Customer research, product strategy, and design evaluation services

Perfetti Media is a Boston-based consulting and training firm that helps product managers and design teams create products that delight their customers. We work with teams to conduct up-front customer interviews to define product features, develop user profiles to guide the product design, and run usability studies to evaluate the design concepts.

See how our workshops, consulting services, and articles can help you.

Perfetti Media Blog

June 3rd, 2010

Announcing the Usability Bootcamp

We're pleased to announce Perfetti Media's new two-day workshop, the Usability Bootcamp. This August, we'll offer these interactive and hands-on events in Boston and San Francisco.

Christine Perfetti has helped dozens of companies and agencies improve their designs by bringing research into their process. In this workshop, Christine's put together a program designed to improve your user research, usability testing, and evaluation skills. You'll come away from these two days knowing how to:

  • Plan your user research, conduct user interviews, and analyze the data
  • Run your in-person and remote usability tests without any outside help
  • Conduct advanced usability tests, including 5 second tests and first click tests
  • Design a paper mockup and test the design with real users in only one hour
  • Develop personas or user profiles to communicate the users' needs throughout your organization

Plus, for our readers, we're offering a special discount. Sign up using promotion code PERF01 and you can attend the event for only $795 – a savings of $300 off the final registration price.

As a special gift, if you sign up by June 24th, we'll give you two complimentary UX books from our good friends from Rosenfeld Media: "Remote Research" and "Prototyping."  Find out more about this offer.

May 26th, 2010

Behind the Scenes of WebEx Meet: An Interview with Jon Nakasone

By Christine Perfetti – May 26, 2010

In March 2010, WebEx launched the beta of their new product offering, WebEx Meet. The designers of WebEx Meet intended to create a solution that helps users meet and collaborate with each other in a faster, more efficient way.

I recently had the opportunity to talk about the beta launch with Jon Nakasone, one of the product design leads within the User Experience Group at Cisco WebEx. Jon's group is responsible for bringing innovation to WebEx's online collaboration products and focusing on doing more for the users.

Back in the summer of 2009, Perfetti Media worked with Jon and the WebEx team to conduct a series of usability studies to evaluate the WebEx Meet design. In our interview, I talk with Jon about the launch of the WebEx Meet beta and the WebEx team's approach to design and user research.

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May 19th, 2010

Mad Mimi: Thinking About Their Customers

Christine Perfetti – May 19, 2010

At Perfetti Media, we've recently been sending our email newsletter to subscribers on a weekly basis. A few months back, thanks to a recommendation from our good friend Jeff Patton, we signed up for Mad Mimi, an online tool for writing, sending, and tracking online emails to customers. Based on our experience so far, it's clear the design team at Mad Mimi has been thinking about their customers.

This month, we sent our first email newsletter using the Mad Mimi service. Immediately after hitting the "Submit" button to send an email to our subscribers, Mad Mimi responded with the following message:

Mad Mimi Messaging

In addition to congratulating us on sending our first message with Mad Mimi, as a courtesy, the team volunteered to review our message before it was sent to our entire audience. Why is this such an important detail for new customers of Mad Mimi's service?

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May 13th, 2010

Usability Tests in a Nutshell, Part 2: Recruiting Users

By Christine Perfetti – May 13, 2010

Many of our clients come to us requesting usability testing consulting services. One of the reasons they reach out to us is because they think usability testing must be a complex and scientific process. As a result, they'd prefer to have an outside consulting company conduct their tests.

The first thing I tell people who contact me is that usability testing is not a complicated process. It's a technique that anyone can learn with training and lots of practice. In this series of articles, I'll share the essential steps when conducting your first usability tests. In part 1 of the series, I shared the steps for planning your usability tests. In this article, I'll discuss best practices for recruiting your users.

When considering your first usability tests, you'll want to find people who are representative of your target audience. You have a couple of options for doing this. With in-house recruitment, you can assign someone internally to find your users. Or, you can outsource to a reputable recruitment agency. We use both approaches at Perfetti Media and they've worked well for us. Usability Works and AlphaBuzz are two of the organizations we recommend for their recruitment services.

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May 10th, 2010

Usability Tests in a Nutshell, Part 1: Planning your test

By Christine Perfetti – May 10, 2010

Many of our clients come to us requesting usability testing consulting services. One of the reasons they reach out to us is because they think usability testing must be a complex and scientific process. As a result, they'd prefer to have an outside consulting company conduct their tests.

The first thing I tell people who contact me is that usability testing is not a complicated process. It's a technique that anyone can learn with training and lots of practice.

Read the rest of this entry »