the blog for experience innovators

Experience Research

A wooden table with a keyboard, a mouse, a phone, pens and other tools to work.

May 27, 2021

16 digital tools for people who want to understand and shape customer experience

Great software can be an enabler for helping organizations practice and integrate CX in their work. At Smaply we naturally value and use our own tools, however we also make use of a range of other tools that help us engage in the CX activities that need to be done within our organization. Great tools allow us to do work more efficiently, help us communicate better and bring order to our daily tasks.

Cambrian Berry

person looking at data on a wall, trying to find a way to cluster it

October 8, 2020

Customer experience data: how to structure CX data in the world of service design

So we have spent weeks and months collecting all types of customer data. By conducting interviews with our customers, doing desktop research, hosting workshops with our team, digging into KPIs, as well as many other approaches. Through this process, we have generated a large pool of high-quality insights – so large that it has become increasingly fragmented and difficult to find specific knowledge. So, what do we do now? How do we make a start when it comes to data management so that our resources are stored in clear, logical ways that are easy to access when we need them?

Cambrian Berry

two people sitting on a bench, the sun is setting

September 10, 2020

Contextual interviews: understanding employees in their work context

This case study shows how contextual interviews together with other research methods helped to understand people’s work environment, experiences, and pain points of delivery folks of gas cylinders. The study highlights the value of the triangulation of research methods.

Pranjali Pachpute

May 13, 2020

Employee experience: shaping new work practices

Managing employee experience helps us find a way out of the endless loop of trying to catch up with the latest HR trends and helps come up with our own solutions. This article introduces to the concept of employee experience, how to bring it into action, and what we – as humans and organizations – can get out of it.

Melina Savvidis

cloud with lightning and heart on a grey background

May 5, 2020

Ask Marc – about experience research

In this session we give an introduction on how to do experience research. We talk about the differences of qualitative and quantitative research and why both of them are interdependent and crucial for an organization. And of course we answer all user questions, such as when to use which UX research methods, examples of ethnographic research and how to calculate the cost of research methods.

Marc Stickdorn

apartment building with balconies, where people sit

April 15, 2020

Remote experience research

Experience research is more important than before, as we need to deeply understand new contexts and act accordingly. As a researcher, we have the opportunity to learn more about behaviors and change products and services responding to crises. We have the knowledge and power to act responsibly and care about customer and employee experience.

Zsofia Szatmari-Margitai

March 10, 2020

Case study: researching experiences in a restaurant

How is the customer experience in a newly opened restaurant? This article shows how our guest author Anna slipped into the guests' shoes and helped the restaurant managers to improve the service.

Anna Katharina Reisenberger

February 11, 2020

The basics of customer experience research

Improving customer experience needs a deep understanding of the entire customer journey and makes structured research the key to success. Customer experience is influenced by multiple online and offline channels, and often happens along a long time frame. These facts make it necessary to carefully evaluate what methods and tools are useful for each specific research and innovation goal.

Antonia Cramer

symbols showing activities on an event on a turquoise background

July 17, 2019

How MPI (re)designed their flagship event

This article shows how mobile ethnography has been used to help redesign the World Education Congress #WEC18.

Ruud Janssen

a map with colorful dots visualizing touchpoints of visitors

July 10, 2019

Case Study: experience research in Central Park

In this article the author discusses her insights on using mobile ethnography for a diary study as a design researcher. The project revolves around understanding how people navigate around Central Park. However, for this article she is be focusing on how she used this tool for a diary study as opposed to the complete project that includes exploratory, generative and evaluative research.

Arushi Jaiswal

vegetables, honey and a college block with the writing "food – health & sustainability"

November 30, 2018

Case study: researching food habits in the Netherlands

This case shows how diverse private and governmental parties worked together in order to better understand the perspectives of Dutch people on health and sustainability of food.

Katharina Rainer

9 icons of participants with 3 in a red circle

June 1, 2018

9 tips how to invite your customers to participate in a CX research study

Participants are the most essential factor of your experience research study. Here come 9 tips on participant recruitment and data quality in mobile ethnography projects.

Birgit Bosio

symbols for office work on a blue background

September 18, 2017

Case study: researching employee experience

This case study describes a research project conducted by the international design and consulting company USECON in order to investigate its internal employee experience.

Katharina Rainer

laptop showing the researcher interface of experiencefellow and smartphone showing the mobile interface for participants

September 7, 2017

How b2b research can benefit from mobile ethnography

Mobile ethnography started in B2C research, however B2B companies are now beginning to see the benefits of this approach and have started adopting the technique.

Jen Birch

symbols showing public services on a pink background

May 9, 2017

Case study: researching public services experience

This case shows how a consultancy agency together with a local governmental institution in Chile worked to understand and improve the customer as well as the employee experience.

Birgit Bosio

symbols visualizing things happening in a museum

January 25, 2017

Researching experiences in a museum

Mobile ethnography research can also be used as a tool for winning over new customers as shown by the Royal Ontario Museum.

Katharina Rainer

visualizations of touristic activities that are captured with a smartphone

July 9, 2016

E-book: Case studies of applied research projects on mobile ethnography for tourism destinations

Getting started with mobile ethnography? Here comes an introduction to the method of as well as seven examples on how it was used to research customer experience in tourism.

Birgit Bosio

symbols showing touristic activities on green background

April 11, 2016

Case study: researching tourism experiences in Upper Austria

The Upper Austrian Tourist Board is the only provincial tourism organization in Austria which has installed a Service Designer within its enterprise.

Birgit Bosio

symbols showing touristic activities on yellow background

February 18, 2016

Case study: researching experiences in tourism

The Alpine tourism destination Serfaus-Fiss-Ladis researched their guests’ and employees’ experience to further improve their offer.

Birgit Bosio

Klaus Schwarzenberger, and Carina Hauser, Usecon

January 6, 2016

[German] Webinar: Mobile ethnography and user research

This webinar with Klaus Schwarzenberger and Carina Hauser from Usecon is about user behavior and how mobile ethnography can help research experiences.

Klaus Schwarzenberger