In every industry, organizations that endure have a few core competencies stamped into their DNA, qualities that don’t change even as competition and context do. At Bold Insight, we are UX researchers to the core. That means that we are girded by specific methods and grounded in data. Clients count on us to offer insights they can act upon, driven by actual observed and measured experience.
Even as our UX work rapidly evolves, it continues to find us mediating conversations between user needs, business needs, and the capabilities and constraints of technology. Early on, our role was to bring data and insight into the user’s experience of a physical or digital product or service, so that the design of the product or service itself could be improved. Even five or six years ago, a healthy percentage of our work was in these traditional usability studies.
Now the context is changing. We are being asked to bring the same rigor of approach, but instead of recommending solutions for issues on the user’s screen, we also actively partner with clients to identify potential opportunity spaces where products and services can effectively expand.
TLDR? Our UX practice informs business strategy.
Here are three ways our data-driven approach has expanded into new contexts and addressed critical business decisions for our clients:
Deliver a deeper and broader view of the user journey
End-to-end journeys once charted a user’s experience within an app or website. Today, our studies are foundational, breaking out of users’ screens and observing the context in which people live and work — and exhibit unmet needs for products and services that will be shaped to help them. Real-world examples:
- We followed content creators to their home studios in nine countries to understand the context in which they use video tools. Our work helped our global technology client adjust product market fit of their new offering in specific emerging markets so that it could add value within an existing ecosystem.
- We tracked customer experiences of a large global retailer well beyond the shopping process to understand consumer’s needs pre-purchase, post-purchase, day of delivery, and post-delivery.
- We worked alongside a pioneering automotive company to determine how challenges that emerge at the vehicle level will scale to the entire fleet.
Shape a product development framework that is deeply attuned to the competition
Standard usability testing often benchmarks user task completion on a client’s website or app as well as those of direct competitors. Today, our competitive research goes much further, informing decisions at the earliest stages of product ideation and development. Real-world examples:
- For a global technology company redesigning their app for a specific health vertical, we used a multi-phase approach to analyze key competitors. We began with a broader SWOT framework, which included social media sentiment analysis, then narrowed our focus to detailed app teardowns, and conducted a series of interviews with target customers to evaluate competing solutions.
- For an emerging technology leader expanding its cloud-based product into a new, rapidly evolving vertical, we provided real-time, detailed analysis of relevant players. We evaluated gaps in the feature set and gaps between competitor positioning and user perceptions as expressed in specialized public forums.
- For a product team designing AI automation for small business owners and solopreneurs, we informed the design of the prototype project through our landscape analysis, co-design exercises, and expert interviews. Each phase of the work contributed to the evolution of the prototype.
In each project, our team’s insights positioned the client to reduce risk as they pursue new opportunities, target specific spaces and customer segments where they can provide the greatest value, and apply their resources wisely.
Bring insight and process alignment to an organization’s internal customers
As organizations must navigate the shifts to their internal operations from many factors, user insight can help guide this process with teams adapting to emerging technologies. Real-world examples:
- Familiar with the rigor of our work analyzing external customer experience, a global tech leader with significant investment in human content moderation asked us to help them plan for the changes that large-language models (LLMs) would bring. Our work helped them envision multiple Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) scenarios, changes in job definitions, and provided a metrics framework to methodically evaluate new ways of working.
- After we conducted months of external customer research, our global tech client prototyped a service where call center agents collaborate with custom Gen AI tools to fulfill customer requests. We then studied the interactions between human and AI agents, leading to a service blueprint workshop. In this workshop, each team in the complex organization actively participated in shaping the evolution of their processes to support the company’s new offering.
In each of these three expanding contexts—understanding the 360-degree world of customers who use products in their rich and fully-scheduled lives, navigating the competitive landscape where products compete in ecosystems rather than zero-sum environments, and recognizing technology disruption that considers both internal and external customers—we help our clients make sense of data so they can determine their business direction.
We are ‘in the room’ because we are able to observe, measure, and provide actionable insights. The rooms change and so do we. We develop new frameworks and ask new questions. In each context, clients turn to us because they recognize our work helps them create the influence that makes change happen. We help them drive business strategy because we speak plainly and make recommendations based on rigorous bodies of data. That’s why UX people make great strategy consultants. We don’t just gather insights; we drive impact.