Making mobile wireframes

Research

Ad Hoc’s research practice helps customers understand the problem, the world around it, and the needs of users.

Researchers solve problems by asking many questions, clarifying and documenting the answers, and presenting the data for decision-making. Early in a project, we do discovery research to gain a foundational understanding of the context, problem, and users. Working iteratively within agile sprints, we do usability research to determine whether the solution meets people's needs and how we can improve it.

This process makes sure teams spend time and effort in the most useful ways. It also centers the solution on the humans who will use it. While we advocate for the people who use what we’re building, we also balance regulations and business and stakeholder needs.

Research team skills

  • User testing
  • Usability testing
  • Human-centered design
  • Design and discovery research
  • Service design
  • Business ethnography
  • Persona definition
  • Research logistics

UX Principles

  • We collaborate with and listen to users, government stakeholders, and agency partners.
  • We design in the open and are transparent about our process.
  • We design for all people and abilities.
  • We create straightforward systems, and we respect users’ time.
  • We design for the long haul.
  • We raise expectations for government digital services.

Read more about our guiding principles

Our Research team

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Recent Research posts

How to keep your research practice going in a remote world

May 12, 2020

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Instead of hitting pause on user research plans, now is the time to understand the benefits of remote research.

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Why design skills are a power-up for researchers

January 23, 2020

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Figuring out your research questions, finding participants, and doing the research are only part of the challenge. Perhaps the most significant work comes when you need to tell the story of your research.

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The 21st Century IDEA Act Playbook Part 4: Prioritize modernization with user research

September 04, 2019

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The 21st Century IDEA Act mandates that every agency prioritize public services that need modernization. The best way for agencies to prioritize their services is to thoroughly research how users interact with those services.

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Creating a human centered information architecture on VA's developer portal

April 17, 2019

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VA's Developer Portal is the front door access to VA's high-quality APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) which developers can use to learn about and access services using VA data.

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Qualitative and quantitative research

March 14, 2019

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Most of our work is focused on qualitative studies, and we find that there is often a lack of clarity among our stakeholders on the benefits of qualitative versus quantitative data.

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Decommissioning Cohorts

February 13, 2019

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Cohorts is Ad Hoc’s custom-built user research participant management application. Cohorts has been used at some point by nearly every research team at Ad Hoc, however, we’ve run up against Cohorts’ limits.

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