Past Research Clients
Fact Sheets
Product managers and software engineers rarely have a firm enough grasp of their users' work habits to create detailed workflows and feature sets. Limina will work with your team to create the right user research program for your project needs. Our User Research, Persona and User Typology services and deliverables can be uniquely tailored to best fit the needs of the project.
User Research
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"We conduct focus groups and user interviews, but somehow we keep missing key user requirements. We need a new method for understanding what our customers really need." Contextual inquiry is used at any stage of a development cycle to understand target audience behavior in a naturally occurring context (ie, work environment).
The discussions are normally conducted one-on-one allowing the user to describe and show their daily routines. The usability expert then translates the data to design a product that will best meet their needs. It is commonly known in the usability field that users will describe a task one way and perform it quite differently.
All too often requirements are built based on how users describe their tasks and the product that is delivered does not meet their actual needs. When users are observed doing their day-to-day tasks, the resulting set of requirements using that data is much more accurate, and will end up producing a high quality product.
Persona Creation
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"How can we better understand and segment our users to inform and drive our strategic decisions and requirements gathering process?"
Personas are used to help focus a team on a specific audience. They provide concrete data about what might be a real or fictitious person. Data collected to define personas includes the user's context, goals, pain points, daily activities, demographic attributes, and any other questions that need to be answered.
Team members can use persona documentation to create specific designs that will contribute directly to the persona's workflow and/or environment. In addition, features of an application can be prioritized based upon the needs of individual personas.
This offering can take anywhere from a week to a month to complete - based upon the complexity of a product's audience and their accessibility to the usability researchers. Limina has extensive experience building personas and prioritizing application features as a result.
User Typology
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"We know who our user groups are but we need to better understand similarities and differences in behavior patterns across the groups."
A User Typology visually describes the different ways your users interact with and consume information. It focuses on identifying and grouping users based on behavior - regardless of their persona or role. The exercise starts with creating a set of continuums tracking different behavior dimensions. For example; how do your user types approach locating information? This continuum would range from directed (e.g. search) to exploratory (e.g. browse). The elements that define their interaction style might range from passive (e.g. I want to information served up to me) to interactive (e.g. I want to explore and interact with the data). Other continuums might look at user's interest in community generated content vs. site content. Or interest in expert opinion vs. community voting or filtered vs. unfiltered information.
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