Mixed Methods Research
Your software's success stands on a foundation of user research. As a user research agency, our multi-modality approach helps us uncover every insight needed to make that foundation strong.
Multipronged Research Approach
User interviews. Competitive landscape analysis. Immersive learning. There are many ways to gather information to strengthen your product, and research agencies often have a preferred style. At Tandem, we take a mixed method approach to research, availing ourselves of the many research tools at our disposal.
Make Confident Decisions
Tandem’s research engagements involve multidisciplinary teams of product designers, software engineers, and stakeholder partners. We believe in doing “just enough” research: when you have confidence in the validity and value of your research, there’s no need to over-research, over-analyze, or over-work. In our perspective as a user experience research agency, a mixed method research approach is the best way to provide the leverage needed to make the right decisions for your product’s users.
Our Research Methods
Your digital user research plan will be customized for you and may include combinations of these modalities:
Competitive Landscape Analysis
We analyze your competitors’ features, industry trends and conventions, and gaps in the marketplace. This digital user research tool is especially relevant for clients working in highly competitive industries.
User Journey Mapping
Your user’s workflow doesn’t start and end with your software. Tandem’s user research team will document the actions, thoughts, and emotions of your users at each stage of their process to create a digital product roadmap. Many digital products have more than one user group, so we map out multiple unique journeys.
Immersive Learning
We want to understand your world! By immersing ourselves in your industry, our multidisciplinary product team can quickly get up to speed in the needs of your business and your users. Immersion may take the form of shadowing, site visits, or other types of observation.
Customer Empathy Mapping
Amazing insights emerge when we’re all focused on the user’s perspective. Through customer empathy mapping, we put your stakeholders, leadership, or engineers in the shoes of your users: what do they see, hear, feel? At Tandem, we focus on human-centered software design and this exercise helps humanize the technology and align the team.
Visual Landscape Analysis
Tandem’s product designers will catalogue the colors, typefaces, iconography and styles of your competitors to uncover visual trends and conventions. This analysis provides a solid foundation for decisions about where to conform to standard visual cues, and where to differentiate.
Continuous User Testing
You’ve made a long-term investment in your custom software, and your users’ digital landscape is constantly evolving. Continuous user testing helps you stay ahead of your users’ expectations so we can proactively plan features and user interface updates that support your goals.
User Interviews
As we focus on user-centered software design, interviews provide a remote-friendly opportunity to uncover your users’ and stakeholders’ roles, expectations, and values. We make sure our interviews are collaborative, casual and friendly, with a focus on uncovering insights to inform product decisions.
Stakeholder Problem Framing
Often, a project’s stakeholders bring different unstated goals to the table. We delve into the metrics and KPIs that will signal success to each stakeholder, and emerge with a strategy to meet your business need. We find this to be helpful when working with large, matrixed organizations, or with any client whose goal is to create an MVP.
Let’s mix it up!
Ready to get started? Our team is ready to custom-build a research approach just for you.
