1. Methodologies Utilized:
 Online bulletin board/focus group
 Social media recruitment
 Usability/UI/UE
 Quantitative
 Unique methods/custom
user-friendly market research™
CASE STUDY
Building a Wiki

2. user-friendly market research
Project Background
A wiki is a collaborative website where anyone
with access can contribute content and modify
at will. Perhaps more famous for their
educational applications, wikis have also been
used by businesses to create simple
knowledge management systems, or function
as a collaborative software.
Wikis build relational knowledge database
systems, capturing the links between isolated
pieces of information. Though this results in a
non-linear navigation system, wikis are a more
accurate method of structuring information
than traditional static databases. This organic
structure makes for intuitive search.

3. user-friendly market research
Client Objectives
One of our clients wanted to create a definitive
resource for third party video game developers,
and they already had the qualitative research
data to do so. In fact, they had well over 90
different studies worth of data.
Having performed some of the initial research for
the client, we were asked to combine our own
findings with the insights from other usability
studies, in order to produce a Game Developers
Handbook. After discussing the proposed
Handbook with the client, it became clear that
what they really wanted was to develop a
searchable database of best practices, which
could serve as a reference point for game
developers, and save a lot of headaches.

4. user-friendly market research
The Challenge
Our role was to take this vast collection of
assorted findings, and consolidate it into a
comprehensive, yet comprehensible catalog.
This meant reviewing the research data,
identifying the best practices, and then re-
organizing 90+ individual reports into a useful
tool for the developer community.
Due to our familiarity with some of the
findings going in, we knew that this wouldn't
be a clean job by any means. Creating neat
categories from messy data rarely works;
insights interact, and are dependant on
relationships between variables.

5. user-friendly market research
Our Approach
We decided that to structure all of this data, while
capturing the inter-relationships, we would need
to build a wiki. Approaching the project as a wiki
meant using the existing research to note
relationships, or affinities, and then come up with
headings to describe the major groups of
relationships.
Instead of organizing information, we created a
custom taxonomy to describe the mountain of
data we were working with. This process
organically revealed the basic best practices hiding
in those 90+ research reports.

6. user-friendly market research
The Outcome
We identified eight groups, or types of findings to
structure the wiki, and describe the best practices
of video game development, as evidenced by
previous research. After pouring the existing data
into this structure, we cross-indexed the contents
of each group to map out all of the relationships.
Then we handed the wiki off to the client, so the
developers could access the database, and add
their own insights where applicable.

7. user-friendly market research
The Upside
The initial insights were valuable to the client, but
they would become even more valuable if they
had an infrastructure for ongoing learning. We
didn't just cut and paste existing research; we laid
the foundation for a living resource and useful
tool.
The relationships established in the wiki make
finding useful information an intuitive process for
developers, providing ongoing benefits for the
client.

8. user-friendly market research
Thank You!
Contact us with questions or to request a proposal
212.660.0110
info@goodmind.net
www.goodmind.net
Follow us on Twitter: @goodmindMR