Helpfully is a R&D firm with partners and clients worldwide.
Helpfully® has built a network of talented individuals with widely diverse skills, perspectives, and expertise. We provide companies with substantial intellectual horsepower and emergent ideas to stay ahead in today’s uncertain environments.
Helpfully is fluent in the future: We help you grasp and harness tomorrow — to solve problems today.
How We Help
We research people and their lives using qualitative & quantitative methods
People and their problems propel us. We learn as much as we can about consumers, customers, clients, competitors, and internal teams in order to find insights into their behaviors and attitudes. We use ethnographic tools to dig into the ways people live, work, play, grow, heal, and thrive. To understand people, we travel with clients to visit health clinics and hospitals to better understand how doctors use technology in their practice, develop and launch in-store ethnography sprints watching 30-somethings buy clothing, or deploy innovative digital apps that enable a two-way dialogue with teens.
We facilitate and conduct workshops
Helpfully brings together expert facilitators to help you move your project forward no matter what its current form. We introduce companies to user-centered design and design thinking using hands-on workshops to find new insights and apply new perspectives.
We help companies build a better pipeline of good ideas that will fuel future growth. We design alongside client teams to build concepts, define requirements, crystalize ideal customer journey maps, and core user experience flows.
Helpfully has extensive experience in wide ranging industries including manufacturing, investment and retirement products, personal finance, healthcare including insurance and pharmaceuticals, fashion retail (and ecommerce), grocery chains, and global non-profits.
We design services and digital products
We’re also a prototyping studio — bringing ideas from the whiteboard to the real world is our design practice. Our prototype-led development is nimble, riveted by human behavior, and always fixated on meaningful improvement.
We develop and design prototypes to move projects into reality. Prototypes help because they quickly reframe the assignment, shift requirements, and enable rapid pivots. They are an artifact we can take into the field for research with customers and users.
As we say, “A prototype is worth 1,000 meetings."
Helpfully is fluent in modern web and mobile technologies, sensor-based systems (a.k.a., Internet-of-Things), wearables, augmented reality, virtual reality, data products, and artificial intelligence.
About Zach Pousman
Helpfully is led by Zach Pousman. Zach is a convener of today’s best talent and tomorrow’s best ideas. Zach has a background deep in theory- and practice-centered work in Human Computer Interaction. Zach is also skilled at ethnographic fieldwork and acts as the chief facilitator for Helpfully. Zach has consulted with Fortune500 and startup companies including Coca-Cola, Verizon Vehicle, Citibank, Blackrock, and Anthem Blue Cross to discover digital opportunities and bring new digital products and platforms to market.
Zach has a philosophy degree from the University of Chicago, and holds a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech, where he was a member of the Information Interfaces Group.
HELPFULLY Clients
the Helpfully Network
Every month, Helpfully brings talented designers, coders, idea-lovers and idea-makers together for lunch at our office at Ponce City Market to discuss how to design the future today. We have free-wheeling conversation, with themes but no agenda or formal talk. Topics center around digital products, design, ux, technology, and society. We share ideas, strengthen our networks and uncover new inspiration.
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From the helpfully blog
