Research
User focused methods are at the heart of our approach. Understanding your audiences – their needs, motivations and aspirations – is key to developing communications that work.
User focused design and planning involvee a number of stages within an iterative process:
- Identify user groups and understand their needs, motivations and behaviours.
- Create working models, such as user journeys or prototypes of messaging, to show optimum ways of satisfying the audiences’ needs.
- Test to identify any areas to be optimized.
- Refine.
Stages 1. and 3. both involve research. It’s fair to say most of our research work is focused on understanding target audience segments and identifying their needs, perceptions and behaviours. We use a number of tools:
- Persona modelling
- Face to face interviews
- Telephone interviews
- Focus groups
- Surveys and questionnaires
- Competitor analysis
- Review of existing research
- Website analytics.
Stakeholders
The research component of a project often involves consulting stakeholders. We have extensive experience of stakeholder management and will work with you early on in the project to identify who the stakeholders are and the best methods for ensuring that they receive an appropriate level of engagement.
Surveys
Surveys are a great way of getting quantitative data at low cost. We’re highly experienced at running profiling surveys both on and off line.
Focus groups
Understanding how to draw out key individual attitudes and responses within a focus group context, while gaining balanced insights from the whole group, makes running focus groups both an art and a science.
Usability testing
We test products with users at several points in a project process: testing of paper prototypes, design and messaging response and task-based user testing on a beta system can all provide valuable insights, if budget allows.
Analytics
Interpreting website analytics has become second nature. With a simple embed of Google code on your system, you have at your disposal perhaps the most powerful tool for measuring the behaviours of your audiences ever invented.