We get up close and personal with potential customers in their own environment, watching how they do what they do in real life. The difference between what people say and what they actually do can be the difference between a product being pretty good or being great.

Poor focus groups… sadly, so often misused. We deploy them carefully to explore what really can be answered in a group discussion of target customers: preferences, levels of interest in a product concept, top-of-mind concerns, and user-generated ideas.

We construct detailed models and real-life scenarios, elegantly inked sketches or screen mockups or video treatments, that describe how people will use your product. Walking through the whole experience – not just the user interface – ensures big gaps are not left in the product definition and that capabilities work together from beginning to end.

Our in-depth, one-on-one interviews go beyond preferences and demographic information to learn the whys about customers in a mixture of free-form conversation and structured activities. With this knowledge, a mysterious failure or the inexplicable popularity of a minor feature can suddenly become dramatically clear.

Do you wonder where people might get frustrated or confused while using your product? We recruit people who fit your target customer profile and have them use your product in a normal way to see where the problems are, as we take notes. Using our findings, you can fix the problems long before you go public with your final release.

As potential customers use the product or prototype, we observe and probe to learn how well the experience meets the product’s promise. You get a realistic, high-level view of whether the overall product concept is worth investing in, and you’ll learn what’s missing.