Josh (name changed), a UX designer by profession was recently in a project meeting in which several stakeholders were drawn into an argument over an application design. As the only UX professional in the room, he pointed out that they weren’t the end users, and suggested that the team invest a few weeks into research to learn what users are doing. The project lead rejected the idea, deeming that they didn’t have enough time and budget for research. Instead they’d just have to rely on assumptions, experience and ‘best practice’.
Sounds familiar?
I come across many such stories during my interaction with participants while teaching Human-Centred Design and UX related courses. The challenge that UX professionals such as Josh face is quite common since traditional research approaches are not quite suited for working in agile environments. The Agile Development process promotes evolutionary change throughout the development life cycle. The traditional approach to research was to plan everything in advance and then execute it. While this approach has been in place for a long time, more companies are realizing it’s too slow—businesses can’t wait around to make data-informed decisions. They also find that it limits their ability to optimize solutions.
Making research agile
Agile is now the new norm. Companies want research insights to feed into their rapidly evolving product development cycle. Researchers are being asked to get more consumer feedback faster, using the same—or sometimes even smaller budget. Hence the need to move towards Agile market research. Agile market research represents a different approach to manage market research. It takes its inspiration from agile development and values:
- Responding to change over following a plan
- Individuals and interactions take precedence over process and tools
- Working software is more useful than documents about the software
- Continuous customer or stakeholder collaboration is critical
- Quick responses to change are the foundation for continuous development
“Agile market research is any platform, tool or methodology that is quick, flexible and affordable enabling people to get meaningful and actionable insights to address specific, time-sensitive research questions.1”
The need to get insights faster to the business is not new to researchers, but agile research methods allows them to arrive at actionable insights much quicker than traditional methods and other online methods. The standardization and automation of certain pieces of the process allows for more time spent focusing on more important things.
Flexibility and adaptability are more important than speed in many cases. It allows teams to adapt to learning and issues as they arise to achieve the best insights to solve their problems. Research needs to be adaptable as things change or arise in order to support the best outcomes. The agile research approach should be able to…
- Adapt throughout the complete project- real-time responsiveness to learnings in terms of questions asked or overall project scope
- Use a range of approach to get the best insights
- Integrate hybrid research methods (qualitative+ quantitative) as needed
- Switch between qualitative and qualitative methodologies
- Engage research participants via seamless flow across channels – fixed and mobile (omni channel data collection)
- Reach out to respondents to clarify points
- Add more sample if necessary
- Choose from a range of price options
Agile Marketing Research is not a total replacement for traditional research practices. However, leveraging the availability of new technologies, and new communications channels combined with the proliferation of information and data, Agile Marketing Research techniques are particularly effective:
- When there is a need to address time-critical questions or respond to crises by producing insights quickly (often in only a few days) and more affordably than traditional marketing research techniques, while also achieving an acceptable and appropriate level of quality.
- When developing new product and marketing initiatives, to funnel and refine concepts and improve the likelihood of success by iterating on multiple concepts simultaneously, with larger samples than traditional methods, faster and for the same or less budget.
Agile research uses an iterative testing and insights process, enabled by an on-demand community platform, that provides feedback in hours, flexes in real time based on in-the-moment insights.
Lean Research Approach to support Agile
There are a growing number of lean research tools and methods that support agile approaches in research. Let’s discuss a few of them.
- Guerilla research
Guerilla research means getting out of the building (a phrase popularized by Steve Blank and the lean startup movement) and spontaneously recruiting and interviewing research participants. Genchi Gembutsu, a Japanese term for “go see it yourself” has been practiced by Toyota for many years. The importance of basing strategic decisions on firsthand understanding of customers is one of the core principles that underlies the Toyota production system.
In order to find people relevant to your research problem, target places where your audience might regularly spend time. If your research question is pretty common across the demographic spectrum, you might want to visit places where people will have spare time to help you: metro stations, parks, corner shops, restaurants, etc. People love to tell their stories—we just need to listen. The same method can be used when testing designs or prototypes—just go out, take your designs (even concept sketches) on your mobile phone or tablet, and ask people for feedback. Even though people you encounter may not be knowledgeable about the subject matter of your design, they’ll often point out simple usability issues that you couldn’t see.
- Insight communities
Insight communities are a good way to get close to consumers’ everyday lives and gather their opinions, ideas and experiences over time, no matter where they are. Insight communities provide a platform for consumer co-creation and are loved by consumers as much as researchers since they give them a real voice that’s listened to. These insight communities are private and invite-only which means that participants must opt-in. Many companies actively encourage their end customers to join their insight communities.
Participants can be engaged via their mobile device or tablet as well as their desktop computer. Various participatory research activities can be conducted such as ideation and development, concept testing, project tasks, storytelling, digital diaries, in-mobile surveys, quantitative surveys, photo and video uploading and so forth.
- Remote interviews
Face to face interviews are usually time-consuming—recruiting people, preparing discussion guides, scheduling, conducting and analyzing findings. It can take weeks to get insights from this exercise. But now with availability of smart online platform solutions, remote interviewing is proving a viable option when time is the most critical factor. Erika Hall in her article Minimum Viable Ethnography explored the method of 10-minute interviews, where the only question you have in your script is “Walk me through a typical day.” It’s a question anybody can understand and answer. Of course, some interviewees might struggle with an answer and you’ll need to use your interviewing skills to encourage them. And some follow-up questions will help participants to articulate their answers better.
- Social media
Social listening is an indirect data gathering method that can monitor customer complaints and compliments. Advantages of using social listening as a lean research tool is that problems are reported in real time. It may include user-generated troubleshooting. If monitored carefully, it usually includes user wish list.
- DIY surveys
Evolution of online survey tools and platforms have enabled creation of do-it-yourself (DIY) surveys. There are a host of low-cost online survey tools. DIY surveys need to be mobile friendly. The relationship between agile surveys and mobile is a bit of a symbiotic one: little and often is the best way to conduct mobile surveys (and therefore, given so many people now complete surveys on their mobile given half the chance, all surveys). Surveys on mobile are a good way to get contextual, in the moment feedback. This means that you must be using a survey platform which makes running surveys on mobile simple and offers a good user experience so that the quality of your data is not affected no matter how your respondent completes the survey.
Designing without doing any research on users in not an option
Without at least a basic understanding of the end users, you can’t design a successful and sustainable product. You either create a solution that doesn’t solve the right problem, or a solution that doesn’t solve the problem adequately. When undertaking a UX project, the kinds of research information you need to be looking for include typical behaviors and psychology of decisions (motivations, needs, drives and blocks etc.). Basically, anything that will support you in building personas and allow us to empathize with the end user. Empathy is the key to meaningful design.
Now its time to think Lean.
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