Ease of use above all!

This image by Katerina Kamprani perfectly represents the feeling that other platforms for qualitative research have given us while using them.

It is as if they were designed to make life difficult for us, in most cases.

Katerina, following in the footsteps of Donald Norman (who doesn't remember the famous 'masochist's coffee pot?'), presents a collection of uncomfortable everyday objects. 

The idea and the development of our platform came precisely from the feeling that there was plenty of room for improvement, to make research platforms actually designed according to the logic, the needs, the experience of those who live within qualitative research projects.

For instance, in any interface, site or platform, the menu is the first element the user has to learn and use.

Sicché's interface is designed to follow the various moments of the research, from left to right, in a 'logical' way.

It is clear, therefore, that everything that needs to be set up before the research begins (research team, interviewees, discussion guide...) will be found inside 'Setup', just as we believe it is intuitive that the 'live' phase of the research will be followed within 'Moderation', 'Monitoring' and 'Messages' - which is why these areas are graphically tied, even though they are distinct.

The active area is easy to spot as it is shown in either orange or the colour selected by the customer (in this example, we are working in Setup): it seems trivial, but the majority of menus on other platforms 'don't help' us in this respect.

We have also provided an area where you can find a whole series of contents that the researcher will have selected, filtered, and highlighted during the moderation phase: the 'Analysis & Export' area is glaringly absent from all competitor platforms... in essence, you rely on an export file either in Excel, or go through the questions reading over and over what has been said. As researchers, we find this unbelievable...

One last thing, which may seem trivial, but trivial it is not: we have taken care of every last detail in terms of graphics, aesthetics, colour palette. This is why we are often told that Sicché is also 'beautiful'. But beware: for us it is not just a question of image, but of tidiness, cleanliness, ease of use. Let's go back a little to the cover image of the post: on our side, we work every day to eliminate every step! 😀

There are many examples but let's close with one last one. So many competitor platforms rely on automated systems for various functions: from translations (bad ones, with Google Translate!) to word cloud systems. 

We thought that a qualitative platform should be designed differently, providing word clouds only in certain types of questions, where it was really possible to extrapolate only the first associations, concepts and important words, useful for analysing frequencies and emotional impact. 

If, however, you prefer word clouds full of "ifs", "don'ts", "buts" and a thousand other words that then have to be removed one by one... let us know 🤣