Whether you’re about to embark on a website re-design or a new product exploration, user-centered design is not possible without knowing and understanding your customers. And sometimes you need an outside party with proven research techniques to help you draw the most honest insights from your customers in order to develop an effective user-experience strategy.
SPK Media uses ethnographic research methods to help you learn from your customers. Our primary user-experience consulting tool is the ethnographic interview – we’ll engage your customers in an open-ended discussion about your website, products and services in an environment where we can watch them interact with them. Learning what your customers want and need up front saves time and money in the long run by ensuring we’re creating something they’ll want to use!
For consumer product development, we offer full ethnographic research engagements with video support, shop-alongs, camera studies and diaries and numerous other research methods and activities. We’ve done everything from watching people mow their lawns and fry chickens, to interviewing them about medical conditions and philanthropy.
If you'd like to learn more about the history of ethnography, please read our brief white paper, Ethnography: From Fiji to the family room.
Here are a few research projects we'd be happy to discuss with you if you'd like to learn more:
Webroot
SPK interviewed IT decisionmakers from potential corporate customers of Webroot’s online and mobile security projects. We learned how they shopped for products, how vendors made their short-lists, and what they were looking for.
We used this information to create a series of product demos that addressed key questions and concerns that came up in the product-selection process. Then we put them in a format that allowed decisionmakers to share the product information with their superiors and teams.
You can check out the end product here
Best Buy
SPK worked with a quantitatively focused research firm to conduct the qualitative components of a study for Best Buy. SPK conducted focus groups, interviews and shop-alongs with fitness machine and accessory consumers to help Best Buy learn more about expected product selection, pricepoints, and preferred shopping environments.
At the end of the project, we were able to tell Best Buy which of the three concept stores customers liked most, and we provided videotaped feedback from customers along with our own analysis.
Bonfils
SPK interviewed current and lapsed blood donors, as well as non-donors, to help Bonfils identify requirements and functionality for an online blood donor portal.
Automatic email reminders and personal goal functionality we recommended allowed Bonfils to increase donations among regular donors while helping to convert infrequent and lapsed donors to regular-donor status. Extensive FAQs and content about safety and eligibility that we both recommended and created not only reduced customer service call volume, but also encouraged new donors.