Understanding the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ — consumer research in three top tips
Senior Product Manager, Jack, shares his top tips for building out a consumer-centric approach to research for any Product team.
‘It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to show us the truth. It’s our responsibility to find it. We do that by asking good questions.’
This is my favourite quote from Rob Fitzpatrick’s brilliant work, The Mom Test. I like it because it speaks very directly to our approach to consumer research here at Aire.
Our desire to deliver ‘win-win’ outcomes (one of our company values) means that we care deeply about the experience that people have when they interact with our product. And we know that in order to learn from those experiences, we need to be intentional, consistent and determined in how we do this.
At Aire this approach to research is continual — having informed the development of our product from day one, it’s a philosophy hardwired into the way we work.
Below I’ve shared our top tips on how we’ve developed this thinking and how you can too:
1. Build research into your everyday product discovery
We have a principle to conduct regular user research as part of our product discovery and delivery cycle at Aire, ensuring that decisions are made with legitimate evidence rather than our own opinions.
Different user research methodologies exist, each of which is appropriate for the problem we’re trying to solve. These range from ‘generative’ research interviews (where we are trying to understand people's approaches to topics without showing them any of our ideas) through to remote usability tests (where we set users tasks and watch them attempt to complete it whilst speaking their thoughts aloud).
‘Our continuous approach opens up the set of research questions beyond just what we can test through our application interface, and by doing so offers a more complete understanding of the individuals going through our product.’
Chris, Lead Data Scientist
To develop this internal capability, we’ve stood on the shoulders of some great proponents and educators of product management: for anyone looking to learn more about best practice approaches, I’d recommend starting with Marty Cagan’s Inspired, Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test and Tomer Sharon’s It’s Our Research.
2. Get everyone involved
Running continuous consumer research at Aire is a truly cross-functional team effort, with people from our Product, Engineering, Data Science and People functions all pitching in and getting some extremely rewarding experiences during the process.
It’s just as important that we share this knowledge across the business. We use our ‘lunch and learn’ platform to present the importance of consumer research back to our team, with key learnings often shared in our monthly Mission Update, bringing to life for the rest of the business the consumer experiences that are shaping the products we’re building.
‘Having been lucky enough to sit and observe as some of our generative interviews took place, it brought home to me the critical role our product plays in enabling people to properly represent an often complex financial situation in an intuitive way.’
Tom, Data Science Manager
3. Don’t confuse ‘what’ with ‘why’
The data you see about the usage of your product is valuable in telling you ‘what’ is happening, but it doesn’t tell you ‘how’ or ‘why’. To understand this, you need a robust research strategy in place that allows you to actually speak with people and watch them use your product.
For example, before launching Pulse, our most recent credit insight product, we held generative interviews to understand people’s approaches to their finances and how they would feel about their lender contacting them. As we gathered this information, we introduced early prototypes to use in the interviews. This preliminary research was fundamental to understanding why consumers act and this greatly accelerated the quality and the relevance of the product we’ve built, reassuring lenders that our approach is centered around the best possible experiences for their customers.
‘Consumer research makes our product user stories real. I believe Pulse is there to enable consumers to voice their side of their financial situation and the research allows us to have a glimpse into these real life stories, offering us a valuable understanding of the types of issues consumers face so that we can learn and build a better product for them.’
Tara, Software Engineering Manager
And it doesn’t stop there. We continue to run regular, remote usability tests to watch people use our product and show us what’s good and not so good. This, along with the data we gather, drives what goes into the development of Pulse, allowing us to build a more informed, improved and crucially consumer-centric product with every single iteration.
What are your tips for effective research? We’d love to hear from you.
Jack Parr joined our Product Org in January 2019. Read more about Pulse from Aire, the product he’s building, here.
