Implementing Customer Insights for Your Business

The ultimate success of products and services depends on your ability to understand the wishes, motivations and experiences of your customers. Customer research (also called user research or design research), e.g., contextmapping, can supply user insights, but companies have difficulty in translating these insights into new propositions. This course is about getting them to work in your organization.

This professional education course is an advanced introduction for managers and consultants in design, innovation and marketing who would like to learn how qualitative user research can support their business.

The course is given by TU Delft’s leading scholars and experts in the field of industrial design, who developed the now world-standard “context mapping” method, in which user experience informs design and the creation of elegant solutions to complex problems.

It will equip you with an in-depth understanding of the value of qualitative user experience research; of the insights it can develop into the needs of users, and of how can these insights support design processes and product strategy.

The course structure is case-based and enables you to learn from real-world challenges of companies that utilize user research in their product or service design. In addition, the course includes practical assignments and discussions about cases within the community; and feedback given by peers and content experts. You will also have the opportunity to network and interact with other professionals who deal with the same challenges on a daily basis.

Upon successful completion of the course, you will earn a Certificate and 1.5 CEUs.

Week 1 – Setting up

• Introducing the value of UX research for businesses
• Discussing the value of discovery-based research techniques 
• Introducing qualitative research techniques - Basic principles
• How to define a scope and focus for your project
• Case: Why existing companies made the shift towards UX research

Week 2 - Gathering

• Determining the size and composition of the research participant group
• Discussing the importance of recruiting and sensitizing participants
• Introduction to basic sensitizing techniques
• Case: How existing companies chose their participant groups; pitfalls and success stories

Week 3 – Fitting In

• Translating collected data into meaningful results
• Fit discovery based qualitative research results with quantitative knowledge, business strategies and goals
• Translating research outcomes to business opportunities
• Case: How a company used UX research outcomes for successful opportunities

Week 4 – Rolling Out

• Why not to write reports
• Introduction to impact driven communication techniques
• Introduction to creating and sharing personas
• Case: How impact driven communication techniques influenced companies
• Create own plan of approach; how to implement UX research in your business