Services
Midwest Research's services are designed to deliver a complete toolkit enabling product development and/or marketing efforts to be focused accurately. We will examine your user's current needs, previous experiences, and their expectations and then deliver recommendations based on our findings and our knowledge of cognitive psychology and usability best practices.
We are small which allows us to be flexible in our work style. Bring us on to supplement your team or we can work independently in a traditional consultant role. We facilitate usability studies in your lab, conduct remote usability tests, rent labs in around the world as needed, and/or bring portable usability labs to the participants.
Products Midwest Research can help you develop:
- Consumer products including: electronics; appliances; automobiles and toys
- Medical products and medical devices
- Web sites
- Software applications
- Kiosks, touchscreens and interactive environments
- Mobile devices
- Intranets, portals, social media and more.
User Research - Understand who uses your product
Midwest Research helps you to identify people who already use your products or who are your intended audience. We then observe people in their home, school, work space or wherever they will be using your product.
Usability Evaluation and Testing - Will This Work?
Midwest research has the expertise to conduct a wide variety of usability studies and can conduct them in person or remotely. We can work with you at any stage of usability study development.
- Define the type of usability study that will be conducted.
- Plan the study and handle recruitment of participants.
- Facilitate the study.
- Analyze the study results and quickly deliver findings and recommendations in an easy-to-understand format.
User Research
Midwest Research spends time with prospective users to understand their needs and the situations in which they will use your product.
We then explain the user's needs clearly to your team so that the right product is built.
User Research Services:
- Observations and ethnographic field research
- Interviews and contextual inquiries (in person or phone)
- Mental model creation based on the user's needs
- Focus groups
- Persona and profile development
- Card sorting
- Participatory design sessions
- Surveys (web and phone)
Marketing Research Services:
- Competitive studies
- Focus groups
- Customer experience management (CEM)
- Surveys
- User segmentation
Usability Evaluation and Testing
Before going prime-time your product will go through many quality checks.
The acceptance and usability of a product has a direct impact on sales so evaluation for usability is one of the most important quality assurance steps you can take.
Usability Testing Services:
Paper prototypes, functional prototypes, and finished products.
- Planning, scheduling, working with recruiters, conducting and analyzing studies
- Classic lab usability testing
- On-site testing (at conferences, events, etc.)
- Remote usability testing (via web, remote testing software, and/or phone)
Expert Review Services:
Quick evaluation resulting in an easy-to-understand report and/or presentation.
- Heuristic evaluation
- Cognitive walkthrough
- Accessibility review (Section 508 and WCAG)
Training During Projects
Learn while doing by combining training with your project.
Bring us in to support the formation of standard processes or to help speed the integration of usability methodology into your development lifecycle. We will customize the training based on your teams needs and the project. From learning basic methods to sharpening the saw on advanced skills.
We have experience setting up usability labs (traditional and remote) and can troubleshoot problems in your lab.
Our consultants have taught usability courses at the college level and have taught usability tutorials at conferences nationally. We have experience working with groups at different usability maturity levels and welcome opportunities to share our knowledge. We can conduct training with training or consulting budgets.
Polish Your Facilitation Skills
Improve your style of facilitation with a formal review.
We can coach you to refine the quality of your sessions - send us a recording, conference us in, or bring us along. We will closely observe the facilitator and provide feedback to improve the quality of facilitation on these aspects (and more).
- Hosting style and sensitivity
- Confidence and Control
- Neutrality and avoidance of leading
- Listening
- Probing
- Dealing with difficult situations
Additional Services
If you don't see it here please contact us!
- Best practices review
- Business analyst activities
- Gap analysis
- Facilitation of brainstorming sessions
- Information architecture
- Literature reviews
- Project management
- Qualitative and quantitative data analysis
- Requirements gathering including stakeholder interviews
- Usability lab setup
Midwest Research consultants can also perform other services for you. If you don't see your needs listed here contact us via email at info@mw-research.com or by phone at (773) 218-6568 to find out how we can help you.
Midwest Research will always provide you with a fully detailed summary of our key findings and recommendations. We will also provide any survey and interview results where applicable. We pride ourselves in making sure that you fully understand the results of our studies.
