Customer Insight Services

Holistic Design Research: Customer Insights with Soul

Customer insight is the compass that guides successful design journeys. It's the art of listening, observing, and understanding human experiences — a treasure trove of data and connection that fuels your creativity and informs your decisions. Discover a new dimension of design and elevate your projects with our unique approach that seamlessly integrates prosocial and spiritual practices into every facet of the design process. We combine traditional quantitative and qualitative customer research with insights into the emotional and spiritual well-being of your design teams, ensuring that both the customer experience and team dynamics contribute to innovation that truly connects.

What We Bring to the Table

Traditional Customer Insight Expertise

We begin with proven design research techniques that deliver actionable insights for both customers and design teams:

• Customer Discovery: We conduct in-depth interviews, surveys, and ethnographic studies to understand the motivations, behaviors, and pain points of your target audience, equipping design teams with a clear vision of who they’re designing for.

• Usability Testing: Observing how real customers interact with your product or service, we identify friction points and areas for improvement, ensuring that designs are intuitive, functional, and user-friendly.

• Behavioral Analysis: Through journey maps, experience maps, and task analysis, we uncover how customers navigate products and services in real-world contexts, revealing patterns, pain points, and opportunities.

• Strategic Roadmapping: We translate insights into actionable, long-term roadmaps for design teams, guiding product development and improving user satisfaction.

Holistic Design Research

Beyond traditional research methods, we add a holistic layer that supports both user understanding and design team dynamics. At HDRS, we believe that great design doesn’t just come from understanding users—it comes from supporting the people doing the designing. Our holistic approach blends traditional research rigor with emotional intelligence, mindfulness, and systems awareness, creating space for both deep user empathy and internal team alignment. We focus on the full human experience—of your customers and your design teams—ensuring that the product and the process are equally intentional, inclusive, and transformative.

When we honor both perspectives, the result is design that is not only effective, but deeply resonant and resilient.

Our holistic approach includes:

• Empathetic Research Methods: Immerse yourself in a research journey that goes beyond data. We use in-depth interviewing, observational studies, and and empathy mapping to dive deep into the emotions and experiences of your customers and stakeholders.

• Narrative Inquiry for Team and User Connection: By encouraging personal storytelling, we guide design teams to understand the emotional context of customers, strengthening both team dynamics and the emotional relevance of the design.

• Mindful Design Thinking: We infuse mindfulness practices into ideation and collaboration to help design teams slow down, stay present, and create from a place of grounded awareness—fostering psychological safety, creative flow, and more meaningful outcomes.

• Co-creation Workshops: Collaboration is at the heart of our process. By including diverse internal voices and honoring each perspective, we build buy-in and expand design intelligence from the inside out.

• Inclusive Design Practices: We help teams design with empathy across difference. By considering cultural, emotional, and systemic contexts, we ensure your products and services reach and respect the full range of people they serve.

• Ethical and Reflective Design: We guide teams to pause and ask: Are we designing with integrity? Our process includes space to reflect on the ethical and spiritual implications of design choices, ensuring solutions are not only innovative, but also responsible and aligned with your organization’s values.

Join Us on the Journey

Design research is the bridge between imagination and reality, and we invite you to embark on this exciting journey with us. At HDRS, we combine traditional customer research with a holistic, human-centered approach to provide insights that elevate both user experience and design team collaboration. This approach allows you to create products that not only meet functional requirements, but also foster meaningful connections with users while enhancing teamwork, creativity, and empathy among your designers.