Ethnographic Research

Smart Home Innovation
Digital Smart Scanner
Warehouse Tracking
Hospital Portable Tablet
Technology in Education

Workstation Serviceability 

​Overview: Explore smart home early adoption, understand how people are using voice assistants and other new technologies, look for unmet needs.

Method: 12 in home interviews, all with smart devices, 6 with voice assistants and 6 without, 6 in CA and 6 in Houston TX, age range 30-59.

Findings: Major concerns were setup, energy use, security, privacy of information with a voice assistant, interoperability, adding more devices and falling short of truly being useful. Delights were easy shopping, quality speakers, fun with the new “family member”, control from outside of the home.
Results: This project spawned follow up work and led to an inventor patent submission-First Respondent Digital Assistant Emergency Recognition and Communication Device, filed April 2017 International Application No. PCT/US2017/028910

Documentation Redesign

Overview: Setup posters are included with all laptops. The poster redesign project looked at all posters, to streamline the creation process and maintain functionality and ease of use.

Problem: Posters were different sizes, there was variation in content and content was not shared across posters. Our team needed to test the existing posters,  recommend and test changes to the posters and ensure that changes did not affect ease of use.

Methods: Baseline usability test, iterative usability testing and recommendations throughout redesign.
Results: Generic illustrations and reusable content reduced the development and training time of document managers.  The reduced poster size and weight, saved on ink, paper and freight.  This provided an annual savings of $3.2 million, without negatively impacting ease of use.

Streamlining Support

​Overview: A Support Assistant is an application for your laptop and phone designed to help manage notifications, updates and troubleshooting for all of your devices.
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Problem:  The Support Assistant was intended to improve the customer’s ability to maintain and troubleshoot their devices but adoption was low. Our team needed to establish a baseline, make recommendations for improvement and begin iterative testing.

Methods: Baseline usability test, competitive heuristic analysis, competitive usability tests, iterative usability  testing throughout redesign.
Results: The redesigned application saw increased adoption and decreased support calls. Time spent on the Support Assistant was converted into call center cost savings for an estimated impact of $25 million.