User Studies

User Studies is one of the most important and critical activities of User Centered Design.

< Design Director Gautam Karnik conducts a user interview for designing an e-governance application. Identities of users are withheld.

> Many products face acceptance issues when end users actually use them. This results is increased calls to customer service, user irritation, dissatisfaction, loss of customer loyalty, product iterations, higher product breakdowns and eventually lowering of product sales.
> Lower product acceptance from users typically happens due to lack of understanding user requirements and lack of systematically understanding the context of product usage.
> Product creators lose many new opportunities due to lack of direct contact with end users.
> Product creators are not necessarily product users. Product creators may have invalid assumptions about what end users truly want.
> Design experts use several interviewing techniques to probe into the minds of users to understand their needs.
> Rich psycho-graphical data is gathered about work habits, behavior, emotions, feelings, issues, expressed and unexpressed needs of users.
> Experts investigate the gaps between the vision of product creators and the actual need of the users.