We help you achieve 4 transformations
BUILD WHAT PEOPLE WANT
Are you building the right thing?
Is there really a need for your product?
How does your idea fit within the market?
We help you understand people and problems, identify and validate solutions, and clarify your product’s purpose. How?
Discovery research creates a deep understanding of people’s behaviors and needs — the Who, What, and Why. Market research highlights your niche and positioning in relationship to competitors. Validation ensures that your product meets a real need and people will buy it.
Here is how we work with you
Discovery
Great innovation begins with understanding people. We inform your strategy and design parameters for products and services by providing an understanding of end-users, the context of use, and identifying unmet needs.
Our team, all PhD qualified researchers, will do the hard work for you. We roll up our sleeves and get “into the field”– studying people in their natural context to understand their lived reality, challenges, and opportunities to improve their lives.
Discovery research delivers thick, rich data about people. The insights generated answer questions about the problem or market opportunity. They help you clarify and articulate a project’s reason for being, answering the questions:
“What should I build?” or “Are we building the right thing?”
We synthesize findings into reports, personas, UX scenarios, and storyboards that bring their experience to life. This creates empathy and aligns the product and design teams to the people that matter the most –your users.
Market Research
Market research analyzes market size, competitors, and demand for a product. This crucial exploration highlights where you fit into the larger market and how you can stand out compared to competitors.
Research informs actions—and decisive action in the marketplace is the difference between a brand’s failure or its success. Through research, our experts will determine the viability of a new product or service by answering these questions:
- What is the market size and customer demand?
- Who are our competitors?
- How can we stand out?
- How do we reach our audiences?
- What price point should I set for my product?
We will provide analysis reports and an informed plan for your business in the larger marketplace. The outcomes include an understanding of your niche, clarity on your core value propositions, and your positioning in relationship to the competition.
Validation
Concept validation helps assess the viability of product ideas before they enter the real world. This critical step helps ensure you are building the right product or service.
Our experts will use evaluative methods to validate both the problem and the posed solution. These techniques will help answer four key validation questions:
- Is the problem real?
- Does your idea solve a problem?
- Is there a market?
- Does anyone care enough to buy?
We will then use data from discovery and validation to create a product market fit scorecard.
The outcome of validation is evidence to inform the decision to iterate, pivot, or persevere with your concept. If and when your concept is validated, you gain confidence—knowing that the problem is real and that your solution meets user needs. This is an early indicator of product market fit.
Product Workshops
Workshops are intensive collaborative sessions used to solve problems and enable progress on a particular challenge. They are one of the most common methods of working together on product design.
Our team works with stakeholders to define project goals, generate ideas, and develop product concepts in a creative, participatory environment.
We also facilitate co-creation workshops that engage all stakeholders (users, designers, managers etc.) in design activities. These bring the voice of the customer directly to the team, and help them think outside the box. These highly innovative workshops often result in new ideas and pivotal shifts to the product roadmap.
The length of each workshop varies based on project needs, scope, and stakeholder availability.
DESIGN BETTER PRODUCTS
How do you know what is or isn’t working?
Can people figure out how to use your product?
How do you create a better user experience?
We leverage user experience research (UXR) evaluative methods to identify what is and isn’t working. Our UX and content design experts then help create efficient, effective, and satisfying product experiences that users can understand and adopt easily.
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
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?
- How do we compare to competitors?
Experience Design: User Flows
We design experiences that engage and satisfy users. Our experts apply design psychology and prototyping skills to connect with human needs and desires, making your product or service experience seamless and intuitive.
This begins by defining user need stories and the functional scope of the product. We then create user flows — diagrams that display the path a user takes when using a product to meet their goals. They show the user’s movement through the product, mapping out every step the user takes – from entry point through to the final interaction.
At Rill Insights we use flow sketching and mapping to look at the whole picture, before creating prototypes or interface design. When working with products that are already developed, flow diagrams allows us to understand any friction points customers may be facing. They help to build the product backlog and set priorities for the development stage.
Experience Design: Prototyping
Prototyping is the iterative cycle of thinking, making, and observing so you can get fast feedback on design ideas and rapidly adapt the product.
Our experts build on user flows to create Low-fidelity (lo-fi) mockups – simple and low-tech concepts of the product in the form of testable artifacts that you can then use to collect and analyze feedback in the early stages.
Lo-fidelity prototypes help focus on the most important aspects of the product – function and logic – instead of thinking about visuals and interactions. They allow for quick, real time iterations and are accessible – there is no need for a special software or technical skills. All these features make them a perfect tool for participatory UX workshops and brainstorming sessions.
Once the core functionality is laid out, we partner with your design team or one of our affiliates to raise the fidelity to look and feel like the final product. We then test these interactive prototypes to ensure that the product meets user needs and has a smooth, intuitive user experience. This is the final stage before handing the product off to the development team.
UX Content Design
Great content improves sales, adoption, and ease of use. We can help you craft user-friendly content and clear messaging that lands with the target audience, from UX writing to onboarding content and multichannel delivery workflows.
For existing products, we begin with a site-wide content audit and identify areas for improvement. With new products, we work with you to determine what content is required and how to deliver it.
Our experts will then create a strategy and design content that align to user and business needs. We’ll help you develop content standards and guidelines, facilitate the strategy with your team, and implement governance that maintains brand and voice consistency.
Our services ensure that:
- Users find and understand the content they need when they visit your site.
- Your content reflects your organizational values across all touch points.
- You have a workflow to create and maintain content over time.
Optimize Research Operations
How do we conduct quality research at speed?
How can we centralize and share knowledge?
How do we translate insights into actions?
How can we leverage AI in research?
Systems that help collect, centralize, and translate insights into actions give leaders the data they need to make informed decisions with confidence. We will co-create a product feedback strategy with you and then optimize research operations to deliver with both speed and quality. We’ll enable your team too with ongoing training and support.
Here is how we work with you
Strategic Audit
Our initial engagement is a comprehensive assessment and analysis of where you are now and where you want to be in the future. Our experts will identify the company’s core processes to understand strengths, weaknesses, and pain points. We will then review existing requitements and technologies to develop a comprehensive understanding of the businesses’ capabilities and needs.
We present our findings and recommendations, highlight key themes, and provide multiple options for courses of action. Together we align on the best next step for your organization.
You get clarity, establish priorities, set expectations, and create an initial plan to enhance your research and product operations.
You will be able to use the results of the Audit to design your own operational systems, should you wish to do so at this point.
Optimize Operations
Optimizing operations begins by co-creating a product feedback strategy that will improve the quality and speed of research efforts. We will build lean processes to efficiently define, validate, and evaluate ideas, ensuring that your decisions are backed by evidence. We can also help you setup a repository that will centralize knowledge and make insights accessible across the organization.
Our experts will 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 and supporting systems, establishing workflows and governance for research operations.
Throughout this process, we participate with all stakeholders to drive quality-focused product releases. Our enablement efforts include training, mentoring, and support services until your team is skilled and confident.
Streamlined research operations increase productivity and speed, and empower teams with clarity and confidence. It also mitigates risk and saves money by eliminating guess work and waste.
Centralize Research
Product leaders and managers need information at their fingertips to make informed decisions. Their teams need a place to keep everything organized and tools to enable their research efforts.
We help you centralize information in a repository that makes it easy to access research projects, review customer feedback, and share insights across the organization.
Our experts will help you choose and implement a research system that includes a repository, efficient qualitative analysis tools, and a participant management database that makes it easier to find and track the right people for your studies.
We offer complementary training and support to ensure these tools are used effectively.
Centralizing research efforts and insights creates alignment on the Why and makes life easier for everyone, especially people who don’t have the time (or patience) to dig deep into the data.
AI Consulting & Implementation
Our team evaluates and advises software companies on the use of artificial intelligence in product and market research. We do the AI testing you don’t have time for, and can help you choose and implement AI research platforms that will save you time without sacrificing quality.
We can consult you on:
- Which AI tools are best for research
- AI workflows that improve research work
- AI updates you need to know about, such as data privacy and regulation
Better yet, we can implement AI powered research software, giving you expert support and excusive insights from our partnerships. Select an icon below to visit their websites and see what they can do.
We will explain the differences between each platform and how each can fit within your organizational culture. Then, if you choose one of these options, we will help set it up for you and enable your team to use it efficiently and effectively.
We are implementation partners for...
CONNECT WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS
How do you make your customers happy?
What are they struggling with?
How do you get the voice of the customer to the product team?
Capturing the voice of the customer helps keep a finger on the pulse of the customer experience — vital for experience management and continuous discovery. We help you develop a CX strategy and set up channels where customers can give feedback and bring that voice directly to the people who need it.
Here is how we work with you
CX Strategy
We help you keep a finger on the pulse of the customer experience by co-creating a CX strategy to gather and centralize insights from listening posts across the customer journey.
Our experts begin with an audit to understand your business needs, internal resources, and capacity. Together we define a CX 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.
CX Research
Customer-centric organizations continuously listen to and analyze feedback to better understand and manage the customer experience.
Our team supports your CX 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.