Insight

Our suite of research services help you gain a competitive advantage by identifying where the best opportunities are to engage your customers and constituents. We also look for gaps in the market landscape where you can differentiate from competitors.

Requirements Gathering
Form over function? Or function over form? To us, it depends first on what you're trying to accomplish strategically. Through a variety of investigation methods, like stakeholder interviews or collaborative scenario planning, we identify and prioritize the range of organizational requirements (stated and latent) to guide subsequent design decisions.

Analytics Audit
As a complement to the qualitative user research, we quantitatively analyze traffic flow and interaction trends to learn where your visitors come from and how they interact with your web or mobile site or application. Often used in conjunction with A/B or multivariate testing, these insights can validate existing design directions or provide a basis for new ones.

Content Audit
Web platforms exist to serve content, either in the form of text, graphics, media, and conversations. For the content to be most effective, it needs to match the target audience's needs and interests. To that end, we assess the relevancy of your content, map it to user profiles or personas, and determine how the content itself and the mix of it can be improved to better engage your audiences.

Capabilities Audit
Often, proposed solutions fail because they don't match organizational capabilities. To be sure that doesn't happen, we analyze the effectiveness or your existing digital assets, organizational structure, content management workflow, and technical proficiency, among others.

User Interviews, Surveys, and Ethnography
Understanding the customer's mental model in decision-making allows for the creation of a user experience that is truly useful and engaging. Our typical methodologies include focus interviews, phone or in-person surveys, and observational ethnography. Based on this data, we create user personas and profiles to guide design decisions.

User Experience Benchmarking
Your offering needs to stand out, not just among competitors, but also from the other good experiences your customers have with other companies. To determine where the opportunities for differentiation are, we select a group of competitor or comparator companies beyond the boundaries of your industry to benchmark features, functionality, brand messaging, content positioning, and even clickstream behavior where available. This analysis is usually developed through secondary or direct research, such as onsite visits with companies being researched.

Heuristic User Experience Audit
Sometimes the simplest improvements yield the most substantial improvements to the user's experience. The trick of course is knowing where these are. To help, we will analyze your site across a range of criteria and on as many as 140 evaluation points, depending on how rigorous you'd like us to be.

Usability Testing
Through in-person or remote-testing, we make sure the web site or application we create works as intended: provides a differentiated branded experience, enables transactions to be conducted efficiently, and makes the desired information easy to find.