User Research
Understanding your users - their motives, goals, and behaviors - is essential to designing a product that meets their needs and is intuitve to use. Here are the types of research services we offer:
- Usability Testing
- Card Sorting
- User Interviews
- Contextual Inquiries
- Persona and Scenario Development
Usability Testing
In a usability test, users use the website or web application in a lab or remotely in the user's setting, to complete typical tasks. A usability specialist moderates the session, observing the user's behavior, taking notes, encouraging user to follow the “think aloud protocol.” Product team members are invited to observe usability testing sessions.
Card Sorting
During a card sort session, participants are asked to group content or a list of tasks from your Web site in a way that makes sense to them. Participants often label these groups. The findings from this activity help us understand how your users think about and organize information, and what terminology they use and understand.
This activity is best done when creating a new site architecture or optimizing an existing site architecture.
User InterviewsA user interview is an informal, open-ended conversation with users about how they’re using a Web site or application, whether or not it’s meeting their needs, and any other opinions users have. Interviews are particularly useful when users have experience using the Web site or application, but it’s not clear what goals they’re using it to accomplish (they might even be using it differently from how it was intended), and whether it’s easy or difficult for users to accomplish their goals.
Contextual Inquiry
In a contextual inquiry, a researcher observes the user working in his or her natural environment. A contextual inquiry is particularly useful when the user’s social or physical environment plays a significant role in how the user works and uses (or will use) the Web site or application.
Persona and Scenario Development
A persona is a fictional representation of a typical user. It includes a photo of the user, as well as demographic information and other details that affect how the user would use the Web site or application. It also includes a few personal details to make the user seem more realistic. Usually several personas are created to represent different user groups. Personas enable the design team to consider the Web site or application from a user’s perspective, without having a user in the room.
A scenario is a fictional depiction of the situation the user is in. Several scenarios can be created for each persona to determine if there would be variations in how the user uses the Web site or application. For example, a user using an application for the first time will generally experience it differently than if he or she has used the Web site or application many times before.