Research and insight seeks to deliver knowledge of competition, markets, brand execution, customer behavior, user problems/needs. It is inherent in a user-centered design approach that supports business goals, and involves both quantitative and qualitative techniques to add context and insight to the design. To be successful a design not only has to delight users, it needs to provide a better experience than competitors, meet the expectations of the target market, and fit within the business strategy.

In-depth Interview:

Designed to discover underlying needs and requirements from users, and can lead to new insights and design opportunities.

Focus Groups:

Group participation can stimulate wider discussion but care needs to taken to avoid bias.

Questionnaires:

Useful for validating qualitative research and to understand satisfaction levels with existing designs and solutions.

Ethnography/Diary Studies:

observes users in their own environment or collection of thoughts, actions and feelings recorded as they occur, in order to understand natural behavior. The outputs from ethnographic/Diary studies can deliver illuminating observations.

CASE STUDY

As Arm Flexible Access provided innovative new ways of working it also required a modern development environment that was equal to supporting a larger development community with a wider variety of needs and tasks. The existing Arm Developer site at that time was built to support the needs of a few large customers rather than the wider developer ecosystem, hence a ground up complete refresh of the Arm Developer site was required.

One of the biggest challenges was gathering and aligning requirements across the whole business. This required conducting customer interviews, gathering user research, competitive benchmarking, and facilitating several workshops and stakeholder interviews to build an effective customer journey map that we used as the foundation of the design approach. Another key challenge was to create to understand the needs of the existing and new users that would be visiting and working with the new Arm Developer site. This required revisiting assumptions and previous Persona definitions to being them up-to-date with extensive user research of over 100 users to create a working set of key  persona types covering specific needs and behaviors of engineers, developers, managers, and administrators.