You are looking to:

• Understand the explicit and hidden needs of the people who experience your services
• Break assumptions about the customers and clients who interact with your organisation
• Obtain meaningful and usable segmentations of the users of your target service
• Bring user insight into your organisation in a way that is authentic, effective and manageable
• Achieve an approach to user engagement in the design process that enhances speed and results
• Fast-track and optimise your design process
• Gain assurance that the services you are designing will hit the mark with the target users when implemented
• Make co-design a reality within your organisation
• Reduce the risk and cost of innovation

We can help by:

• Planning and executing a design research plan that meets your needs, including participant definition, research approach and realisation
• Applying ethnography- and sociology-based techniques to explore the customer experience first-hand
• Immersing ourselves and your staff into the world of the customer to provide a unique outside-in perspective
• Uncovering needs or opportunities for service improvement that customers are unable to identify or articulate
• Getting at the heart of a community or user issue or problem
• Applying iterative and participatory design techniques to engage people in creating better services, faster
• Increasing the chances of getting it right the first time

What we have done:

• Understanding the experience of software companies with government

  We developed a user research project to explore medical software companies’ experience in developing medical administrative software, with an emphasis on the government interactions required to bring these products to market. The goal was to improve the government service and support of these software companies who play a key role in delivery of e-services. We conducted immersive user observations to sample the software company’s daily work and to establish what it meant for the employees and their organisations to meet the requirements from government. We developed insight pathway maps that modelled the positive touch-points and the irritant touch-points. We turned these insights into actionable strategies for implementation.

• Designing internal staff perception survey – to improve ICT services

  We developed a quantitative survey for a corporate ICT division to measure the effectiveness of their service delivery within a large government agency. The goal was to define the key measures of performance and to develop a measurement tool to baseline and track over time the performance of the ICT division. We used focus groups across the organisation involving senior leaders and staff in regional areas to understand the qualitative elements that define the effectiveness measures. These qualitative measures formed the basis of a formal online questionnaire that we administered to a sample of all staff across the organisation. The survey was conducted every six months.  We collected and analysed the data, and we reported the progressive service perceptions, which informed the ICT executive about strategies for service improvement.

Examples of what we deliver:

• Observation and immersion research
• Focus groups
• Questionnaires
• Exploratory interviews and thematic analysis
• Collaborative innovation workshops
• Service survey design and longitudinal studies