Product Research Rules

Chapter 4. Plans Make Research Work

In the Introduction, we talked about excuses for not doing research. Often, the people who make those excuses have experienced failed research efforts. Planning your research is key to ensuring success. But because planning is often invisible from the outside, if you are new to product research, you may have taken it for granted.

What if ready, aim, fire is better than fire?

This chapter is about planning, including picking a method, finding participants, working as pairs, preparing guides for your sessions, and keeping all related parties in the loop—as well as what to do when things go wrong.

Picking a Research Method

If a sibling or friend has symptoms of the flu, how would you find out how bad they feel? You’d ask them. You wouldn’t run them through a CT scan to find out how they feel. On the other hand, if you suspected they might have a lung infection, it would be more appropriate to run some tests than to simply ask them how likely they feel it is that they have a lung infection.

How you should go about conducting research depends on what you want to know. You need to pick the right research method for your research question. Running a CT scan to understand how someone feels is like running a usability study to understand how much future customers would pay for your product. And asking someone to judge if they have a lung infection based on how they feel is like sending out a survey to understand why people abandon their carts online. ...