How to Future-Proof Your Research

Worried that your insights will expire soon after you report them, or that you might be missing early signals of emerging trends? Here are some simple ways to start future-proofing your research.

Jessie Shen

Published in

Meta Research

5 min readJul 19, 2022

By Jessie Shen

Ever tried to anticipate how user behaviors might change in the future? Or wondered whether your research insights will still be relevant a year from now? I’m a foresight strategist, so it’s my job to think systematically about the future and anticipate change. But you don’t have to specialize in foresight to extend the shelf life of your research. A few simple tips can help researchers of any discipline become more future-minded.

Why future-proof your research?

As researchers, we often focus on understanding what’s happening now to inform and improve our products. But to innovate and anticipate future changes, it’s important to look beyond what the majority of people are doing today.

Future-proofing your research can help you:

Scale your impact across multiple teams or product areas as you focus on broader and more strategic themes
Identify behaviors and trends early
Anticipate change by looking at the margins

In foresight, we look at least 3–5 years out, examining both macro forces and weaker signals of change. The following tips can help you begin to do the same.

Tips for future-proofing your research

You can future-proof your research by scanning for external signals up front, paying attention to early adopters and edge use cases, and triangulating future change.

1. Scanning for external signals

In foresight, a signal represents an instance of change. It can be anything from an interesting edge behavior to a policy change. Sources of signals include research papers, articles, industry reports, and on-platform data. One common framework we use to look for signals is STEEP.

In scanning for signals of change, you’re trying to understand many things, such as:

What are the broader forces shaping this topic area?
How are people’s behaviors changing?
Are there any new technologies or policies that might shape this space in the future?

The key is to collect as many relevant signals as you can. Go as broad as you’re comfortable with and look at adjacent industries. Once you’ve collected some signals, look across them for themes or shifts. (A shift signifies a longer-lasting change, often with broader implications.) You’ll know your scan is nearing completion once you start to see repeated themes and have developed a good understanding of the space.

Scanning is great to do at the beginning of your research, while you’re doing your literature review or writing your research brief. For example, I conducted a one-week scan on how leisure travel is changing before embarking on qualitative research. One of the shifts that emerged is that travel was becoming more community-first rather than destination-first. Understanding this shift helped shape the research design, participant selection, and ultimately the scope and focus of my research.

2. Paying attention to early adopters and edge use cases

As the author William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” Early adopters are great sources for understanding emerging user behavior. Understanding what they’re doing and why can help you anticipate future shifts.

I’ve spoken with many early adopters in my research. At the start of the pandemic, I interviewed a middle school teacher who had, years before, championed a full transition to online learning. Talking to him helped me understand the gaps in the solutions available today, and how different learning technologies could come together to make the experience more engaging.

Another area to pay attention to in your research is edge use cases. This refers to behavior that’s out of the norm; it might not even be immediately clear what’s happening. An edge use case might point to a need that current solutions aren’t meeting, and that people are solving for in new and creative ways.

While you can actively recruit for early adopters in your study, you’re more likely to naturally come across edge use cases in your research (since people often don’t know whether what they’re doing is “normal”). Edge use cases can come from anyone, not just early adopters, so pay attention to respondents who are doing things differently and try to understand why.

It’s important to note that while early-adopter and edge use case behavior is usually interesting, it’s not always meaningful. You’ll also need to consider the broader implications of these behaviors and whether they support any signals or shifts you’ve identified.

3. Triangulating future change

User research often focuses on the present and past, but a lot can be learned by asking participants about their future expectations. While we can’t assume that those changes will come about, expectations do provide valuable insight into people’s aspirations and the conditions for change.

There are many types of questions you can ask respondents to elicit their future expectations. For instance: What might make you stop using X? What might make you use X more? What are you most looking forward to? What are you nervous about?

Not every participant will be comfortable imagining or talking about the future, so you might want to consider bringing in creative exercises to help. For example, co-creation exercises that let participants design their ideal product can convey what kind of features they want. We often want participants to think beyond the constraints of today; we can do so by bringing in future artifacts (a concrete, speculative object that might exist in the future) or innovative signals to broaden the realm of possibilities.

These are just some of the many ways you can future-proof your research. I hope you’ll have fun applying these techniques in your research, and that they’ll help ensure that you’re answering not only today’s questions but also future questions that might emerge.