To help your product team understand your digital product domain better, Team Spirit supplements available information by planning and conducting new user research and analysis. During user research, Team Spirit first develops preliminary user profiles in collaboration with members of your product team, including both people who have contact with users and those who must understand users’ needs, desires, and preferences. Team Spirit then prepares a User Research Plan for your project and submits it for your approval. This plan documents our approach to user research and modeling, task analysis, and user requirements analysis for your project.

User Observation

To ensure that your product team understands your target users, their goals, and how they perform their tasks, Team Spirit observes the work of and interviews either

• people who are representative of users working in the task or information domain that your proposed product supports
• actual users of your current product or competing products

Ideally, we observe and interview these people within the context of their normal working environments.

Objective of User Research

When conducting user research, our primary objective is to elicit qualitative user data that enables us to

• understand users’ mental models and terminology, the context of their work, how they currently perform their tasks, and how we can better support their tasks
• ascertain users’ perceptions of your current product or those of competitors
• identify usage patterns for your product or those of competitors
• determine unmet user needs that future versions of your product should satisfy

Other Methods of Gathering User Data

Additional means of gathering user data during user research include surveys and focus groups. Team Spirit can develop Web-based surveys to obtain information from a broader range of your current users. We can plan and conduct focus groups to ascertain current or potential users’ perceptions of your product and competing products.

For a Web project, Team Spirit can also analyze your site’s access logs and search logs to determine usage patterns for your site, ascertain what information site visitors find of interest, and learn the vocabulary that they use when searching for information. Through user research, we can learn what information is most valuable to visitors.

Our User Research Findings

At the conclusion of our planned user research and analysis, we present our findings to your product team in our User Research Report, inform you of any discoveries that warrant further investigation, and can help you to decide whether we should pursue any additional research. The user data that Team Spirit gathers during user research provides the raw material for the creation of personas during user modeling, as well as the information about users’ tasks that Team Spirit analyzes during task analysis.