User Needs
User needs (or user requirements) research is essential to achieving a truly user-centred approach to any website design, redesign or enhancement project.
It provides the in-depth understanding – of lifestyles, attitudes and, most importantly, of online behaviours and needs – that ensures your website will engage your customers and provide an excellent user experience that keeps them coming back time and again. It can also be the key to gaining an edge on your competitors.
We use a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies to unearth those deep insights – and the results can deliver very wide ranging benefits. For example, depending on the stage at which user needs research is undertaken, it can provide robust evidence to:
- Establish or validate a project business case
- Secure stakeholder buy-in
- Confirm and prioritise user types
- Inform the development of user personas
- Determine range and scope of content and functionality
- Identify gaps in content and functionality
- Identify potential USPs for your site
- Enable learning from your competitors’ successes and failures
- Identify the preferred look, feel and tone
- Ensure the website reinforces brand values
- Prioritise your development / enhancement activity
- Inform success measurement
- Inform your marketing programme
Distinguishing real user ‘needs’ from user ‘wants’ for enhanced ROI
Separating user needs from simply a list of user ‘wants’ and then prioritising these, is a critical component of truly effective user needs research – and we have developed a bespoke process to achieve this.
Why do we feel so strongly about it? Well typically, we find that many of the things users say they ‘want’ to be able to see or do on a website, in fact reflect one of more of the same underlying ‘needs’. When we separate real needs from wants and prioritise those needs, our clients’ development budgets and time can then be focused where they will deliver maximum ROI in terms of user experience, whilst avoiding the inclusion of superfluous, non-critical features and functionality.
Bespoke approach
To address the unique objectives and issues of individual client projects our approach to user needs research is always bespoke, drawing on a variety of methodologies, including:
Traditional focus groups
Typically run over 1.5 hours with 6-8 participants all of whom are professionally recruited to a specially devised brief. The sessions are moderated to a pre-agreed discussion guide and supported with stimulus material where appropriate.
HCI groups
Typically 6-8 participants in 2-hour sessions that blend individual, task-based, qualitative and quantitative usability evaluations with focus group style discussion.
Depth interviews
Conducted on a one-to-one basis, in person or by telephone, with selected representatives of key audience groups.
Quantitative online surveys
We design, deliver and analyse both online and email surveys.
Quantitative telephone surveys
Carried out amongst a sample of sufficient size to produce statistically significant data across the requisite range of user types.
Ethnographic studies
A purely observational (i.e. non-discursive) methodology used to gain insights into how target audiences behave in their own work or home environments. It provides a unique, ‘lifestyle’ perspective on the usage of interfaces and other methods of information sourcing and is carried out either through live observation or remotely, using ‘fly on the wall’ filming.
