Gain Insight Into Audience Needs While Meeting Your Business Goals

What’s one of the biggest - and most fixable - reasons web sites and online applications fail?

The audience doesn’t understand how it works, or it just doesn’t offer them something of value. How many times have you checked out a web application or site, only to get frustrated with it because it doesn’t deliver on the promise?

To build a successful site, it helps to understand the needs and goals of your audience -- but not in a vacuum. You have to couple that with business reality:

• What is your vision of the problem you’re solving?
• What features will customers pay for, and which ones will they expect?
• What are the technology restraints, both of your company and of the audience?
• How will customers access it? Online? Mobile? Through some other device?
• What are your competitors doing?

Gathering these requirements takes work but it won’t grind your project to a halt. Ultimately, meeting the needs of your audience now will help outline the rollout of features down the road as well.

Learn More About Our User Research Services

What is the best way to map the features of your web site or interactive application to the needs of your target market? Each project has unique demands that are dictated by audience, timing, budget, business environment and your internal development process. We don’t force you into a rigid user research model, but devise a plan that works best for your project.

Competitive Evaluation

Getting an idea of the competitive landscape - what features they offer, how is their product designed, what’s free and what’s not - provides a context for audience research. The results generally describe the competitive landscape, but don’t tell you how the target market feels about particular concepts or features.

Task Analysis

How does the potential audience for your product currently complete the tasks you hope to solve? Supporting a logical workflow often is a key factor in the acceptance of a new idea, so it helps to understand how the audience would expect steps in a process to proceed.

Participatory Design/Storyboarding

Get help from your target audience to design features, the product or site. With tools as basic as sticky notes, potential users and the designer can work through tasks and the order of tasks, plus elements of the design layout, terminology, help, even navigation. This research technique is a helpful team design tool, bringing in team members from other disciplines to design or review a design together and make those critical trade-off decisions necessary to move forward with a product.

Expert Review

When time or budget are the biggest issues, its still helpful to get input from one or more usability experts to evaluate a prototype, website or product and provide comments on potential problems and issues.

Usability Testing

Usability testing gives you feedback from members of the target audience as early in the development process as possible. This more formal research must be done in the design stage to validate design decisions before they get developed. Once coding begins, fixing problems with requirements or design is much more costly.

Content Evaluation

What terminology is used? Are instructions and messages clear to the audience? Reviewing content either through an expert review or user testing ensures it is readable, correct and clear.

Support Evaluation

Product support must be consistent, accurate and meet audience and business needs. Through our experience writing users guides, designing support documentation and training, and setting up call center processes and tools we understand support options. Our evaluation recommends ways to improve customer service and reduce support costs.

User Validation

When development is almost done, target audience input helps work out the minor kinks in the process -- from bugs to navigation issues to error messages they don’t understand.

Acceptance Testing

Subjective elements of your product - like voice prompt clarity or graphics appeal - aren’t always checked through unit, regression or other testing. Chili helps evaluate with user testing or expert reviews.

User Feedback and Field Trials

Measure the success of the product in a real usage environment with actual users during beta testing or a technical trial. Or, expand the scope to include the full experience - support options, documentation, installation, etc.  By thinking of your trial as a test of the whole user experience instead of just that product launch, you can have a bigger impact on your company's bottom line. Chili has expertise in recruiting users for trials, collecting user feedback, analyzing usage and performance data, and monitoring and assessing call center activity.

Lifecycle Management

What does the complete interaction experience between you and your audience look like? Understand every touchpoint to get a full measure of customer satisfaction, look for usability and usage issues, identify opportunities for new products or features, and gauge overall brand and product consistency.

Log File/Performance Data Analysis

Most systems generate log files and reports, but do you analyze them for experience improvement? These data offer important clues about how your customers use your products, and reveal important information about performance, functionality, and sizing/load balancing.

Contact Chili today to get discuss how research can improve your project outcome.

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