User Study

A user study involves collecting data from people as they interact with your product. Depending on your product and your needs, Furiant will observe product usage while collecting data corresponding to various performance metrics. From this information, we can analyze and determine your product's weaknesses and strengths and then make recommendations for improving the interaction experience.

Because this information comes from real people using your product, we are assured of getting results that closely approximate the genuine processes experienced by your customers.

Benefits

User studies are excellent tools that can be executed during all phases of product development. When performed at the beginning of the development cycle, a user study can reveal fundamental usability issues before you invest too much into building a flawed product. By learning about interaction shortcomings before building the bulk of the product, you can greatly reduce the overall cost of total product development.

User studies are also very valuable in the middle of the development cycle. By incorporating user studies into your development process you can make better decisions about interaction specifics as you implement them. Additionally, these studies can help show you how to integrate the user interface with the underlying technology in a way that makes sense and that will provide the optimal user experience.

Finally, a user study is a great way to test your product near the end of the development cycle. At this point, it will help confirm whether or not your product meets usability expectations. If you have successfully developed the usability aspect of your product, an end-cycle user study gives you empirical data that highlights your product's ease of use to your customers.

Because a user studies obtain data from real user performance, the results are more conclusive than those from a heuristic evaluation. Usability studies take longer and cost more, but also provide results that are more accurate and defendable through the empirical data.

Details

Furiant offers two levels of user studies.

Our small-scale user study involves 3-5 users. This typically takes a total of 2-3 weeks, including preparation, running the study, analyzing the information, and preparing the deliverable report. Our quote for a small-scale user study will depend on parameters related to the specifics of your study needs.

Our extended user study involves 10 or more users. The total number of users required for the study depends on the type and scale of interaction required of your product as well as your specific reasons for needing the study. These studies take 3 or more weeks to complete.

If you are interested in having Furiant perform a user study for you, please contact us. We can help you determine whether your needs are best served by a heuristic evaluation or by one of our user study products.

Sample

For a sample of our usability study product, please look at our competitive analysis for Akceil Corp. This involves 2 user studies, one for their product and one for a competing product. Please note that this is the non-NDA version of the report and all proprietary information has been blacked out.