Research

Exploring the needs of the target audience

Design research, or exploratory user experience research, helps you truly understand who you are designing for. It delves into the lives of your target audiences and the context in which they (could) use your products and services.

The focus of design research is on uncovering people’s needs and motivations, and identify problems and opportunities. These insights will help you to define your strategy, making sure you are focusing on the right issues and therefore building the right solution.

To gain a deep understanding of (internal) customers and their context, I apply qualitative user research methods such as observation, interviews and participatory workshops. Of course I also take into account any existing research and quantitative data.

Where possible I conduct research together with you, as this enhances the level of customer knowledge and empathy in an organisation.

Insights and recommendations

Design research should increase customer understanding and help you make decisions. Research findings are therefore translated into actionable insights and recommendations.

Rather than just producing a report, I can help you create artefacts like persona’s, journey maps and service blueprints. These artefacts are often more useful than reports in the design phase – and less likely to end up unread on a shelf!

From insights to solutions

Research insights can be translated into opportunity statements or ‘how might we’ questions. Opportunity statements are used to generate ideas for solutions, which in turn can be prototyped and tested. This forms part of the design thinking process, which I can facilitate for you in co-creation or co-design sessions.

Research can be done online or in-person, in Dutch or English.