User Research

What is User Research?

Qualitative User Research focuses on understanding user behaviors, characteristics, aims, needs and motivations. Qualitative research tools and methods, which are mostly based on social and behavioral sciences, provide answers and insights for underlying reasons, opinions and problems. Research enables you to understand all the different causes and relationships that influence a problem or make up a challenge and helps you to develop ideas or hypotheses to enhance an innovative human centered approach. At superduper design consultancy we follow a practical design process, using established qualitative methodology as well as our own tools, which we have developed and customized over the years. Through our expertise we support you and your team during the whole process of qualitative user research. We help you to design and plan the research, we recruit your users, we facilitate your workshop(s) and help you to get to the hidden insights you need to develop or test your service or product.

How does it work? - An exemplary project process …

• Together we define the research context and decide on the themes and issues that you think are most important to explore
• We set up a plan for the research process
• Define the user group you are focusing on and decide on the right questions to ask
• We choose and develop the right set of qualitative methods (Interviews, Home Visits, Shadowing, Cultural probes etc.)
• We recruit the right users
• Set up the user research workshop including facilitation and moderation
• Extract key insights (Customer Journey, personas, user models, opportunity fields)
• We then define the focus of challenges for your innovation process

Why is it important?

It can be observed that organizations often draw conclusions about user needs based on assumptions and suppositions. At the same time, these inferences are backed up by quantitative data collection, which, however, only reflects a current and overall picture of the users. In order to be able to understand and answer real needs, a differentiated approach is mission critical. Qualitative research enables you to get much closer to users, their habits and behaviors. This leads you to hidden insights and gives you an understanding of the real reasons that cause problems and needs.

What is our opinion?

Qualitative research is an essential process for a human centered innovation approach either if you want to exploit and anticipate unmet needs and socio-cultural shifts in behaviour or to test existing products or services. It is an important process to enrich or proof assumptions generated from quantitative research or hypothesis. Through efficient methodology you will be able to dig deeper, uncover details and to evaluate insights that will lead you to a new perspective towards your organizations and the challenges it is facing. This approach creates a variety of options for raising user feedback informing iterative product development, so that acceptance hurdles can be reduced as early as possible and the greatest possible added value can be created for the end user.