Creating great designs requires a deep understanding of users’ behaviour, abilities, preferences, goals and motivations. Ideo have told us to ‘hit the streets’ and Lean Startup advocates tell us to ‘get out of the building’. But how do we do this? And more specifically, how do we do this when our background is in design and technology?

This tutorial will present a set of practical techniques you can use to find and interview users and then give you a chance to practice them. With these techniques you can gain the insights you need to take your designs to the next level.

Questions Answered:
How can I learn more about the users of my product or service?
If I can meet current or potential users, how should I spend my time with them?
How can I find existing and potential users to speak to?
How can I go beyond simple surveys and interviews?

In increasingly competitive markets businesses need to act faster with better information. Traditional market research is good if you have the time and money but often fails to get the the real issues. Online customer communities allow brands to join the social conversation and get to what really matters for customers and prospects. It’s direct feedback, often warts and all. What better way to put customers at the heart of your business than to engage with them in honest and open discussion?

Questions Answered:
How to create a successful online customer community for your business?
Why having a community could become your greatest business asset?
How to engage the community to give you the best possible feedback and real market insight?
How to get a community to help you design better products, create more engaging communications and develop more satisfying services?

How well do you know your customers? Understanding their interest and preferences bring benefits across the business. In this talk will walk through Chatterbox’s exciting machine learning technology to show how you can profile and segment your online audience. Real world examples will be given, drawing on data from the Barbican Centre’s online audience.

Questions Answered:
Why would an organisation like the Barbican want to understand their audience?
What are the limitations with existing approaches, including collection data and processing data.
How is this possible, without any prior knowledge of the audience’s interests.

London-based startup SwiftKey has an army of 100,000 evangelists that have helped propel its app to the top of the charts in 38 countries – in 2012, it was Google Play’s global best-selling paid app.

By creating a genuine and open dialogue with these users, SwiftKey has been able to avoid paid advertising (bar a frivolous £20 experiment with Facebook ads…), offering other startups a compelling case study on how it doesn’t take a huge budget to make a big, and global, impact.

SwiftKey’s “VIP Community” has evolved from an idea to 30,000 members at the start of 2012 — and 100,000 today. From giving rigorous feedback on beta releases to successfully campaigning for SwiftKey to win a People’s Voice Webby Award, these users are priceless.

This talk will focus on the practical steps other companies can also adopt to ensure they make the most of peer recommendations, brand evangelists and the untapped power of their userbase.

Questions Answered:
How to build a global brand without a huge budget; how to create customer loyalty; how to go from startup to success.