Analysis, Evaluation & Persona Services
How do you translate data into insights, insights into ideas, ideas into designs, and designs into completed products? I’ll help you leverage your existing resources to help you identify opportunities for improving your customer experience.
Understanding Your Customers
The best way to understand your customers is to build personas. Personas transform your data into ‘imaginary people’; they are detailed descriptions of your key customers built out of the knowledge you’ve accumulated, your business objectives, and data. Completed personas include lots of information, including: Who your customers are, how they behave, what their goals are, how they think about your brands and products today, and how they think of your competitors. Personas get everyone in your organization on the same page - your team can use personas to make business, design, and even marketing decisions.
Personas are worth the investment. I can help you create quick, ad-hoc personas or full-data driven personas built in collaboration with your entire team. With my process, your company will quickly develop personas that you be put to work right away.
- Guided workshops to create ad-hoc personas
- Collaborative projects to create data-driven personas
- Using personas throughout design and development: the persona lifecycle
Analyzing Your Customers’ Experiences
Once we clarify who your customers in relation to your brand and business goals, we can evaluate your existing site to identify problem areas and missed opportunities to build a more successful ‘conversation’ between you and your customers. Detailed analysis is great, but it’s hard to identify issues and generate solutions. That’s where my experience comes into play. No matter which analysis process we choose, all of my reports contain both clear descriptions of problems and actionable recommendations to fix both surface and structural problems.
Process Analysis & Redesign
I can help you look at they way you and your team approach design, redesign, and supporting development. There are lots of new, practical methods that can help clarify communication and help your team work together more efficiently. Together, we will identify problem areas, develop solutions, and help your organization adapt these solutions to your own goals and needs. If you don’t have a customer experience team or a customer-centered design and development process, I’ll help you plan the structure for your process and your team, and figure out the best ways to introduce and support customer-centrism throughout your company.
Competitive Analysis
When we have crystal clarity on who your target customers are, your ‘sweet spot’ in the market and unsatisfied goals and needs of customers, we can use these insights to evaluate your competition. I like to treat the competitions’ products, websites, or service descriptions as ‘version one’ of any design or redesign. Your competition has made customer experience mistakes that you can skip-if you know what they are. This is a very different approach from creating lists of features and trying to ‘catch up.’
- Remember you will never get ahead of anyone as long as you are kicking him in the seat of the pants."
- - Adapted from Walter Winchell (1897-1972)
By the way…
Navigation elements that appear and disappear aren't necessarily a good idea. But in this case, my desire to create a strong sense of what my site is for and how it is structured (at the most basic level) was more important. I didn't want visitors to get caught up in reading lots of navigational detail. Instead, I wanted to provide three strong 'front doors' that led to deeper content.