Research

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Contextual Inquiry

Contextual inquiries almost always lead to valuable Insights into user behavior and help uncover user needs. It is an invaluable tool when developing new products. Insights into user behavior supports decisions about product requirements, strategy, and feature sets and eliminates much of the guesswork otherwise involved in incubating products and creating new functionality. While it can't eliminate the risk entirely, it reduces the risk of building products or functionality that is not successful.

Usability Testing

Usability testing is a great way of evaluating design with users and making adjustments to the design early on in the process when the cost of making changes is relatively low. Usability testing is usually done with prototypes that don't have the full functionality of the end product. They can range from low-fidelity paper prototypes to detailed prototypes that look and behave like the finished product for the tasks that are performed in the testing.

Competitive Research

Competitive research involves looking at competitors products and services and evaluating them. This can mean looking at feature sets, brand, interaction design, or other relevant factors. It is important to evaluate these against own research; not everything competitors are doing is a good idea. In fact, the opportunities lie in identifying shortcomings in the competitors offering and creating a better product or service.

Site Analysis

Conducting a professional review or heuristic evaluation of the currrent product can reveal strengths and shortcomings of the current solution. Combined with user and usage data this can be highly valuable in improving the customer experience.

Focus Groups

Focus Groups are primarily a marketing research technique and are generally not the best use of budget to inform design decisions. However, they can yield valuable insights into preferences regarding brand and visual design.