How to run effective research when you have limited resources.

As product people we tend to fall in love with our ideas. Often, we buy into a product direction without having all the answers and then rush to launch to see how things perform. That often results in solutions that don’t generate the desired traction we hoped for. If we only spent a tiny fraction of that time understanding our customer and uncovering their motivations, we would be a lot more likely to produce solutions that succeed. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never met a product person who was against validation and getting feedback, but it’s just a lot easier to build the thing and see what happens.

You might say you have a ton of analytics data that’s guiding your decisions. Although quantitative data is great, it is no substitute for the deep learnings you get through qualitative insights. Quantitative data tells you the “what” ie. what are people clicking on, at what point are they dropping off, what usage on a feature looks like. But it will never answer the “why”, it will never let you get beneath the surface, to uncover motivation.

Successful products maximize the outcomes for the end user and do so really well. It’s hard to change consumer behavior, so unless your solution is worth the trouble, it’s very unlikely that someone will drop the way they solve the problem today and switch to your solution. The best way to ensure that your product or service will be worth the trouble of switching is to talk to people in your target segment. The prospect of research can feel daunting and often overwhelming, especially when you have limited resources and are pressed for time.

A big myth about research is that it takes a lot of time and doesn’t always yield results. This post breaks down the steps to conducting effective research quickly, along with guidelines to help you get started. Consider this as Research 101. It takes practice to get good at conducting research, but my hope is that this post will help you learn some best practices and increase the quality of data you gather from your sessions.

Interview Pre-work

1. Outline a research objective. Research always attempts to answer some question and validate certain assumptions. Do you want to validate some key use cases of your product? Do you want to know whether people find your interface intuitive? Do you want to know why people are dropping off at certain points? Make sure to outline what you’re looking to learn from research and which assumptions you want to test. Make sure to run this by your team so you aren’t missing anything. This is the foundation of your research so it needs to be well thought out.
2. Define target interview candidates. Quality of data is only as good as the people you speak with. Make sure you talk to the right people. Start with defining the qualifying criteria they need to meet. These are a list of attributes that define people you want to collect data from. It’s also helpful to state what attributes you want to exclude from your research. Use this worksheet from Google Ventures as a starting point.
3. Recruit interview candidates — There are several ways to go about recruiting. If you are targeting a customer niche you could look in forums and other groups where you might find people who meet your criteria. For example, if you are a B2C company targeting foodies you could search for people in cooking and food related Facebook Groups. At this point you don’t want give away too much information and bias the interviews. Keep this neutral, shed some light on what you’re doing but keep it vague. Here’s an example: “Hi there, I am conducting some research around a new food related product and am looking to speak with people who are passionate about organic cooking and eating. I’m scheduling 50 minute remote interviews which will be held remotely over video conference. If you are interested please email me at…” Alternatively, you could use a survey screener to carefully select the people who meet your target criteria. Typeform is a great tool that let’s you send surveys and filter out qualified testers easily. When recruiting for very specific criteria (often the case for B2B companies) the best way to find candidates might be searching for people in professional networks or within your personal network.
4. Schedule the interviews — Although it’s great to interview folks in person, it’s not always feasible. Remote interviews work just as well. They might require a little extra set up, like a video meeting software that allows you to screen share. My personal favorite is Zoom. It has great video quality, allows you to screen share, record the interview and even give participants remote control access so they can interact with your prototype while you watch.

Pro Tip 1: It usually helps to offer some sort of incentive to get people to talk. You could either try an Amazon gift card or something more personalized to your product.

Pro Tip 2: You typically start to see patterns after 5–7 interviews. As long as you are interviewing people that match a certain target criteria this should be a good number. You want to speak with at least 5 people in each target segment.

Interviewing

Now let’s get down to what it takes to conduct a successful interview

Prepare a lightweight interview guide. For the most part you want the interview to feel like a casual conversation but it’s helpful to create a guide with a list of questions that will ensure you cover all topics. Don’t expect to ask these in the pre-defined order but having a guide will help you steer the conversation. Make a list of features or tasks you want to test.

Structuring the interview. Well structured interviews form a smooth arc that start with a warm up and rapport building, move on to context questions, attempt to uncover customer pains and motivations, lead into tasks and end with closing questions followed by a de-brief. Let’s break down each section.

1. The warm up: You want the conversation to flow as smoothly as possible. Set the stage by greeting them and putting them at ease. Thank them for taking the time, tell them why they’re there. Tell them you will be asking questions, showing them things and that it will be a casual conversation. Most importantly, tell them you are looking for honest feedback!
2. Uncover pains and motivations: Ask them about their life, casually lead them into the topic and try to uncover how they feel about the topic at hand. You want to get a sense of their struggles, motivations, barriers to achieving goals and frame of mind. You can ask questions like: What are the biggest challenges you face when it comes to X? How do you deal with this situation today? Ask open-ended questions about past experiences and behavior. Ask “why” as much as you can to get insight into their motivations. Why is this important to you? Why is this such a pain? When was the last time you experienced this?
3. Lead into tasks: Ask their permission to show them something. Tell them you are looking for honest feedback and won’t be offended if they don’t like things you show them. Also ask them to think out loud as they walk through the prototype or product as this will help you peer into their mind.
4. Test the prototype: You want to let participants poke holes in your solution so try not to handhold them as they walk through your product. Write brief instructions for each task you want participants to perform. But keep the instructions loose and don’t provide much guidance. After all, you won’t be there to tell your users how to use your product. While they are completing the tasks ask questions like: What is this? What do you think this does? Is this what you expected? What goes through your mind as you look at this? What would you do next? By leaving these questions as open-ended as possible you ensure not to lock yourself into limited or biased feedback.
5. De-brief: It’s important to capture highlights and overall impressions before you wrap up the session. By answering all your questions and going through the prototype, the participants usually form strong opinions. It’s your job to extract out what’s on their mind and get all your questions answered. Ask them things like: What did you like or dislike about this? What were your favorite parts? What would you change and why? What parts were the most confusing? How likely would you be to recommend this to a friend?
6. Wrap up: Thank them for participating and for their time. At this point you want to end the conversation but keep the door open. Ask them if you can contact them in the future to get more feedback and if they’d like to be in the loop on the product’s progress. Ask them if there are other people they know who would be good candidates for feedback and if they can connect you. Also ask them if there is anything else you should be considering/looking at.

Getting ready for the research session. Before the interview make sure to have a printed copy of the interview guide with you, prepare the necessary links you want to share, turn off notifications, silence your phone and clear your desktop (if you’re going to be sharing your screen).

Pro Tip 3: Allocate a certain amount of time to each section/topic of the guide. This will make sure you are covering all the topics and don’t spend too much time on low-priority items.

Research best practices

Things to keep in mind as you conduct interviews.

1. Go in with a beginner’s mind. Try not to make assumptions based on what you already know. This will help you explore and gain unexpected insights.
2. Embrace the awkwardness. Let’s be honest, interviews like this can feel unnatural. Try not to fill in the awkward silences. Try not to inform or sell. Your main objective is to listen and learn.
3. Ask open ended questions. Try asking questions that begin with who, what, where, when, why, and how. This will help to avoid asking leading questions.
4. Don’t mention solutions too early. First learn about the participant and their needs and pains before you introduce your solution. This will help you get better data.
5. Unearth evidence. You will always get more authentic answers when you ask people to recall instances from past experience. So instead of asking questions that begin with would you do this or would you buy that, ask questions like: When is the last time you experienced this problem? or When was the last time you did this?
6. Uncover motivations. Asking “why” as much as possible can unearth insights you never expected.
7. Leave the door open. While wrapping up the interview ask them if they’d be willing to talk in the future and if they can connect you with 1 or 2 people they think you should talk to.

The sure shot way to validate ideas and reduce uncertainty is by talking to customers. Fast and effective research can help you make better decisions and move faster with confidence. And you don’t need to dedicate weeks or months. Even spending 3–5 days on research will take give your solutions a significantly higher probability of success.

N5 is an innovation & design strategy studio. We help innovators solve tough challenges, validate ideas quickly and launch products with confidence. Our mission is to empower teams with the strategy, tools and insights to innovate with velocity and get to market faster with winning outcomes. We use a combination of problem discovery, business model innovation and design sprints to help drive impactful results quickly. Each engagement moves our clients an order of magnitude ahead in progress in a ridiculously short amount of time.