Markets and Products and Users, Oh My!

Market research, product research, and user research are terms often thrown around in investment circles, at the office, and even in textbooks! On the surface, it may seem that these topics are virtually indistinguishable. In practice, they each play a key role in the product life cycle. To take your idea through to implementation, it’s crucial to understand the difference between each of these terms in order to leverage them to your advantage.

Market Research

According to Oberlo (Shopify’s big brother), market research is

A systematic process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting information. The information could be about a target market, consumers, competitors and the industry as a whole.

Market research is used by big businesses and startups alike to gain a greater understanding of customer segments and their needs. Good market research can answer questions like:

Is this market growing or shrinking?

What the key consumer needs in this market?

Who are the top competitors in the market?

The answers to these questions can help companies decide whether to create products for this market and what products this consumer is likely to buy. Growing markets with weak competition are ideal markets to enter.

How To Conduct Market Research

1. Customer insight interviews. Interviewing your potential customers is a great way to understand their problems and their current solutions. Keep in mind, your customers are not typically a good source of inventive solutions. After all, when Henry Ford asked people how’d they’d solve their transportation problems, they simply asked for a faster horse. Oftentimes, it is your outside perspective that will help you create truly novel solutions. To help you get started with customer interviews, read one of our previous posts dedicated to this topic.
2. Read. It’s simple but very important. Read voraciously about your industry in order to learn everything you can about it. Try to find any resource that can help you understand this market and get a sense of the general trends in the industry. Articles, online courses, print media, academic papers, and even social media can help you through this process. Once you do this, you’ll get a better sense of what’s working, and (more importantly!) what’s not in the market.

Product Research

Product research comes later in the product life cycle. Successful product research provides all of the features and unique characteristics required to launch a service or product. At this point, a company may have a product or range of products in mind and want to introduce them to the market. As described by InfiniteResearch, good product research can answer questions like:

Whether the offered service or product will be successful in the market?

What are some of the similar products in the market?

What are the best ways to start, develop, and sell your own products or services?

The answers to these questions can help a company determine its competitive edge over current players in the market. It can also get them closer to a definitive design for their product or service.

How To Conduct Product Research

1. Search on Amazon. Amazon (and other large vendors like them!) have a wide array of products and services. Check to see what products are on the “Best Sellers” list in your industry. This will help you see what types of products are working well and also find concrete examples of your direct competitors.
2. Keyword search. Google Trends is a great hidden resource to see how often people search for products and services. It concretely shows what kinds of products consumers are searching for and what keywords they use. Branding your product to align with common keyword searches is a great business strategy.

User research

User research is markedly different from market or product research. It is an approach that ensures the user is at the center of your design decisions. In essence, successful user research should help a company design a product that is actually useful to its users. While it seems simple, this can be difficult to implement in practice. It requires a deep knowledge of the user base, iteratively user testing, and is typically used to finalize a product. Good user research can answer questions like:

Is this design relevant to my target users?

Do my users receive a great user experience?

If not, what pain points do my users experience with my design?

How to Conduct User Research

1. Talk to users. There’s no way around it. You’ve got to show your product to users and get their feedback on it. Get your product down to the absolute bare minimum required to make it usable for customers. If you were AirBnb, this should look like an Excel sheet and a Google Form to manually match renters. If people are excited about the idea, they are typically willing to try your product, even if it isn’t entirely polished. Showing something to customers and getting their feedback should always be done sooner, rather than later to help you validate the product.

Market research, product research, and user research are all distinct aspects of the product design process. Treat each one like unique tools in your toolkit. When used together, they’ll turn you into quite a craftsman!