A quick summary of what I do
Bespoke research
- Qualitative interviews and focus groups
- Websurfing interviews and web groups
Expert review
- Strategic research review
- Professional usability review
- Analysis of language (discourse) and signs/design (semiotics)
Custom training and workshops
- Research methods
- Evaluation methods
The Long Version
1. Stuff achieved from the comfort of the office
Professional Review
Some website issues can be spotted without interviewing a single user. I use a basic heuristic review to walk through a website, evaluating how it performs against typical website expectations. For example, did you know many users still have no idea that logos usually double as the Home Page link?
Heuristic Reviews also work well after user research, once we’ve established what your users’ goals and needs are in using your site, and what your own goals are for your site. These goals are then translated into design guidelines or heuristics for evaluating your site and those of your competitors.
Semiotics and Textual Analysis
The partner to the professional usability review is the semiotic review. Websites present text, colour and graphics to communicate with their audiences, and many of these elements signify a certain meaning. The choice of image or photography can frame the organisation as upbeat or serious or medical or youth-orientated. The language used in text and conversation often frames an issue in certain ways and not others. Analysing look and content of communication, alongside user research, helps us understand what the design is communicating, either deliberately or unintentionally.
Strategic Research Review
Although most of my consultancy is qualitative, I have a very strong background in statistics. I can review your research, and reanalyse and reinterpret your data, so that you can understand what you already know, where the holes are and how to fill them appropriately. While I do offer analysis and report writing, I don’t run quantitative surveys personally, but I can direct you to some lovely people who will do that part beautifully.
2. Stuff that requires getting out on the road
One-to-one interviews
Interviews are unglamorous and absolutely essential. They can be websurfing interviews, in a usability context; office interviews, at a desk in a cubicle; home interviews; telephone interviews and even web-mediated interviews. They are an excellent way of understanding individual response and individual sense-making. They can be a little over-rational, in certain subject areas.
Focus groups
Eight (or six) strangers, one mirror. Groups are wonderful for discussing things with a social element or a great deal of subtext. A good group, sparking off one another, will identify the fatal flaw in a marketing plan, and worry away at a problem.
Groups in web research are very useful at the strategy planning or needs analysis stage. The dynamics of a websurfing group are rather different to a typical group, and the sessions need careful planning if you’re to capture all the insights emerging. In my experience, unless you’re working in a dedicated facility (and sometimes even then), web groups will push the technology to its limits.
Interactive Workshops
More and more clients are interested in participating in the research more directly, by talking to users, or asking users to help solve a problem.
When it comes to contentious subjects, deliberative workshops and consensus conferences can be very helpful in understanding why people think the way that they do and how they respond to certain arguments. These kinds of workshops can involve experts and representatives of special interest groups as well as the general audience
Both general workshops and deliberative workshops need good planning and structure if they are to work well. I think we’ll see more of these applied to general marketing and website research, as it becomes increasingly important to understand how to talk to your audience outside traditional advertising communication.
Custom training
I offer training on creative research methods, evaluation, and science communication, taking particular care to ensure that the training is right for the organisation and can be supported by it.
Evaluation Training
Increasingly, people who offer a service, or a piece of training, or even a piece of theatre, are asked to evaluate the impact of their intervention with the target audience. This is now a standard condition of grant-awarding in some fields, yet it can easily be end up as an afterthought. I specialise in helping to design evaluation that’s helpful as evidence for external bodies, but above all helps you to identify your goals, strengths and weaknesses. With a bit of effort, evaluation can be enjoyable, thought-provoking and even fun.
