What We Do

The science that drives your brand experience.

The science that fits products to people.

Innovative design for top companies around the world.

Corporate “blueprints” for all your product and packaging design.

Design Research: Research with Design in Mind

While many companies are just discovering ethnography and usability, Metaphase has been conducting and refining it for several of the world’s most prestigious brands since 1991.

We combine state-of-the-art research techniques and our expert knowledge in ergonomics and design to explore how people and products interact. It begins with the user, because you can’t design a product if you don’t know how your customer thinks, feels, behaves, and responds. Through custom research programs, we see things others don’t. We deliver meaningful insights that shape and inform design opportunities, new product development, product portfolio management strategies, and innovation strategies.

We prefer to conduct research where the product is used to observe real behaviors and to study the difference between what people say they do and how they actually behave. We not only study the product of interest, but we also observe all that surrounds the product and user, allowing us to build a deep understanding of the customer’s lifestyle and the context in which the product lives.

We conduct domestic as well as international research.

TECHNIQUES/TOOLS

Ethnography, In-home, At-work, Retail Intercepts, Product Placements, Usability Testing, Perception & Kinesthetic Testing, Buddy Groups, Focus Groups, One-on-One Interviews, Shadowing, Competitive Analysis, Concept Testing, Task Analysis, Product Lifecycle (from factory to home), Artifact Analysis, Logbooks, and Photojournals…just to name a few.