This is such an interesting article!

As a young design researcher, I work in a company where most people are in marketing. I’ve always been amazed with the unlimited tools that they have and the quality of data that they can generate via their techniques.

As a deign researcher, I was previously using mostly ‘traditional’ research tools, putting my faith in ‘human interactions’ first rather than on a data dashboard.

However, I started to realise how I can use these testing tools and insights in my own ways, not taking things too much for granted, always retesting my assumptions with some real-life guerilla approach or other traditional methods; and so far digital guerilla has been a very helpful tool! Especially when I test a message or a few different visual for testing the look and feel of a brand for example.

An other thing that I would like to add: these tools can also help you ‘recruit’ participants for your research. As an example, I use twitter or Facebook communities to identify the most active users in a community, or the most reactive to my guerilla content, or just the top followers of some accounts. (There are some free tools that allow you to analyse twitter or instagram audience and give you some insights about their demographics, interests etc. ) Thanks to this technique, I then have a list of contacts of people who showed interest/propensity to buy the advertised product. I can then contact them, with my design researcher hat on, and ask for a phone interview, usually it comes with a little incentive (Amazon voucher for example; this is also a way to get a foot in the door, after this quick phone call I can ask them for a more in depth interview.) It allows me to quickly identify and reach specific users.

Thanks a lot for this amazing ressource dear Matt, it’s a real treasure trunk and inspires me a lot.

PS- I always dreamt of working at IDEO…