Research is a form of QA for your product or service
Quality Assurance efforts help you answer: does the product I built do what I said it would do? Research efforts allow you to answer something equally if not more important: does the product I am building do what it should do? Many companies leave user testing to the end of the development lifecycle when it is most costly and least impactful. Research applied at the right points in the process can lead to breakthrough improvements that streamline development and increase market adoption of your product.
Field Research is a broad category of research that covers anything from long term, silent observational studies where the researchers do not engage with the research subjects at all to active interviews and engagement with users during the activities of their daily lives. Empirical specializes in the latter. We shadow users in their homes or places of work to understand patterns of behavior and then actively ask them questions to comprehend their motivations and underlying assumptions. We also engage in participatory design activities and tactile involvement of the participants whenever possible.
Field Research can be applied very early in product incubation, to identify new product ideas. It can also be applied to post‐product release to discover how the product is actually being used in the field and to identify improvements for future revs of the product.
Get 6 – 10 people in a room and what can they tell you? A lot – depending upon what you do with them while they are there. Empirical’s unique approach to focus groups starts with how we target the participants and the way we conduct the activities that are part of the focus group session. We integrate participatory design, features ranking and rating, pricing strategy and many other factors that help you get closer to the information you need when you need it.
Focus Groups are useful while still in the discovery state of product development, but after you have a general idea of the type of product or service you are looking to offer. They can also be used further down the line to better understand your target market and design effectiveness.
Surveys allow you to target a large number of people at a relatively low cost. Empirical has a unique approach to both recruiting users and designing the survey to help ensure favorable opt‐in and completion rate for your sample sets. Where surveys give you breadth and quantitative information, interviews allow for a deeper understanding and qualitative information. Empirical designs interviews to try and allow for both answers to questions you know you have, but also to uncover information that is unexpected and valuable.
Surveys and Interviews can be used at multiple points in the software development cycle, depending upon the goals. From early on in ideation and features definition to mid‐process user needs definition to post‐launch satisfaction, surveys and interviews allow you direct access to a large number of users to gain invaluable insight.
Unlike focus groups and surveys, user testing is one‐on‐one, focused time with the user. It is designed to find users specific responses to interaction with the product concept, prototype, or the product itself. At Empirical, we view user testing as more than just evaluating the usability of a product. We focus a great deal on what users are communicating in between the lines – interpreting the “why” and not just the “how.” We bring our expertise to uncover hidden cues or indications about what aspects of the product hit a chord with the user and how the product matches with their underlying values or existing paradigms to better understand product resonance and adoption.
User testing can be used at many stages in the product lifestyle. Early on, it can be used for low‐fidelity, iterative design revs to catch design and usability issues before the product moves to production. It can also be used to test specific functional issues during production to help make requirements modification decisions, and of course, is invaluable post‐launch for end of line User Acceptance Testing.
Understanding your user at a deep level – who they are, what they value, how they live – is foundational to building a successful product. From this understanding comes informed decisions about product design and feature sets. User Roles and Personas represent the demographic, psychographic, background, experience and attitudes of your users. If done effectively, however, they also convey your users underlying values and lifestyle choices so that you can see where there is overlap in your target market that transcends traditional approaches to user demographics.
Task Flow Analysis helps you understand what your target users do and how they do it. It is designed to identify specific tasks and the precise actions required to accomplish those tasks. In many cases, task analysis activities consist of contextual on‐site interviews and observations. How do users approach tasks in their daily lives that will inform your product design?
Task analysis can also help you answer a series of very specific questions about your product or service, for instance, how do your customers use the sales funnel on your website to convert into sales? This analysis will identify a series of user scenarios that will be used to define the functional specifications for the product or service. Mapping user’s work flow is a low‐cost, high ROI activity that can help you pinpoint key improvements and or design direction for your product or service.
A usage model, or conceptual model, rolls up all of the research and strategic efforts done on your project to date. It is an overall model for major usage areas (tasks, goals, etc.) that begins to create the paradigm by which the user will interact with the product. It is a visual outline – a picture that answers
questions such as: What are our categorization schemas? What language will we use? How might the user navigate through the product structure?
From the usage model, the team can begin to design the interaction and architecture of the product or service. During usage model development, high level user scenarios are begin created alongside the overarching model, which feed into task flow analysis and use case development. The usage model is also an important communication tool for the designers and developers for the product as the project progresses through the lifecycle.
Use case development, along with the usage model and task flow diagrams, serves as an important communication tool between design and development, as well as a reference point for the research and strategy teams to validate past work. A use case is a written description of essential tasks and scenarios that your product or service will enable. Use cases can be of different fidelity – they can show a higher level user interaction, or they can be very detailed system level use cases that outlines the detailed system workings with detailed alternative paths.
Use cases tend to augment functional and technical specifications to ensure that the development team builds its requirements from the important user experience work that has been done on the project. Use case development, depending upon its fidelity, can occur before design activities to be included in functional specifications, or after interaction design efforts to fully describe the final details of the design to the development team.