Excellent Research
There's Research... and There's
We have so many books, authors, and models telling us similar things, especially when their model is a variation of the Scientific Method: Understand your target audiences. Research their tasks and experiences. Step away from your desk, talk to representative members of the Experience Ecosystem, and observe their realities. Discover opportunities to serve these people, solve their problems, and make their lives and work better.
- Business strategy books say that customer-centricity is key to your competitive advantage.
- Marketing books say that you should understand your target audience and the market.
- Product management books say that we must have multiple conversations with customers frequently. Understanding our customers leads us to find opportunities to create delight and innovation.
- Design thinking books say that empathy is the foundation of good design, and we can’t truly empathize with people we don’t understand well.
- Lean and startup books talk about “validated learning” and getting out of the building to talk to potential users, which sound like “research” and “research.”
- Sales books say that you should know your customers’ pain points.
- Books MBA students read treat customer research and market analysis as business fundamentals. Books and courses are filled with case studies of companies that succeeded or failed based on what they understood about their audiences, and how they chose to address that market.
And yet companies mostly ignore these messages. They keep the “work fast from assumptions” advice they wanted to hear, and ignore the “do thorough discovery research before trying to solve problems you don’t understand” piece they didn’t want to hear.
When every company is fast, you win when you deliver quality and value.
It’s hard to solve problems when you don’t fully understand the problems or your Experience Ecosystem. It’s hard to find opportunities to improve or innovate when you chose Minimum Viable Research over setting teams and projects up for more efficient success.
Delta CX uses qualitative research, human-to human conversations and observations, to learn your market’s tasks, behaviors, decisions, collaborators, preferences, and realities. We can answer the hows and whys, and deliver actionable suggestions on what to do (and not do).
We’ll create a research project plan that fits your time frame and budget without sacrificing quality. You need us to deliver evidence-based insights and advice. We are experts who work efficiently without sacrificing quality. Most of our projects take 2-4 weeks.
For an example, see our case study about a hosting company struggling with funnel abandonment and low conversion rates.
If “Customer Conversations” Are All We Need, Why Are We Still Failing So Often?
Because all research isn’t Excellent Research. Non-Excellent Research includes:
- A badly-designed or badly-analyzed survey, especially if the questions are tweaked to give you what you hope to hear.
- Researching with too few people, the wrong people, or too homogenous a group of participants.
- Asking the wrong questions, or asking questions in ways that are likely to bias the participant.
- Anything that leads to confirmation bias, where we design the research study that will tell us what we hope to hear.
For example, one of our clients had non-Researchers run a research study that came to the conclusion that everybody loved the dashboard. The dashboard was clear and made sense. So, they invested time and money in building and releasing the dashboard only to find nearly zero utilization and low popup survey scores.
We investigated this and found that this team had never validated their Foundational Hypothesis, which was that customers needed this dashboard. Our research found that people wanted to log in and get to work immediately. They had important tasks to accomplish, and saw no reason to stop and look at a dashboard.
Excellent Research takes time, but often a few weeks, not months or years. It’s an investment, not a waste, and not a corner we can cut. It’s the foundational information that will inform our strategies, decisions, priorities, products, services, and more.
How about “Just Enough Research”?
“Just enough research” is a phrase that sounds reasonable until you ask: enough for what? An inhumane deadline? To falsely validate something, or hear what we hope to hear? To “just ship it”?
“Just enough” usually means “as little as possible before we do what we already wanted to do.” You can do minimum viable research, but that doesn’t mean that it will lead you to more successes, more efficiently. When everybody is fast, we differentiate by being great.
Excellent Research is Excellent partially because it uses time wisely. It relies on experienced, qualified Researchers to get the right work done well and as quickly as possible.
Whether you like your research to be “just enough,” Agile, Lean, or part of “continuous discovery,” there’s no substitute for Excellent Research. It’s at the foundation of every method you’ve been taught, but sometimes it’s been whispered instead of shouted or required.
We Only Offer
Delta CX will only offer project plans that deliver Excellent Research. We are not offering minimally viable research, a research sprint lasting a few days, or a quick survey when we need to observe behaviors and truly understand users and the problem space. We don’t burn time on unnecessary workshops, where people guess what users do or need, or a high-paid person dominates the room.
Most of our projects take 2-4 weeks, often depending upon how quickly we can find the right number of the people who fit your ICPs or segments. That’s just a sprint or two devoted to replacing opinions, guesses, and assumptions with evidence, data, and knowledge. Just a few weeks to build a stronger foundation for strategies, decisions, and priorities.
Just a few weeks to more deeply understand your Experience Ecosystem. Because Excellent Research is so much more than “just ask people what they want” or “have a few customer conversations each week.” It’s about asking the right people the right questions, and observing them.
Our team has specialized in Excellent Research and bringing make-or-break insights to teams and leaders for over 15 years.