Regardless of how you conduct it, any type of in-depth interview will produce big benefits in understanding your target market and customers. Doing it right is expensive, and if you cut corners, your research could fall victim to all kinds of errors. But this story highlights an important lesson! “The only scripted question I want you to ask them is this one: take me back to the day when you first decided that you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this kind of a goal. The following four steps will give you a solid understanding of who your users are and what they want from a company like yours. A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on psychographic and demographic data from people who use websites and products similar to your own. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. And associations exist for just about anything you can imagine, as you can see from, I’ve also found great statistics and infographics on Pinterest. For more on how your data is used and stored, check out our Privacy policy. How to do it right: whatever survey/interview questions you ask, they should answer the following questions about the customer: How Smallpdf did it: Smallpdf ran an on-page survey for a week or two and received 1,000 replies, which revealed that many of their users were administrative assistants, students, and teachers. That’s why Sarah Doody, author of UX Notebook, adds it to the end of her written surveys. I agree to continue receiving knowledge and news updates from EyeSee in the future. Or cloud services? Seven tips for lean market research. So how do we bring validation in sooner in the process and improve it the product (through iterative testing) so that we can kill it much earlier? When and why do consumers rent cars vs. use other transportation options? In other words: simple market segmentation for admins showed a business need that had to be accounted for, and now customers are happier overall. According to this movement, a competitive advantage is gained by the speed (and cost) of your learning (or validation of hypotheses). And don’t forget to scan the bibliographies of good articles for interesting references. Change ). Post was not sent - check your email addresses! In this blog post, you’ll learn how to conduct quick, effective market research without hiring an agency—something called lean market research. They ran a survey asking key questions to determine who their users were and what problems they were trying to solve with Smallpdf. The cornerstones of Lean – validated learning, the Build-Measure-Learn principle, and MVPs are necessary and useful new additions to the CPG market research vocabulary. What makes online surveys so popular? Since I’m naturally lazy and startups are impatient, I first look for research that someone else has already published (and often conducted with more academic rigor than I would have time to do myself). What makes observation so clever and powerful? Stop Talking About Products And Start Talking About Problems, 3 Essential Mindsets That Will Help You Succeed, NCMA National Community Media Association, How to perform market research (in a lean way), Market research example: how Smallpdf turned their market research study into business results (in 6 steps), A 75% reduction in error rate for the ‘PDF to Word’ converter, Greater confidence in the team’s marketing efforts. With a conventional research process, this is often only at the end of the process. If the article is interesting, Google the author’s name or visit her site to see if she’s written anything else useful. Here’s a summary of the steps they took. How to get the data: use on-page or emailed surveys and interviews to understand your users. A flow model is a diagram that tracks the flow of information within a system. ( Log Out / ... I’m often asked to answer these kind of tough questions, which can require time-consuming and expensive market research. The above customer journey map, created by our team at Hotjar, shows many ways a customer might engage with our tool. Unfortunately, the university had gone paperless. As a user researcher, I’m often asked to answer these kind of tough questions, which can require time-consuming and expensive market research. Don’t avoid academic articles — but don’t waste your time reading them, either. The meatier and more specific questions come later. You launch something, and then you improve it.“ He adds further that “ [..] at Unilever, this is difficult because we aren’t used to this mentality. An affinity diagram is a way of sorting large amounts of data into groups to better understand the big picture. According to HBR, “It’s a methodology called the “lean start-up,” and it favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development.” One of its cornerstones in the Build – Measure – Learn principle.