We provide our clients with a detailed view of themselves from the perspective of their own customers, and recommend ways to improve what they see. To accomplish this, we coordinate multiple disciplines and techniques. Each research program we design is customized to meet your specific needs and built upon highly established techniques and practices. Following are some methods, techniques, and tools we use:

Design strategy:

Story is a major component of design strategy and is a powerful tool for uniting your internal teams and producing consistent results. The design strategy weaves the story of authentic needs of all of the people involved. It provides a strong basis for understanding all of the stakeholders' needs, desires and cultural contexts that will provide the basis for an effective creative strategy, guiding your business towards delighting customers and supporting the User Experience.

Design strategy provides the overall vision that guides creative teams, and is usually founded on research, trends, overall business strategy and conditions. A well-defined design strategy focuses your creative resources on designing products that fulfill their intended purpose, providing the team with a clear basis for evaluating their design decisions. Design strategy can be applied to advertising, product design, entertainment products, even political campaigns – it focuses the full extent of your team or organization's creativity on a particular task, to ensure that what you create is useful, and marketable.

Ethnography and Observational research:

Ethnographic studies examine a specific group of people (such as your existing customers, or a market segment you hope to capture) in the context of their natural environment as they work, play and live. A study of public transportation commuters would occur in buses and trains during drive-time hours, whereas a study of first-time homebuyers would entail watching people as they visit realtors and banks, view homes, shop online and research neighborhoods. Ethnography uncovers the details of how people actually use your products in their lives with a depth and clarity that other forms of market research simply cannot provide.

Ethnography documents behavioral and cultural details that have become so ingrained they seldom get mentioned in market research that occurs out of context. If many of your customers have adapted your product to better suit your needs, ethnography will uncover how and why. Ethnography reveals the truth and details about your customers – how they use your products, what motivates them, what they need, what they want. Ultimately, findings from ethnographic research can paint a picture of all the products and services that all your customers wish were on the shelves today – so you can build them tomorrow knowing they will be successful.

Participatory design:

Participatory design directly involves your clients and customers in the process of creating the products they will buy and use. Nobody is more qualified to show you what your customers want than your customers. Working in collaboration with your design and development team, existing and target users of your products directly contribute to the cast of ideas for new products and product revisions.

Participatory design sessions are a radically efficient means to defining product refinements and determining what your customers would expect of new products in development. Combined with rapid or low–fidelity prototyping, participatory design sessions can be a cost effective way to determine if a new product idea is marketable, and if it is – direct the design of that product to take a form that will be useful in the real-world where people work, play, and live.

Your design and development team will benefit from direct contact with customers through participatory design sessions. Collaborating with customers helps designers see the products they create from the perspective of the people who will use them – by merging the vision of your designers and your customers, you can reduce risk in your development cycle.

Facilitation, Coaching, and Team Building

Lynne Duddy is an accomplished facilitator with the ability to captivate people's imaginations and tap into their creative process, bringing new, inspired solutions to the surface, building trust confidence within individuals and teams. Lynne is passionate about developing and facilitating sessions that draw out people's thoughts, feelings and ideas in an supportive environment. These sessions result in quality experiences for all participants that contribute to the knowledge base of the organization, help identify creative strategies and provide direction towards common goals.

Organizational analysis:

Organizational analysis allows you to measure the structure of your organization against its ability to accomplish what you have set out to accomplish. We study the people in your organization, the roles that they play and the ways that they communicate, documenting the way your organization works, and then objectively measuring your company's ability to carry out its mission based upon your current needs and imperatives. If we find that your needs aren't being met by your current organizational structure or processes, we can recommend realistic, and incremental change initiatives to mold your organization around the goals it seeks to fulill.

Information architecture:

Information Architecture is the practice of organizing information logically, based upon the way people will use and access it. Information Architecture is often thought of as a something that has to do with developing websites but its useful applications are much broader than just developing websites. Good information architecture is important to any project where information must be logically and accessibly organized, from public signage systems to organizational development and software design, information architecture provides a conceptual framework and map for all of the knowledge and data important to your project.

Usability studies

Usability studies evaluate how easily a person can use a particular product to accomplish what they want to do with it. These studies determine whether or not the product in question suitably accommodates the needs of the particular person using it, and informs the person using it how to accomplish particular tasks, and access features or whether the product is designed around the intuitions of the people who will use it. These studies answer the question: "How suitable is this product for human use, given its intended purpose?"

Usability studies can help software, hardware, website and industrial design companies make sure that their products are easy to use. High usability is the quality that separates products that work your way, from the products that simply get in your way.