We go and meet your users in their real usage environment, to understand what they actually do and not what we assume they do.

You have a product that grates, a journey that's poorly understood, a redesign to prepare or a new value proposition to validate? UX research makes the diagnosis before the prescription.

UX research

Q: What methods do you use?

We identify the real blockers, we model your personas from interviews, not from marketing stereotypes, and we test your concepts with real users. These are individual interviews, in front of the service in question, following an interview guide prepared to reduce interpretation bias and let people speak without a filter.

Q: How many participants for a user test?

There's no point trying to identify every single problem. In qualitative testing, a few participants per profile are enough to bring out the essentials; beyond that, it's often the same points that come back.

Q: When in my project should I do research?

As early as possible, before decisions are locked in: UX research makes the diagnosis before the prescription. But we also step in on a product that already grates, to understand where it stalls.

The human and social sciences, used to collect and model user knowledge. So decisions take into account both the people who use and the people who build.

Go and meet your users, observe them interacting with your products and services, and interview them. Run tests in dedicated labs, or in the street, a café or a waiting room, face to face or remotely, quickly or thoroughly. Sometimes combine this with surveys, questionnaires and polls to bring measurement to individual experiences. Surface needs and expectations, abilities and limits, desires and frustrations. Cross-reference the result with your business vision to feed it into your business outlook, product or service strategy, or annual roadmap.

Check out our awesome research case studies!

Christophe Bey Co-founder and Associate Director & Flying object enthusiast

Your need

Understand before designing, question your assumptions.

A conversion funnel that doesn't convert quite as well as it should. A phone support service that's overloaded even though there's a form. A monumental building where every type of visitor should be given a unique experience. All these are playgrounds, and there are so many more for our UX researchers!

Meet the Research team

What we help you do

We won't teach you anything "disruptive" about your users. Our clients are highly knowledgeable in their fields, and that's a good thing. On our side, three PhDs in cognitive engineering ground research in scientific rigor. What the approach brings is a shift in perspective that lets us look at the same problems through the narrow end of other people's binoculars, those of the people who live with the product, not those who design it.

Ask without biasing

It takes expert interviewing skills to turn a sample size that makes big data experts raise an eyebrow into material decision-makers can act on. Ask the right questions to get the right answers, and don't expect simply holding out a microphone to be enough. Know when to step in and probe, and when to keep quiet and wait. Combine contexts and approaches to gather both many small, individual stories and facts that can be fully generalized.

For example: Studying the mobility needs of people with disabilities

Surface the needs

Model user knowledge

Research is about shifting perspective.

Approach the problem from the other side, the users' side, to question what we think we know. This doesn't mean holding their opinions sacred and forcing the organization to adapt to them. It means giving them a say, just like the other project stakeholders, and giving them weight in decisions and trade-offs.

Make up your users without going to meet them (we do research, we do not read tarot cards), produce a marketing study in disguise (you do not use your smartphone for the same reasons you decided to buy it, these are two different professions), justify decisions that have already been made (we are not expensive enough to serve as an excuse), or promise statistically precise figures from a panel of five people (Statistics 101).

What we cannot do

They trust us with their UX research

Training

Your teams learn to prepare and run interviews, interpret results, so you can commission useful studies and read reports with a critical eye.

Get trained in research

Discover the other links in the chain

UX design

Which information goes where, and when? That's the UX designers' craft: translating insights into architecture, journeys and wireframes.

Turn the need into a solution

UI design

Give interfaces a strong, accessible visual identity, ready to be integrated by development teams.

Bring the solution to life

Our UX research case studies

For the Cultura Foundation, how do you give young people a taste for reading?

560 young people later, here's what we learned

Bordeaux.fr: a portal that informs Bordeaux residents as much as it serves them, with no compromise on accessibility and eco-design

RGAA 95%, RGESN 86%: stepping behind the scenes

See all our UX research case studies

Need to support your decisions with UX research?

Let's explore together the contexts and the real needs of your users, to help you build products and services that make sense, for them as much as for you.

The methods, tools and deliverables of UX research

A few key concepts, for the more curious among you

Ergonomic audit

Systematic, detailed analysis of an interface (web, mobile, business tool) against a set of criteria, used to surface friction points and produce illustrated recommendations.

Diagnose before redesigning