Qualitative Research in Early Stage Design & Validation
“We’re not at the wireframing stage yet — so qualitative methodologies don’t fit our needs, right?” Well, not quite.
Many folks think of customer research as being highest-value when the customer can interact with something concrete like a prototype, a product, or a service experience. Sometimes we get clients coming to us in the early stages of ideation or concept validation, and they’re not sure qualitative research is the right fit. Often they’re looking for quant or large scale market research, in order to know whether they’re on the right track before they begin creating something like an MVP.
Over time, we’ve come to see the high value of one on one customer research in early stages of concept design — and so have the clients we’ve worked with.
No matter whether it’s being conducted at the early stage or later stages of design, large scale/quantitative studies and market research give you the what, not the why. They might tell you that people don’t like something, but it can be hard to see the real motivations and problems behind that preference.
In early stage concept validation, you get a chance to see those patterns up close. One of our clients, a large security software vendor, was thinking about providing a new class of software to their clients. After speaking with 5 experts in the field who were their target audience, we learned that the folks we spoke with were interested in new enterprise solutions for that specific market area; but we also learned how complex and interdependent their competition was. The team ultimately realized that based on their company’s strengths, it wasn’t worth their energy to compete in that market niche, and they were able to reconsider their concept.
If they’d ordered a quantitative study instead, our client likely would have gotten some encouraging feedback from those folks (“Sure, we’re interested in a product that would serve that function!”) but would not have gotten a nuanced understanding of where they might fit into the market, who their true competitors were, and whether this niche was worth their time.
It also means you can keep real humans in mind while you ideate — not just an average composite user cobbled together from statistics or survey answers. You can hear a real user’s voice, discussing their frustrations and their motivations. When you’re designing, you know you’re designing for real people. This is both motivating and validating as a designer, and incredibly powerful as a problem solver. We often hear clients saying things in workshops like, “Well, would Adrian have said that’s his biggest challenge?” as they work to make sketches and ideate. Although we’re a huge proponent of research-based persona work, we just don’t think market-research-based personas carry that same weight.
And, you might be surprised at your target audience when you get to know them better. Target audience subsets, if they exist, begin to quickly show themselves during one on one research. You might uncover multiple audiences where you thought there was just one. In the case of our security software client, they thought they knew their audience — but when we talked to people one on one, we saw huge differences in operating style between small and large enterprise security teams. That difference ended up being really important down the line in ideation discussions, and was subtle enough that it wouldn’t have surfaced in quant research unless we somehow knew ahead of time exactly what we were looking for.
When our clients come to us looking for concept validation, we do our best to encourage them to consider one-on-one qualitative research with customers. In every case, I feel like we’ve been able to provide them with an incomparable customer-focused lens through which to begin ideation, and also with which to view any future quantitative research they might pursue.
