A user research agency that goes where your customers are.
Wet Salty Dog is a two person studio working from Madeira with clients and suppliers all over the world. We help ambitious small and medium businesses, and the public programmes that support them, find out what people actually believe, feel and do. Then we design and launch what closes the gap.
Most briefs describe a solution. We check the problem first.
People decide before they think. They feel whether something is right long before they can say why. Your customers do it with your product. Guests do it with a service. Citizens do it with a public programme.
So we don't start by asking people what they want. We go where your people are, on the boat, on the land, on site, and learn from them while they do what matters to you. Our starting point is Contextual Design, a field research method developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt, adapted to your goals.
What we find often changes the brief. That's the point. A wrong assumption costs little at the start and a lot after launch.
what you get
Evidence, not opinion
What your people really do and why, tested against what you assumed about them.
Something to build on
Evidence turned into a guest journey, a value model, a product or a brand your team can use.
A path to market
Positioning, partnerships and go to market, using digital tools and data to make it work.
who we work with
Small and medium businesses with ambition, and the public programmes that support them. For a whale watching operator in Madeira, we researched what guests feel after the trip and designed a six touchpoint journey. For a publicly funded programme, we lead the field research and the value model behind a new incentive mechanism for landowners.
On every project, we agree with you up front what the work should deliver.
Start with your challenge.
Our Strategy Agent asks the questions we'd ask in a first meeting. You leave with a sharper brief. We get what we need to prepare a response and a quote.