Welcome to HMD Research
We are an innovative UX consultancy company who specialise in quantifying the impact of system design on user experiences with speech and text based automated agents.
Our aim is to provide rich, actionable, user centered insights and help you deliver compelling HMD interactions for your customers.
Our Experience
Our Research Methods
Our Research Methods
Our research has always been firmly focused on understanding how people think and feel about machine dialogue partners, and how this impacts the way people interact with them. With a wealth of academic and commercial experience conducting award winning research on people's perceptions of machine dialogue partner's, we are uniquely placed to help you understand your customers HMD needs.
We have worked with startups and Fortune 500 companies conducting large scale surveys and user studies aimed at improving the user experience of e-commerce voice assistants. We also have extensive academic research experience conducting user studies and behavioural experiments using a range of qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods techniques.
Our research has won awards at international conferences including CHI, MobileHCI, and CUI, making a notable research contribution with the development of the Partner Model Questionnaire (PMQ), the first validated measure for assessing people's mental models of machine dialogue partners.
Our Research Methods
Our Research Methods
Our Research Methods
HMD Research deploys state of the art, evidence-backed UX research methods tailored to meet your company's and your customers' needs. We approach every problem with both creativity and scientific rigour. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to understanding people but some of the tools in our toolbox include:
- Advanced Statistical Analysis
- ML techniques for textual and sentiment analysis
- Conversational analysis
- Psychometric questionnaire development
- Wizard of Oz experiments
- Ethnographic research
- Surveys, interviews and focus groups
We have use these techniques in commercial and academic settings, in work including:
- Developing research programs
- Prompt and task flow engineering
- Intent and annotation classification
- Construction and validation of psychometric questionnaires
- Conducting lab-based, online and in-the-wild user studies
- Prototyping UI and interaction designs
- Conducting a/b testing in-house app reviews
Our Philosophy
Our Research Methods
Our Philosophy
Understanding each other is key to clear communication. This is true whether we're talking to a friend, a stranger, a chatbot or a speech interface.
At HMD Research we believe that improving communication between humans and machines starts with learning more about people and how they perceive machines as dialogue partners in the context systems are designed to be used in.
This kind of knowledge is key for delivering compelling HMD interactions, which are born from understanding the role system design features and behaviours and use context plays in forming a user experience, and how this may vary across diverse user groups.