User Research

Our user research approach

No matter the scale or scope of your project, our user research is designed to generate impartial, human-centred insights that enable you to make data-led strategic decisions and help uncover and solve your organisation’s challenges.

To do this our proven user research approach is based on three key principles:

Minimises bias

To uncover how users, stakeholders and customers genuinely feel and behave, our research methodology: 

• Identifies and avoids bias in user research participants and questions
• Guards against confirmation and participant bias
• Works collaboratively to objectively analyse and synthesise our findings
• Tests the research brief, hypotheses and assumptions, agreeing thresholds for evidence

Inclusive

Accessibility by design is the right thing to do and it lets us create better services, products and experiences for you, so we strive to:

• Include in our research participants with a full variety of physical and mental disabilities, whether that’s low or no vision and hearing, and motor or cognitive impairments like dyslexia, ADHD and Parkinson’s disease
• Ensure that we consider people on all aspects of the digital inclusion spectrum including language and digital literacy skills

Ethical

Conducting user research ethically is vital for your – and our - reputation and legal standing, and delivers better insights from informed, happy participants. We are committed to:

• Being transparent and honest in our methods and presentation of results, obtaining informed consent and permission at all times
• The highest possible standards of privacy, confidentiality and data protection
• ‘Doing no harm’ - putting the needs and sensitivities of users, including vulnerable users, at the heart of everything we do. We have membership of, and follow best practice and safeguarding rules set by, the Market Research Society (MRS)

Our proven methods of user research

Initially, we look at what type of stakeholders, personas, segments or firmographic audiences you engage with. We then use tried-and-tested research methods to further map out user intent and journeys, aid the design and production process as well as help plan your future roadmap, typically:

• Ethnographic research like diary studies to understand your users in context (read more about our approach to remote ethnographic research here
• Rigorous usability testing to refine designs, with tools such as eye tracking, SUS and NASA-TLX
• In-depth interviews, to understand your users better
• Task analysis, to see where they encounter friction
• Quantitative studies such as surveys to build an understanding of your market
• Immersion into your existing research, studies and data
• Data analysis, from traffic to helpdesk requests to social media sentiment
• Remote tools for user research anytime, anywhere

 We’ll then refine our user research insights, ideate based on the information gathered, then move swiftly into design and production. We then validate our designs through our certified usability testing processes.