you with insights about users’ behaviours, needs, motivations, and expectations. Those insights serve as the foundation for your design and development strategy.

User research makes decisions less risky because its investigative methods allow assumptions to be replaced by knowledge. It enables you to course-correct early and be confident that you’re making something people will want to use.

The goal is to:

define who your users are, both internally and externally
ensure that the team has a shared understanding of their needs, wants, pain-points and contexts
involve users in the design and development process
create actionable insights
reduce the risk of building the wrong thing
prioritise features based on what is important to users
align products, services and strategies with user needs

Many organisations fail to include users in the development process. Without customer input, organisations risk creating interfaces that fail

Hoa LorangerVP, Nielsen Norman Group

Just enough

We like to keep our user research as lean as possible, doing just enough to learn what we need to, before moving on the next highest priority. We create hypotheses to keep our research focussed and use quick-turnaround methods like guerilla and remote usability testing to keep pace with delivery.

Inclusive

Ensuring that everyone in the team has a common understanding of the users is fundamental to the success of any product or service. As well as planning and facilitating the research itself, our researchers also ensure that everyone in the team is able to get involved and insights are shared regularly across the organisation.

Flexible

Depending on what we’re trying to learn, or where we are in the development cycle we pick the most appropriate research method for the job. This could be generative or evaluative, quantitative or qualitative, and behavioural or attitudinal.

Continuous

58% of companies conduct user research less than once a quarter. User research should be a continuous activity that provides regular insights regardless of whether you’re defining a ground-up customer experience strategy, starting a new product discovery or running a live service.

Services

Make better decisions by getting to know your users and making them part of the design process.

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