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Digital Innovation & Research

Accelerate innovation by uncovering and addressing the unmet needs of your market and users

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Digital innovation doesn’t start with technology. It starts with inventing creative and smarter ways to stay competitive, grow revenue, and continuously evolve. It’s about remaining laser-focused on driving business outcomes that also propel unforgettable customer experiences. It’s about making impacts that matter – impacts for your business and your users.

If you’re ready to transform, we’re ready to translate your visions into reality.

At Highland, we help you move through the noise of unproven hypotheses and instincts toward true innovations that disrupt markets. From uncovering new insights about your users, to evaluating and activating new software ideas with a viable plan forward, to creating core business models that reach new markets, to unlocking the potential of your digital technology, our team enables your innovative future.

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Our Services

We pinpoint critical target audience needs, market gaps, and business growth opportunities – providing you with a targeted digital strategy that creates exceptional products and services people value and want to use.

  • Design Research

    Understand your users: their perspectives, real-world context, and behaviors. We observe and define what people do, what they don’t know they do, and the why behind what they do to present insight-driven innovative way you can better serve them.

  • User Research

    User research is the heartbeat of user-centered design. We’ll help you identify and solve the right problems by understanding your users (how they think, feel, and act while using your product) to ensure user goals and business goals are aligned.

  • Market Opportunity Exploration

    Get the insights you need to gain a competitive advantage in your industry. We assess existing technology solutions, uncover market gaps, and locate opportunities for revenue growth and long-term digital revolution.

  • Customer Journey Mapping

    Learn the steps users take as they use a product or service over time. We will help you uncover customer priorities and goals, feelings and behaviors, and gaps across customer touchpoints.

  • Digital Strategy

    Gain clarity on the big picture strategy you need to deliver immersive, distinct, and human-centered experiences. Our plans are rooted in research insights, and include new value propositions, messaging, and pricing that prepare you for digital acceleration.

  • Digital Experience Design

    Whether creating a new product or optimizing a current one, we design for every touchpoint and interaction, ensuring customers’ digital experiences are directly integrated with your brand’s promise.

  • Service Design

    Gain a true, end-to-end understanding of your services to design new, holistic service models and business process efficiencies. We'll help you deliver more desirable, meaningful experiences that bring your brand to life.

  • Custom Software Design & Development

    We design and develop user-centric, innovative software that makes online experiences transformative, customer relationships stronger, and ultimately, a bottom-line difference to your business.

Ready to push the envelope and embark on your digital transformation?

Let's talk about your project needs
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The value you receive:

With a laser focus on your users, we help businesses evaluate, design, build, and measure innovative products and services, at speed.

  • Innovate with Confidence

    No more speculation and uncertainty about a path forward. Our practice is dedicated to finding hidden opportunities with users, the market, and your products. We crystalize actionable insights that give you the direction you need to invest intelligently, lead with a competitive edge and generate tangible business value.

  • Expanded & Focused Strategic Vision

    We help you define and bring the big picture into view, set a prioritized business strategy grounded in reality, and accelerate your time-to-market with a directed, step-by-step roadmap that delivers an on-target new technology solution.

  • Improved Customer Experience & ROI

    We deliver high performing customer experiences that lead to increased adoption, retention, engagement, and customer satisfaction. In result, you can expect a measurable return on your investment, reduction in overall digital product spend (less waste), and long-term business growth.

  • Team Collaboration & Activation

    We don’t just deliver work, we enable cross-functional team collaboration, communication, and decision making. Together, we bring all departments together to lay the groundwork for changes to come and define KPI benchmarks that ensure your organization is on mark to meet all business goals.

Outshine your competition with a truly innovative digital product

This white paper examines traits that make digital products succeed (and not succeed), and ways you can take advantage of amplifying your unique value offering across your products, services, and ultimately – your current and ideal customers.

Download White Paper
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Industries we serve

We work with all types of customer-centric organizations and have specialized expertise in industries we know well.

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Our Work

We empower transformation with digital solutions that work. Read through our case studies to see how our strategic, creative approaches helped our clients successfully innovate and grow.

Medical App Development And Redesign Case Study

Leveraging Consumer Research to Innovate Mobile Health App

We leveraged consumer research, UX/UI design, and design sprints to help Treatment create a “stickier” mobile app experience.

Using Patient Journey Mapping to Design In-Person Experience and New Medical App

We worked with Children’s Wisconsin to define a new digital health experience for their patients: an integrated healthcare app for general and emergency care.

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Helping professionals land their dream jobs

We helped Archer create a mobile app to digitize and scale their career advisory services.

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Why choose Highland

We’re an all-in-one partner for all your digital innovation needs: from qualitative research to digital strategy to UX/UI design and testing to custom software development. What makes us different is we take a long-term view. Our clients know us for our empathetic approach, serious commitment to client success, and passion for unlocking creative potential.

We use creative workshopping to ask the hard questions and integrate the right answers into a clear, targeted, and testable product strategy – elevating unique, out-of-the-box opportunities that cannot be found through common approaches. Our mission is to use our diverse range of skills to work closely and proactively with you and your team to evaluate and draw – or redraw – digital innovation initiatives, guiding you to seize digital futures that endure.

  • 22 +

    Years of Experience

  • 4.9 ★

    Rating

  • 270 +

    Successful Projects

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Hear from our clients

Highland surpassed expectations, delivering a product that was much more advanced than anticipated. They went above and beyond in gathering all the requirements and turning them into something tangible.

- Katherin Munz, Head of Marketing & New Product Development at Genioo

I was very impressed by the willingness of the team to dig deep and learn hard. We operate within a complex labyrinth of regulatory systems, and the team did a great job coming to speed in understanding the key stakeholders, their needs, and incentives that could align them.

- CEO, Medical Education Firm

They challenged us in new ways. They gradually became a strategic partner, because they had a vested interest in the long-term success of the project. They helped us better and shape the product, instead of just doing the design and development that they were hired to do.

- CEO, Credit Union Firm
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Keep up with us

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10 Things to Anticipate When Starting a Digital Experience Strategy

A digital experience strategy can help enterprises and institutions effectively leverage technology at scale.

Questioning Whether a Problem is Worth Solving? Start with Jobs to be Done (JTBD) Research

"What's the underlying problem I'm trying to solve?"

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What the heck is CX?

An Introduction to Customer Experience for Beginners