In today’s world, viable access to high quality, usable information is vital to ensuring quality living for all. People need information for all phases of daily life, including health, employment, education, transportation, family, recreation and lifestyle, civic and social engagement. How people go about expressing and meeting these needs, however, is poorly understood. Organizations are severely challenged in their efforts to disseminate information about their services and meeting the needs of clientele. Moreover, organizations are rarely aware of the diverse ways in which clients may use and benefit from their services, which results in gross under-reporting of service impact.

Our research team will design and implement investigative tools that capture the nuances of real-life situations. We will study your current and prospective clients regarding how they seek and use different information sources as part of everyday living from different perspectives (as pertaining to your organization’s particular interest). Our approach also entails studying how information products are created, managed and disseminated within your organization and how these approaches fit with clients’ needs and behaviors. Findings from this holistic, user-based approach will reveal your clients’ natural patterns or inclinations, barriers that they encounter, etc., which can be used to improve how you design and deliver information. Our goal is to facilitate the quality of everyday life through helping organizations deliver information. We can help you maximize the impact of your information in your community.

Our research team has helped organizations understand their clients’ information behavior for over 30 years. We focus on people of all ages and backgrounds in diverse contexts--from employment and education to health, politics and recreation--and their interaction with different information sources, including interpersonal, organizational, print and electronic media.