Product Research
Listen to your CustomersHow do you know what is or isn’t working?
How do you get the voice of the customer to the product team?
How do you create a better user experience?
Customer-centric brands deliver high performance products and services by paying attention to the user experience (UX). Seamless UX is essential to driving customer acquisition, feature utilization, and retention.
For those organizations that aspire to be more customer-centric, it can be hard to know where to start. Changing the culture, gaining leadership buy-in, even establishing new capabilities can be daunting. Whether a top-down organizational change or a guerrilla-led team initiative, the roadmap may be unclear, and the end can seem a long way off.
This is where we can help. Our team will provide advice and guidance as they support you in developing a customer-centric culture, co-creating a product feedback strategy and setting up channels where customers can give feedback.
If you need independent expertise, we offer robust UXR services. Our PhD trained team leverages evaluative methods to identify what is and isn’t working with your product, delivering detailed reports and recommendations. We can also benchmark your products experience against ISO/IEC regulations for products that must meet federal or safety standards before being released into the market.
Whether you prefer project based support or an embedded researcher on your team, we will work with you and demonstrate “what good looks like.”
Here is How We Work With You
UX Audit
A UX audit is an expert review of a product by two design professionals with a robust knowledge of design heuristics and a keen eye.
Our experts go through the critical user paths and identify UX errors that appear in these flows. We use a variety of methods, tools, and metrics to analyze where a product is going wrong (or right). Each error is assigned to the appropriate category, receives a priority, and its description is supplemented with illustrations and recommendations for correcting it.
After this stage, you will know what errors occur on the tested paths, which errors require immediate repair, and recommendations for how they can be made.
Evaluative Research (UXR)
If you want to build a product right, or have any questions why your product is not performing as well as you expect, then evaluative research is the answer.
We partner with you to build products and services that are effective, efficient, and satisfying by applying the principles of human-centered design. Our experts explore, test, and help improve the user experience from concept through release, and beyond.
Evaluative research saves you time and money by finding and fixing flaws early and keeping your team connected to the needs and desires of your end users.
Our experts design careful experiments to observe users as they complete real-life tasks using your product or service. These tests answer questions such as:
- What’s the optimal way to organize information for your users?
- Are proposed design solutions usable?
- Are my customers satisfied with their product experience?
- How can the user experience be improved?
Product Feedback Strategy
We help you keep a finger on the pulse of the customer experience by co-creating a product feedback strategy to gather and centralize insights.
Our experts begin with an audit to understand your business needs, internal resources, and capacity. Together we define a feedback vision and key metrics that align with your business goals.
We then do a cost-benefit analysis of tooling and workflow options, providing recommendations and pricing for three options. Once a choice is made, we will help implement the strategy, establishing workflows and governance of the new system.
Actively engaging your customers is fundamental to any customer-centric organization, and a win-win for everyone. Your customers will be happier knowing that you listen and take action on their feedback. For the business, a focus on the customer experience helps the product team continually release enhancements and features that customers want.
Continuous Discovery
Customer-centric organizations continuously listen to and analyze feedback to better understand and manage the customer experience. This is continuous discovery.
Our team supports your strategy by conducting research to define the customer journey and the moments that matter–key touchpoints where you can improve their experience.
We then help design and launch survey programs across these touchpoints in your tool of choice. Each survey collects key metrics such as NPS or CSAT, and qualitative feedback.
As part of an ongoing support offering, our team can help review and synthesize feedback in dashboards and reports. We can also manage the tools, direct actionable feedback to the Product team, and facilitate regular review sessions.
Defining the customer journey and evaluating their experience at key touchpoints, enables an organization to better manage the relationship. Gathering and synthesizing feedback also helps the product teams understand what they need to improve, and informs the roadmap.
Organizational Change Management
Creating a strategy to become more customer-centric is the first step on a journey that can be full of trials and tribulations, but is worth it in the end. We offer organizational change management servives to help you navigate the transformation.
We support you by facilitating meetings, leading workshops, and cultivating the capacities needed. We will identify and mentor internal champions that can lead the way for others.
Our team can also help develop internal workflows, governance, and a communication plan that support the change you want to see.
From start to finish, we provide ongoing change management consultation and training until you are comfortable and confident with the outcomes.
Embedded Support
Setting up new systems is complex, and sometimes you need help. Whether you need support implementing survey programs or processing all the feedback coming in, we’ve got you covered.
Our goal is to cultivate proficiency with your internal team, but until that point we are happy to lead by example and manage feedback systems and processes, from designing surveys according to research best practices to skillful reporting with clear, actionable findings.
Ready to begin?Let's discuss your project.
WHAT WE DO
Our Methods
Strategy
Co-design a strategy to capture the voice of the customer.
Journey Mapping
Visualize the customer journey and measure their experience at key touchpoints.
Surveys
Measure the customer experience with NPS (Net Promoter), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), and CES (Customer Effort) surveys.
Heuristic Review
An expert assessment of how your product compares against usability guidelines (best practices).
Usability Testing
Testing products with real users to find usability flaws and areas for improvement.
Design Validation
Testing designs with potential users for percieved value and other feedback.
Product Analytics
Measure user behavior and engagement with your product.
A/B Testing
Experimenting between versions of messaging or interactions to find which performs best.
Interviews
Talk with people to understand the Why behind their actions.
Bryan came into Vessel at a time when I thought we had a pretty good customer feedback system in place, boy was I wrong. He brought in a level of sophistication that turned our customer feedback into actionable, measurable improvements to the product and experience. He is also very efficient with his time, it didn’t take long for him to make these improvements, to train the team, and to get us going on his program.
Jon Carder, CEO, Vessel Health
FAQ
What will we receive from a UX audit or usability testing?
The output of a UX audit is a detailed report with research-backed suggestions for improving your product. These suggestions are actionable insights and practical recommendations with examples on what exactly should be changed and how.
What is the difference between CX and UX?
UX (User experience) is a subset of the CX (Customer experience). UX refers specifically to the experience of a product or service, while CX refers to the entire customer lifecycle. That includes marketing, sales, product usage, customer service, and customer success. That is why CX strategy takes a more holistic approach and looks at the both specific moments that matter and the overall customer relationship.