Why Do User Research & Gap Analysis?

• You lack clarity about who the users of your site or online application are and which of their aims it should address, in order to realize your own business objectives.
• You want to attract more qualified users to your site or online application.
• You want to improve the user satisfaction of your site or online application.
• You want to increase sales on your site or application (esp. relative to your competitors).
• You want to improve the quality of customer support on your site or application.
• You need clear site objectives to specify and design the site or application effectively.

Methodology

• Work with company personnel to research & define the categories of people whose aims could be furthered by your website and the products and services it supports.
• Identify their aims that new or enhanced virtualized business-functions (marketing, sales, service, delivery, operations, support, etc.) and other elements of your website or new digital product could address. Derive these from team brainstorming, market research (surveys, interviews, raiding databases, re-interpreting prior research), customer-support data, publications, and interviews.
• Depending on the complexity of the situation, conduct efficient field studies to elicit user aims and behavior.
• Research and assess significant alternatives and competitors to your products, services, and website.
• Exclude user aims the company is either unwilling or unable to meet.
• Analyze remaining user aims to identify significant ones unsatisfied by alternatives (competitors, but also any candidate alternative).
• Define these user aims clearly, specifying the benefits to users of achieving these aims.
• Specify the internal business benefits of users’ achieving these aims accurately: potential for increases in revenue, market share, brand penetration, and stakeholder satisfaction, etc.
• Consider marketability: how easy it will be to communicate these aims, your ways of helping achieve them, and the benefits to users, so that they will quickly and easily recognize them as ones they have, but are presently dissatisfied with alternatives for. (Sellability is considered at the concept innovation stage.)
• Facilitate group decision-analysis to select the user aims to try to meet, taking into account the costs, time, and risks of the means needed to address each aim. Include the options of designing and building parts yourself, customizing parts from off-the-shelf packages, & subscribing to online services for other parts.
• This list is the full set of user aims that your new or enhanced website will try to help users achieve.
• When design & development projects are to be broken into phases, group aims accordingly

Benefits of This Approach

1. Clarity about who the users of your website or online application are and which of their aims it should address, in order to realize your own business objectives.
2. More qualified users visit your site or online application.
3. Greater user-satisfaction.
4. Increased sales.
5. Better customer support.
6. Clear, adequate site or digital-product objectives needed to specify and design effectively.
7. Broad consensus and strong support of aims at the management level

Read my Case Study.