Listening
Sometimes it’s more important to listen and understand than to talk.
We’re really good at listening, just prompting every now and again to make sure we really understand how somebody feels or thinks.
We even put ourselves into situations where we can’t talk at all.
Lurking and eaves dropping
When users phone a call centre it is often with the very questions or needs that they would try and do on a web site. They may have even failed to do something online which makes them have to phone.
Eaves dropping in call centres is a brilliant way to hear dozens of customers interacting with a company. We listen to their questions, concerns, praise and anger. It helps us work out how the online experiences can be shaped and altered to best meet the users’ needs.
If we’re working with a client that has a point of face to face contact with a customer, whether it’s a shop, bank, dealership or office, then we’ll spend time there. We’ll listen into conversations, watch what people do learn from the responses that are given. Again we’re working out how the online users are thinking and how we should best respond to them.
We have a breadth of knowledge across all aspects of usability, and have lots of international experience we bring to every project we work on.
In at the deep end
Depth interviews help us really get under the skin of users. They enable us to map out processes that meet with their expectations.
We’ve been in situations where we’ve seen users get stuck on a site. It just doesn’t behave in a way that they want it to. It’s not that stuff’s missing, it’s that it has been put together in the wrong way leading to a loss of confidence in how to use it. We can take our research and transform it in to wireframes and prototypes, along with supporting information architecture that meet the user’s needs.
It’s amazing how when users see a revision of a site that’s been put together once depth interviews have been done how it just works. Sure there maybe tweaks here and there but users will be able to do what they’re trying to because the site’s designed around them.