Revealing and clarifying people's behaviour

Understanding your users, customers and other stakeholders is key to developing successful products, services and systems. Conducting qualitative insight research is an effective way to build that understanding, learning who you should really be designing for, what their motivations are, how they behave and how they respond to what you design.

We have years of experience in developing the frameworks for understanding people's behaviour and in applying the innovating the methods by which that behaviour can be understood and communicated. This often involves combining different research approaches to reveal people's unarticulated needs, opening up surprising opportunities for innovation.

group of cyclist on asphalt road
group of cyclist on asphalt road

Understanding athletes' behaviour. In projects for a global sports brand, we designed and conducted a research project to understand specific athletes' needs. We recruited athletes into the study, interviewing them about factors shaping their sporting performance and observing them during their training and racing activities. This generated novel insights into how existing products were being used, modified and damaged, revealing unmet needs for the client to respond to when developing new product concepts and marketing approaches.

Finding problems in digital device use. In a project for a leader in smart devices, we investigated how customers' interacted with the client's products and moved between different device types during their workflow. We recruited non-experts into the study, and used qualitative methods to identify inconsistencies between the on-screen instructions presented by the devices and the printed product manuals. These insights generated opportunities for redesigning specific interface elements for the client's next generation of smart devices.

a person sitting in a chair using a cell phone
a person sitting in a chair using a cell phone

Recent engagements

Published work

The founder of Cambridge Creativity, Professor Nathan Crilly (PhD), has conducted extensive research in user experience and user-centred design, and this informs the insights work we conduct.

Nathan led the development of a framework that represents the factors that shape user experience, integrating ideas from the fields of design, psychology, marketing and ergonomics (Crilly et al., 2004; 2009). Later work placed this framework in the context of communication theory (Crilly et al., 2008a; 2008b), and directed the field's attention to how users reason about the design process during their interactions with products, systems and services (Crilly, 2011a; 2011b).

The original publication reporting on the user experience framework (Crilly et al., 2004) is one of the most highly cited works in its field, and has been used to inform the analysis of user behaviour for many types of design. In 2016, it was one of only forty academic ‘authorities’ used to construct the Amici Curiae brief explaining the value of design to the U.S. Supreme Court as part of Apple’s billion-dollar patent conflict with Samsung. This brief was authored by over 100 distinguished design professionals, including Dieter Rams, Calvin Klein, Norman Foster. It quotes from the 2004 article to establish (i) the importance of product visual form, (ii) the components of consumer response to such form, and (iii) the way that brands design for these responses (see pp. 22, 23, 27 of the brief, and read more in Quartz).

With respect to research methodologies for developing user insights, Nathan’s development of the ‘graphic elicitation’ interview technique was published in Qualitative Research, a leading sociology journal (Crilly et al., 2006). This diagrammatic approach to interviewing is now well established in the field of visual methods research, and has influenced interview practice across the study of diverse topics, including healthcare, migration, education and family life. Reflecting this wide-ranging uptake of the technique, it now features in the SAGE handbook of Visual Methods (2012).

Expertise in qualitative research methods is also evidenced in many of Nathan’s published research articles, reporting on the attitudes and practices of users, designers, inventors and entrepreneurs (Crilly et al. 2009; Crilly, 2015; Crilly, 2018; Crilly & Moroşanu Firth, 2019). He advises other researchers on the analysis of qualitative research data, such as in the study of users' orientations to potential technology options in neonatal intensive care units, published in Innovations, by the British Medical Journal (Bonner et al., 2017).

The citations above and other relevant publications can be found on Google Scholar.