When faced with market research, it can be overwhelming as you try to figure out which path to take. There are methods that work better for smaller businesses or certain industries. There are methods that are better financially or more efficient depending on the city your company is centered in. The variables are endless, but regardless of how you end up tackling your market research, applying the agile principles can have a powerful influence over your approach. 

The principles of the agile manifesto cover everything from the frequency of releasing new products to technical excellence to reflecting on your work. The principles have been used in many thorough frameworks for developing software companies and can also apply to market research methods, especially qualitative research methods, which can be less clearly defined. There are twelve basic principles of agile:

1. Satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software products & services.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. 
3. Deliver working products & services frequently.
4. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
5. Simplicity is essential.
6. Technical excellence and good design enhance agility.
7. Business people and developers must work together throughout the project.
8. Build projects around motivated individuals, and trust them to get the job done.
9. Promote sustainable development. 
10. Face-to-face conversation.
11. Self-organizing teams.
12. The team reflects on how to become more effective, then adjusts its behavior accordingly.

These 12 principles are, on their own, a solid way to approach product development, but when examined through the lens of market research, they can be especially helpful. Approaching all 12 principles in the face of creating a market research plan could be a bit much to think about, but they can easily be summed up into three steps. These steps are: 

1. Communication
2. Embracing change
3. Collaboration

Communication 

Through continuous, succinct, and direct communication, you can reach the first of the agile principles. This first step is the foundation for any market research plan. To create a product that customers need and to reach those customers, a company needs to know that customer. They must know who they are, what they need and don’t need, which parts of a product may be unnecessary. It is only through communication that we can gain this knowledge, making this perhaps the most critical agile principle as it is the basis of all further market research. 

This can further be examined in how the team communicates as the team must be able to communicate well, thoroughly, and openly among themselves as well as with consumers. The collaborative team must express concerns, look at the data with an open mind, and explore solutions together. 

Embracing Uncertainty

Embracing uncertainty covers the majority of the agile principles. It isn’t just about embracing uncertainty, but about using that uncertainty to your advantage. No matter how much market research you complete before launching a product, the initial feedback (and the way you segment feedback to illuminate insights) will further influence action on that product once it’s launched. By embracing the uncertainty of those initial reactions, you can find the best ways to change a product for the future. 

Beyond that, time will inevitably alter the product further. Any number of things can change your customer’s needs, from social changes to the economy, and the product you produce must be able to roll with those changes. The best way to make sure that happens is to embrace uncertainty within your market research plan. Expanding your plan so that you can collect market research data over your product’s life  will help your company embrace this portion of the agile principles.  To sum it up, one must be willing to accept this kind of change to continue pursuing excellence and work toward a product that meets your customers’ needs.

Constant Collaboration

Collaboration is essential to product development, launching software, and maintaining customer support. A large, diverse team is the best way to develop a market research plan that will cover all of the bases. A well-organized, well-motivated plan requires a variety of personality types, backgrounds, and skill levels. 

There are pitfalls and issues in any product found by having a diverse team, working in constant collaboration, preventing them from becoming a problem. In this way, a truly collaborative team can work to develop a more comprehensive market research plan. 

Perhaps the most crucial aspect of this step is the ability to change based on collaboration. As well as looking at the ability to communicate openly, all team members need to be open to adjusting their actions (or the product) based on that communication. 

The agile principles can enhance any business, but you will see more effective results when applied directly to your market research plan, saving time and money on potential mistakes. Not only do these principles serve to make your software company more effective, but they also reduce costs on the development of your product and the cost of troubleshooting any potential issues that arise. By the time of your next launch, you're ready to face it with confidence and with a solid gameplan in mind. Fingers crossed!

Getting stakeholders aligned and engaged with your research is rarely easy. In fact, it’s typically one of the hardest parts of being a user researcher.

I’ve seen it time and again: researchers pouring their hearts and souls into discovery and analysis projects, only to have leadership teams and different subject matter experts pay little or no attention to the outputs. There is one useful tool for stakeholder alignment, however, and when used correctly it can change how those aforementioned leadership teams and subject matter experts see your research.

Note-taking: A brief recap

The process of note-taking isn’t rocket science – and it’s exactly what it sounds like: Writing observations down during a user interview or other user test in order to identify any useful insights.

In more qualitative forms of research, the note-taking process is essential. It’s how you capture qualitative data. In a card sort, it’s more of an auxiliary exercise that can add another layer of insight.

The core skill with note-taking isn’t necessarily typing, it’s about the note-takers ability to transform observations that they’re making into readable and digestible text. Being a fast typer doesn’t always make for a good note-taker!

This is what makes note-taking an ideal tool for stakeholder engagement. It’s low effort and is an easy way to bring other people into the research process. This is time well spent, as the people who consume the outputs of your research should have an interest in the problems that you’re researching.

3 ways note-taking drives stakeholder engagement

Beyond being a tool to improve stakeholder engagement with your research, the added bonus of getting these people in the room with you as note-takers is that you’re free from the responsibility.

Whether it’s a card sort, user interview or usability test, you can focus on guiding your participants through the various tasks while your stakeholder jots down observations.

Here are 3 ways note-taking can help to drive stakeholder engagement in your research.

1. They get the chance to contribute to your research

Picture this. You’re at the end of your next research project, and you’re standing up at the front of a meeting room alongside a slide deck. It’s time to present your findings back to the original stakeholders of the project. Now consider how much more engaged they’ll be if they also had the opportunity to take part in the note-taking process.

Instead of simply reading your figures and findings, they’ll know exactly where they’ve come from and have a real connection to the data.

2. They can listen to real customers

It’s not often that stakeholders – typically those in leadership positions – get the chance to interact with customers. Usually, they hear about customer experiences second-hand from sales, marketing and customer service teams.

When you bring a stakeholder in as a note-taker, they’re able to hear from customers directly. Being in the room with customers as they try out new features or products is always interesting for those in the higher rungs of an organization.

3. You can generate insights together

Bringing stakeholders into your research sessions as note-takers means you can then collaborate with them to generate findings, thus helping you to reach a consensus quicker. Why does this work? Instead of simply taking a finalized set of findings to your stakeholders, they are with you in the room taking the notes and identifying insights together in the debrief session afterward.

The best tools for note-taking

Forget typing up notes in a document on a laptop – there are a significant number of qualitative note-taking tools available that make the process of note-taking and analysis much easier.

At Optimal Workshop, our tool for this job is Reframer, and it’s a powerful way to improve the qualitative note-taking process. With Reframer, you can log all your notes and observations in one place. After the research session is over, you can make sense of your findings quickly with easy-to-use analysis tools.

Wrap up

You don’t need to bring stakeholders in solely as note-takers. If they’d rather act as passive observers, there’s still immense value in having them in the room with you. Remember: It’s all about getting these people in sync with your research so that they’re better able to see the value of what you do, day to day!

There comes a time in every research project when the actual ‘research’ comes to an end. At this stage, you’ve collated your data and extracted useful insights, and it’s time to take the critical next step: presenting your findings back to your stakeholders.

I remember the first time that I had to present data to stakeholders. My team and I had just run a series of user interviews to learn more about how user researchers seek out and use new learning resources. We’d identified the high-level takeaways and pulled them into a slide deck to take to the leadership team.

Now came the scary part. With the lead researcher on my team, I stood up in front of the group of stakeholders and bumbled my way through the findings. Thankfully, I was with a very capable researcher and we managed to get across all of the important points – but the experience taught me a lot about how to present to stakeholders effectively.

Use stories

One of the most effective techniques that you can use as a presenter is that of the storyteller. Start off by reminding your audience of the status quo, and then reveal the path to a better way of doing things. This sets up a conflict that needs to be resolved.

By establishing this tension, you’re in a better position to persuade your audience to adopt a new viewpoint. Harvard Business Review has a great article from Nancy Duarte that makes for an excellent starting point.

Make it visual

Your findings need to be understandable, not pretty. It’s your job to take everything that you’ve learned, distill it down into the most relevant points for your stakeholders, and then present it in such a way that they’ll be able to take the information on board. A key aspect of success here depends on the visuals.

Here are some key things to keep in mind when it comes to the visual aspects of your presentation:

• Don’t overwhelm your audience with numbers: Use simple formatting, commas and skip unnecessary decimals. Also, right-align columns of numbers so that they form a kind-of bar chart automatically, and your stakeholders can quickly locate the largest numbers.
• Avoid 3D charts (unless they’re the best option): 3D presentation charts are tempting, but they introduce more cognitive load by making people process another element. Of course, there are exceptions.
• Consider something other than the pie chart: Sure, it’s rare that you’ll see a presentation without a pie chart, but they are far from the best option. Why? Because humans aren’t as good at judging the relative differences in circles as opposed to lines. We can much more easily process a bar graph than a pie chart. 

Encourage feedback and questions

You’re not just presenting the findings of your research to inform your stakeholders, you also want agreement. Add to that, this is also a great opportunity to gather more information as well as any feedback.

Don’t be afraid of the Q&A. Ask your stakeholders if they have any questions or feedback on what you’ve just shown them. There are a few ways to do this. You can ask for questions throughout the presentation, at the end, or even send a recap email after the fact to gather written responses. 

Know who you’re talking to

You need to know exactly who you’re presenting to as well as what their priorities and interests are. For example, if you’re speaking to a marketing manager or the leadership team, drill into how your research could impact areas like your free to paid conversion rate, revenue in general or customer churn.

Keep it short, but have more detail available

No one really wants to be sitting in a room listening to a presentation for 2 hours. Try and get all of your key points across within 30 minutes and allot extra time at the end for questions and discussion.

In short, focus on the high-level findings of your research, but have more data available and ready to send out.

Have a TL;DR

It’s a well-known fact that people in upper management positions are often time-poor. That’s why it’s not uncommon to see smartphones and laptops come out in particularly long meetings. If you’re presenting to a group of these people, one of the best ways to give your findings the highest chance of sinking in is through a high-level overview slide, also known as a too long, didn’t read (TL;DR) slide.

The objective of this slide is to give your audience the key takeaways and most important findings. You may also want to insert links to more detailed explanations as well as your suggested next steps.

This is also a great tool for anyone who’s unable to attend your presentation – they’ll know exactly what they’re looking at without having to come to their own conclusions.

Give concrete recommendations

Last, but certainly not least, make sure that no matter what you’re presenting, you have concrete next steps outlined clearly for your audience. For every issue or challenge that you identify, ensure that you have a clear recommendation for how to address that problem. Yes, even if it seems trivial, it’s your job to outline the recommended next steps.

Your stakeholders obviously don’t have to take any of the actions that you propose, but you’re already deep in the problem space and so in the best position to propose further actions. 

Wrap up

Presenting the findings of a research project is an understandably scary undertaking for many researchers – but it shouldn’t be. Remember that you’re there to surface insights to the people that need to hear them, and that this is the best possible way to do so. The last thing you want is for your findings to never see the light of day outside of a shared drive folder.

So remember, focus on creating a useful, interesting presentation that speaks to the people in the room – and don’t be afraid to take questions! Good luck!

Discovery research prior to the design and development of products, services and features nearly always leads to better results, whether that means a better reception from your target audience or product/market fit.

But you already knew that.

You’re likely well aware that this all-too-important research phase helps you to gather a broad range of insights about the opportunities in front of you, better define exactly what problems you need to solve and get stakeholders and other parties involved early on.

With this in mind, which methods should you use to generate the best discovery outcomes? Let’s find out.

Interview your stakeholders

You’ll no doubt be familiar with the process of interviewing your users, but it’s now time to apply that same skillset to the stakeholders of your project. This is a fairly common user research practice, and can give you a good idea of the following:

• Organization goals: What problems is the business trying to solve?
• Constraints: What factors could stand in the way (whether technical or otherwise)?
• Current insights: What do your subject matter experts already know about the problem you’re trying to solve, and what do they know about your users?

Stakeholder interviews are an excellent place to start if you’re planning to build an entirely new product or build a substantial new feature for a product that’s already being used.

Analyze business data

You don’t always need to go outside of your organization to gather information about the problem space. Chances are (especially if you’re in an established company) that there are already reams of useful data just waiting for the right analytical eye.

When we talk about business data, we basically mean any data that the organization already has about the product or feature that you’re working on. This could come in many forms, for example, qualitative anecdotes from customer service teams, or quantitative data about usage from development teams. Analyzing this sort of quantitative and qualitative data will give you useful context about key stakeholders, user pain points, opportunities and even broader issues such as alignment.

Depending on when you start this process, you may find that digging into business data is also a good opportunity to introduce yourself to the stakeholders most closely aligned with the data.

Carry out competitor analysis

Competitive analysis is the process of comparing the products and services of one company (typically yours) with those of another company. You carry out competitive analysis by comparing different types of data. For example, when we here at Optimal Workshop redesigned our blog, we carried out a significant amount of discovery research, which included a large amount of competitive analysis of other blogs. We focused on things like functionality, types of content, target audience and design.

Competitor analysis is a great way to work out where you stand alongside your competitors. You can get an idea of opportunities that they’ve missed, things they do well and potential areas of innovation for your own organization.

Run user interviews

User interviews are a research method designed to get qualitative information directly from your users. Typically, user interviews involve asking people questions related to how they use a particular system, their behaviors and their usage habits.

This research method is useful across the lifecycle of a product, but it’s particularly relevant in the discovery phase. At this point in time, you can use the results of user interviews to build your customer journey maps and personas and segments.

Host a diary study

In a diary study, users log activities of daily activities as and when they occur to generate contextual information about their behaviors, wants and needs. You can then use this data to better understand feature and product requirements.

This method has obvious advantages when used in the discovery phase of a research project. By casting a wide net and having at least 10 participants involved, you can get a broad range of insights over a long period of time. Once you’re finished, you’ll have access to useful self-reported information about usage behavior, usage scenarios, habits and more.

Wrap up

Hopefully, this guide has given you a good introduction to some of the methods that you’ll want to use during your next discovery project. Once you’ve wrapped up your discovery work, you (and your team) should have a clear understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve as well as the opportunities and potential areas of innovation. Oh, and stakeholder alignment of course!

Keep in mind that it’s OK if the outcome of a discovery project is a dead-end – or a completely new direction. Discovery now helps you to avoid running into those issues after you’ve built a new product or feature. 

Happy discovery!

Anyone who’s ever been involved in user research knows that the process takes many different forms. Organization size, research maturity, stakeholder buy-in, budget and many other factors all play a part in how various teams and individuals approach the process of learning how users think and, consequently, how to build products and services for them.

One of the most important steps you can take is to move from tactical (evaluative) research to discovery (generative) research.

Tactical versus discovery research

If you need a brief refresher on what these two terms mean, here’s a handy breakdown:

• Tactical or evaluative research: Assessing an existing solution to work out whether it meets people’s needs. This could be running a tree test on a website that’s already widely used.
• Discovery or generative research: Developing a deeper understanding of a problem or a group of users to identify opportunities and areas of innovation. This could be running a series of user interviews to speak to users directly.

I want to be clear here: We’re not saying that you should never carry out tactical, evaluative research, just that it’s vital to carve out time for discovery.

An issue of time

Time waits for no one. When speaking to user researchers, a common theme is that they’re underresourced and time-poor. Typically, the smaller numbers of researchers in comparison to other roles means that their skills are in high demand, all the time.

What does this mean for the types of work that researchers are often tasked with? In many organizations, researchers are constantly in lock-step with design and development teams, carrying out necessary tactical research alongside prototype development, or testing finalized versions of products and services.

This doesn’t leave much time (if any) for generative research.

Discovery research: A deep dive

Making time for discovery in the UX design process is not about testing hypotheses, prototypes or solutions. This type of research is firmly focused on framing the problem, developing an understanding of the problem space and gathering data.

Discovery, by its very nature, should be broad and have no particular leanings with regards to solutions or technology. The focus here is about learning how people live and act, what their environments are like, and getting a detailed understanding of their behaviors, thoughts and opinions.

If you’re running a discovery project on a product that’s already been developed, then it’s not discovery. It’s essentially validation that what’s already been built is the right solution.

Discovery research should help you build up a solid understanding of your users, the problems to be solved, opportunities available and success metrics that the team and stakeholders can rally behind.

How to get started with discovery research

You can use a number of different methods to carry out discovery research. Let’s take a look at a few of the most common ones.

• User interviews: Ideal for learning about people’s behaviors, problems, habits and perspectives, this method is a great way to collect qualitative data as part of the discovery process. 
• Diary studies: In a similar vein to user interviews, diary studies allow you to collect qualitative data from a group of people. Diary studies differ in that the insights are self-reported, thus giving you a different perspective.
• Field studies: Instead of bringing users into your organization for an interview or usability study, head out into the field to observe how they work and behave in their environment. 
• Stakeholder interviews: Looking internally, stakeholder interviews are a great way to get a unique perspective on the problem you’re investigating. Stakeholders typically know a lot about internal processes, user behaviors and what solutions have already been tried.
• Assumption-mapping workshops: This type of workshop is all about prioritizing your assumptions based on certainty – and risk. The idea is that by identifying the riskiest assumptions you’ll have a better idea of where to devote your energy.

Nielsen Norman Group has an in-depth article on discovery that covers some of the other common activities. 

The outputs of a discovery project

After you’ve run a discovery project, you and your team will have a much more comprehensive understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve – and where you should start to focus your efforts.

We’ve said it once and we’ll certainly say it again: user research is a critical part of the design process. By applying the right research methods to the problems you’re trying to solve, you can pull out fantastic insights which you can use to build products and services that meet the needs of your users.

This won’t be news to any user researchers or designers reading this article – but for those on the marketing side of the organizational fence, it’s time to sit up, take notice, and learn just how valuable user research is. Hint: It’s quite valuable!

Now, thanks to the wealth of information about UX research that’s available online, not to mention the array of tools available, marketers can easily take advantage of powerful research methods to supercharge their marketing campaigns and their user insights.

But, I hear you ask, isn’t ‘user research’ just another term for ‘market research’? Well, not exactly. That’s why we’ll start this article off by exploring the difference between the two.

What’s the difference between market research and user research?

Regardless of organization, profession or field, market research and user research are terms often mixed up or used interchangeably. This comes down mostly to the fact that both terms contain the word ‘research’, but there’s a little more to it.Both market research and user research overlap (check out the diagram below), with a shared focus on things like personas, analytics and competitor analysis. More broadly, user research is seen as a more qualitative approach, whereas market research is typically seen as quantitative. In practice, however, both user researchers and market researchers – at least those doing their jobs correctly – will use a combination of both research approaches.

Looked at another way, market research is typically used to inform sales and marketing (Who will buy what), whereas user research is used to drive product decisions by understanding user needs (What do our users want).

What does this mean for marketers (and researchers?)

Market research, broadly speaking, has always been tied to the bottom line of an organization, and using research as a way to improve revenue lines through an understanding of an organization’s users. Market research seeks the answers to questions such as:

• Who will buy what
• When will they buy it
• What do they look for when buying X product
• Why do they buy X product and not Y product

But this is starting to change. As we’ve seen in the world of design, market research has also undertaken a user-centered shift to try and actually understand the user as opposed to just their intent. There is still a way to go, however. The ESOMAR Global Report from 2017 found that just 15 percent of worldwide spend on market research was qualitative.

As SimpleUsability explains: “The two disciplines co-exist on a moving scale, often overlapping, rather than existing as two polarising variables”.

For marketers (and user researchers to an extent), this really means one thing: focus on the method, not the overarching label. Marketers should take a deep dive into the world of user research and explore all of the methods that researchers utilize on a daily basis:

• Card sorting can show you how your users sort and categorize information, which makes the process of building effective website structures quite simple.
• Diary studies help you to understand long-term user behaviour. Users self-report over a long period of time, keeping a diary about the activity you’re studying.  
• Contextual inquiries let you observe your users in their natural environment, and allow you to ask questions while they go about their business.
• Tree testing lets you test the bare bones structure of your website or mobile app, iterate on the structure, and then test it again.

These are just a few of the methods popular among user researchers – but there are many, many more. Check out the chart below from Christian Rohrer (via Nielsen Norman Group).

How can marketers get started with user research?

Any journey into the world of UX research really needs to start with a holistic understanding of the different methods available and an understanding of what each method can tell you. If you haven’t read it before, we highly recommend the Intro to UX guide on our blog. Then, you can dive into detail by reading about different types of testing and research.

What comes next? The world of user research is a very different place now than what it was even 10 years ago. In the past few years, there’s been a surge in the number of powerful remote UX research tools available, with options available for every method and approach. There are card sorting and tree testing tools, tools for contextual inquiries and even tools for running remote user interviews over the internet. Exploring the different options available to you and playing around with different combinations of tools will put you in the best position to run your own research projects – which brings us to our final recommendation.

With an idea of the methods you can use and the tools available online, you’ll want to put together a UX research plan to build up all of the information you currently have as well as the questions you need to answer.

So here we are. The line between user research and market research continues to blur with every passing day as both sides of the organizational fence rally around a common point: Figuring out their users.

User researchers understand the value of leveraging the various methods available to them. The only question is, will you?