User Research

Services

What is User Research?

User research is essential for understanding your customers’ behaviours, their aims, and how they interact with your products and services. To create a solution that delivers users what they want, you first need to understand what they need. You need to see your product through your users’ eyes.

We provide a full set of user research services, and all of them can be provided remotely. Our user research process is fast, and it’s designed to give sufficient evidence to help your team make good decisions with actionable next steps.

Quite often clients say that they can’t afford to do research or they haven’t got time. I believe you can’t afford not to. Good user research will save both time and budget in the long run as it ensures you understand the real problems your users experience and who you are creating for. Any research is better than no research at all.

Anna Allan - Graphite's Lead UX Researcher

We can provide the following types of user research:

Generative Research - This type of research aims to find patterns in people’s behaviour, goals, needs and desires. This strategic research is used to shape your products and services. It should be regularly revisited. Generative research methods can include formative interviews, user journey maps, persona creation, card sorting, and personality tests.

Evaluative Research - This type of research can help you understand how successfully you have met users needs with your product or service, and it generates actionable insights for design teams to make improvements in performance, usability, UI and UX. Evaluative research methods can include usability testing, benchmarking, card sorting, and more.

Usability Testing - When usability testing the Graphite team use “Customer effort scores” that measure how much effort a customer has to exert to resolve their issue. Customer effort scores are typically on a scale from ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult’.

Review of existing research. Full review of any relevant user research.

Research session designs. We’ll map the research process and how this will integrate with your company. Agreeing methodology and templating key documents. For example, the creation of recruitment documents, in-depth interview discussion guide, and workshop planning.

Execution of research. Depending on the methodology chosen, the execution of research. For example; 1:1 in-person conversations with key user groups.

Analysis. Full analysis and sensemaking of research.

Workshop and analysis. A facilitated group workshop with key user groups or stakeholders. Experience mapping. A full synthesis of all discovery phase research formalised into a document depicting the current user experience. Wrap up and research playback. Final wrap up of all research and playback findings.

Timing: Research is bespoke based on client needs.

Deliverables: We practice providing ‘just enough’ research to give quick, actionable insights. User research can be conducted remotely. We’ll deliver an easily digestible report of analysis with clear findings describing user experience across multiple channels and touchpoints and providing practical and actionable recommendations.