User Research

Everyone knows that if you want to produce new goods effectively, you have to do market research. In the same way, anyone who wants to develop successful software has to do user research.

User research is a group of services we will carry out to map out user requirements, ascertain the characteristics of competing products, and identify trends in a certain branch of IT.

Our consultants are qualified in the field of marketing research, and are capable of correctly analyzing users' true needs, motivations and goals. They will deliver the collected material in a form comprehensible to programmers, managers, marketing staff and designers. Unified vision shared by all these teams is a key factor in achieving commercial success.

The most effective tool for understanding your users is personas. Each key customer group is characterized by one specific persona. Persona characteristics are created based on actual data obtained from interviews, statistics and other sources. They are described in great detail, so that all teams working on application development get an exact impression of whom they are creating the product for. Defined personas cover the entire spectrum of potential users. From this spectrum, you choose the primary persona for your application. The remaining personas serve to understand differences among users and to prevent the creation of an application that is so complex that it does not meet anyone's expectations. Thanks to long years of experience, our consultants are capable of creating personas that are effective in all phases of application development. Especially great emphasis is placed on the usage of personas by all participating teams, and on teaching the teams to use personas properly.

Another important tool for creating successful products is the competitive review. Our consultants will map out competing applications and evaluate their strong and weak points. A competitive review is an effective way of learning from the errors of others, of distinguishing yourself from competing products, and of making the new application unique. When using this method, we place great emphasis on the assessment being objective. This is possible only thanks to the experience of the assessors, who are capable of avoiding subjective feelings and of assessing applications through the eyes of actual users.

Another tool that helps understand the needs and preferences of your users is the focus group. Here we invite five to ten potential users, and monitor their discussions on themes related to the application being designed. It takes the form of a moderated group discussion, where users share motivations, expectations and reveal their ways of thinking. This technique is suited for initial exploration of user needs, but is also useful for concept and design feature evaluation at all stages of development.

By participating in such a meeting as a hidden observer, you have an excellent opportunity to get to know your future customers directly. When using this method, we place great emphasis on the separation of users' needs from their verbalized wishes, which can reflect their immediate moods, or can even be contradictory.