Bespoke methodology for each project

We design a bespoke project for each situation and environment we’re asked to research. We use a wide range of tools that allow us to consistently deliver intimate and resonant insights. We might use film, making a series of short documentaries that explore and document the lives and interests of particular people. We might use a series of in-depth interviews as the basis for developing personas, clustering together the themes we uncover into easily recognisable groups. Or we might run a user-lab or workshop, inviting people to attend our studio in order to explore new service concepts via a range of interactive exercises.

What we don’t do is reduce people’s lives down to surveys or questionnaires. We prefer to deliver materials that are engaging, and present insights into people’s everyday lives that truly get to the heart of what defines an experience. We don’t think traditional market-research is capable of doing this, nor do we believe that research should take place in isolation of the overall design and implementation process.

Guidance on how to implement the insights and ideas

In fact, our projects often involve providing guidance to service providers and design teams who want to use the results to inform and inspire their innovation processes. We’ve established long-term relationships with a number of clients, and we’ve helped some of them reorientate their research activities around the service design principles we incorporate into our work. These partnerships have in many instances extended over multiple projects; we don’t just deliver results, we build relationships and provide expertise and support in the long-term.

We aim to deliver a holistic solution that generates insights, provokes innovation, and assists implementation. Each of these stages is crucial in ensuring that services are connected with the lives of the people using them.

Still not sure what we do? Try downloading one of the following articles:

Service Design – Visualising Future Solutions tells you a bit more about the field of service design,
Design Research – Inspiring Research with the Principles of Design explains a bit more about the design research methodologies we use in our work.

1. STBY magazine – Service Innovation Inspired by People Motivated by the limited amount of literature on design research...
2. Living Sustainably: Exploring Ways Panasonic Can Support Green Living How can people in the U.S. live a sustainable lifestyle?...
3. Videos to Inform and Inspire: Helping Novo Nordisk Design for Diabetes STBY have recently completed a project with the Danish pharmaceutical...

Being known as a world-class specialist in Design Research (short for ‘design-led customer research’), many of our clients have asked us to deliver this kind of research on an international scale. Rather than developing this as an in-house service, we have initiated a global network with other specialists in design research around the world. These are small companies like STBY with a proven track record and working with highly senior staff. This way we can garantee a very high quality of local data collection and collaborative insight generation. In our experience this is far better way of conducting international research than travelling to the international sites ourselves and make do with interviews through local translators and freelance researchers.

The international network we have set up is called ‘REACH – the global design research network’. The network currently consists of 9 members companies, covering 11 countries around the world. We epect the network to further expand over the coming years. See the Reach website for all the details: www.globaldesignresearch.com

The Design Research we do through the network can be described as a combination of two approaches:

Understanding people’s practices to drive innovation
Understanding the people and situations you design for is crucial for successful innovation. These insights only come from spending time with your customers, and developing empathic conversations with them. When presented in an inspiring, visual way such insights are a strong driver of innovation.

Bringing design skills into customer research
Design skills such as generating, modeling and prototyping new ideas are crucial for successful innovation. If these skills are already used in immersive field work and insight creation, the resulting innovative ideas are rooted strongly in the markets your company innovates for.

1. The Great Outdoors of Design: An Interactive Conference Hosted by Reach These are exciting times here at STBY, as today we...
2. Design Research for Service Innovation Our creative research projects connect service providers with the lives...
3. Investigating Written Communication: Working With Reach and Nokia to Find Global Common Ground Do different people in different companies have the same conversations?...

By spending time and interacting with potential users of new interactive services, we learn a lot about their habits, preferences, needs and concerns. This knowledge can be crucial for the successful development of innovative concepts for interactive services. Ethnographic studies offer rich data that allow empathic understanding of real-life consumer experiences. Contributing from the perspective of the consumer, our research is complementary to the perspectives of the design, enginering and marketing experts who are collaborating in concept and development teams.

1. Design Research for Service Innovation Our creative research projects connect service providers with the lives...

STBY has developed a unique method to explore and communicate the elusive, inconsistent fabric of everyday life by using video and engaging in a dialogue with the participants in a research. Design documentaries investigate the opposites, paradoxes and ambiguities that are part of everyday life. They inform and inspire concept developers by offering rich insights into the often messy routines of consumers. We have found that this can be far more effective than the clean and simplified consumer profiles based on marketing statistics that are so often the basis for design briefs.

Image above:

1. New Design Documentaries Website A new website dedicated to Design Documentaries - the technique...
2. Design Research for Service Innovation Our creative research projects connect service providers with the lives...

Successful interactive services are based on scenarios that go beyond just pushing new technology. The process to develop these scenarios needs to be imaginative and well out of the ordinary to generate interesting, innovative and surprising concepts. The concepts then need to be thoroughly reviewed from a multiplicity of perspectives. The reviewing process may be light at first, but must advance as the scenarios get refined. Our scenario & persona development workshops facilitate this creative and multi-disciplinary process, in order to produce scenarios and personas that successfully combine realism and adventurousness.

1. Visionary and curious: Exploring Creative Leadership for THNK To support the development of THNK, the Amsterdam School of...

Well-designed, surprising and playful materials can prompt participants to report in more lively and surprising ways than during interviews or focus groups, where they only sit and talk about their experiences. Probe studies provide participants with research materials they actively use for a certain period, and that trigger the recording of experiences during this use (e.g. notes, drawings, photos or audio recordings). For probe studies close collabaration between researchers and designers is crucial. This is an excellent method to actively involve members of design teams in the early explorations of a concept development process.

Diaries offer an excellent opportunity to document activities and experiences that take place on unpredictable moments or in private circumstances. In these situations direct observation is not a feasible option. As the research participants are asked to record their activities and reflections in a diary as soon as possible after they occur, the diaries provide reliable data with minimal intrusion. To optimally engage participants in the process of diary keeping, we have found that an ongoing contact with the researcher and an appealing design of the diaries are of crucial importance.

1. Visionary and curious: Exploring Creative Leadership for THNK To support the development of THNK, the Amsterdam School of...
2. Design Research for Service Innovation Our creative research projects connect service providers with the lives...

Learn from the leading edge of your customers where the most interesting opportunities to improve your service offering are. More and more companies ackowledge that the customer is becoming the dominant reference point for strategy and innovation. Where better to start than with the innovators among your customers? Based on ethnographic methodologies such as contextual inquiry we visit lead users at their work or their homes to find out what their needs are, and possibly what suggestions they might have for solutions to meet these needs.

1. Design Research for Service Innovation Our creative research projects connect service providers with the lives...

Immerse yourself in the service experiences of your customers, identify new opportunities for innovation or discuss your service concept ideas with a sample of lead users.

In a bespoke one- or two-day programme we facilitate a lively encounter between your team and a selection of people from your target group. Through a series of well-prepared interactive assignments the participants explore the current and future service experiences of your customers. Your team will be able to closely observe these experiences and build up a deeper understanding of motivations, barriers and unmet needs by engaging in empathic conversations with your customers.

Our studios in central London and central Amsterdam are perfectly situated to host these Service Experience Labs. In London we are close to Liverpool Street station, so very easy to reach, and in the immediate surrounding of both an upmarket business environment and a buzzing creative area. In Amsterdam we are based at Herengracht, within easy reach from Amsterdam Central Station. Both locations have many buzzing streets and venues around, ideal for service safaris and service prototype testing. Of course we can also facilitate service experience labs with your customers at other locations.

The Service Experience Labs are also suitable for teams that wish to familiarise themselves with the service design approach of engaging with customers in an early stage of innovation projects. In a full-day programme we facilitate an exploration of the essential stages of immersion, insight creation and idea generation. The programme will be customised to fit the objectives and prior knowledge of your team members.

1. Design Research for Service Innovation Our creative research projects connect service providers with the lives...
2. STBY Sponsors the Global Service Jam STBY are sponsoring and mentoring the London leg of the...
3. STBY magazine – Service Innovation Inspired by People Motivated by the limited amount of literature on design research...

An increasing number of our clients already possess a wealth of disparate research data on the issues they ask us to examine. On a number of recent projects, our work has centred on uncovering, synthesising, and representing the insights that a company has already generated – but are currently inaccessible. Many companies find that work commissioned from multiple agencies – and even multiple internal departments – can quickly become disconnected, with the insights contained within remaining inchoate and underdeveloped.

At STBY, we’re able to synthesise existing insights by making use of the same Design Research tools that we employ in our own projects. When developing personas for example, we’ve used design documentary videos to consolidate and invigorate insights originally generated via several disconnected studies. We’re not adding any new material as such, as the problem in such situations is often how to make sense of the wealth of material already available.

Our aim in these projects is to make existing work more accesible and engaging. Reinvigorating existing material by applying Design Research principles in this manner is an effective way to maximise the value of work already conducted.

1. Videos to Inform and Inspire: Helping Novo Nordisk Design for Diabetes STBY have recently completed a project with the Danish pharmaceutical...
2. Design Research for Service Innovation Our creative research projects connect service providers with the lives...
3. New Design Documentaries Website A new website dedicated to Design Documentaries - the technique...

Qualitative and quantitative work seldom exist in complete isolation to each other. Though as an agency we specialise in the former, our work is often used to help inform and target larger scale studies, serving as the input for quantitative surveys.

Sometimes we are asked by clients to perform this step ourselves, adding a quantitative dimension to the projects we design in a manner that adds both additional evidential foundation, and a further layer of insight to the results of our qualitative work. The benefits of this are that we can use our intimate knowledge of the insights being validated in this manner to ensure a more successful transfer from one stage to the other. The quantitive validation is thus more effectively tailored around the insights being examined, and in a manner more likely to garner additional insights than is possible when qualitative and quantitative phases are more separated within the development process.

If you’d like to know more about the manner in which quantitative techniques can be incorporated into our projects, then drop our Strategy Director, Geke van Dijk, a note at geke@stby.eu.

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