We are happy to announce our newest hire to join the Sentient Services research team - Carol Arnold. Carol will be serving as a Senior Research Analyst to many of our corporate clients. 

Carol most recently was a Military Affinity Marketing Manager for USAA and previously was a Market Researcher at USAA for 10 years running focus groups, tracking studies, customer satisfaction, branding, usability and ad-hoc research for USAA. Previously Carol has held the position of Vice President at several other market research firms and has run her own research and consulting agency. 

Carol is a RIVA, Greeley AND Burke trained moderator  (she has moderated 500+ focus groups herself!). Carol holds a MBA from Cleveland State University.

Needless to say we are glad to have Carol on the team and think you will be too!

Research Revolution

We recently presented at the annual 3CMA conference and had a great time meeting social innovators, researchers, and communicators for local governments around the country. It seems that our social research platform is a perfect fit for community engagement, town-hall forums and citizen innovation.

You can view the presentations we gave on Slideshare:

• Benefits and Pitfalls of Crowdsourcing Community Involvement
• Innovations in Community Management

Not using icanmakeitbetter? A few quick questions:   

• Are you currently leveraging co-creation (crowdsourcing) and social media to develop the products and services your customers want?  
• Do your customers have a way to tell you about their great new ideas?
• Can you conduct fast, valid and inexpensive market research to make better business decisions today?

Don't have an easy to use, scalable and cost effective solution that seamlessly solves these business problems?

We will have you set up in one day - fully hosted, seamless and easy. Even better - an entire year on our platform costs less than a single focus group!

If you do any product development, marketing, innovation, market research or usability this will be game changing - we make it quicker, easier, cheaper, and more accurate than ever before.

Photo: Usability Professionals' Association UX Magazine 

We've started a new section that will be Tips + Tricks. Each quarter we will highlight tools, software, methodologies, ideas or people that inspire us and have practical implications for your market research and innovation needs. 

This quarter we will start with the System Usability Scale (SUS). We use this scale at the end of 1-1 usability sessions, web interviews and others to gather a quantitative benchmark to our usability clients. While this scale has been widely used since 1986, there are still a lot of questions about it - and we have some of the answers here.

A recent article by Jeff Suaro in UX Magazine (a great publication by the Usability Professionals' Association) does a great job giving background and some very, very useful facts. We will highlight a few here:

1. The average SUS score is 68. So if you are scoring above a 68 you are doing well! This is across consumer and business sites, software and other usability tests. So, now you have a benchmark to start from.
2. SUS scores can predict customer loyalty - usability  matters and affects the bottom line! 
3. You don't need a ton of respondent time to get an accurate SUS - 5 seconds of using a site is all someone needs to answer the survey. First impressions count and are very lasting in a user experience.