Quick Tips - September 5, 2007

Tips from the practice masters...

(Part I of III)

How should a technology company carry out ethnographic research, particularly field observation, to develop and refine its products? Julie Gulick and Ned Uber from MEDRAD, the leading maker of medical devices used in imaging procedures of the human body, regularly study the way their clients and yet-to-be clients carry out their assignments in catheterization labs and other hospital facilities. In a recent Product Strategy Network Roundtable, Gulick and Uber shared their insights and practical tips for benefiting from observational research.

• Put people in context

Ethnographic research involves studying a few subjects in very great depth. Observation techniques involve watching people in their environment. It’s combination of industrial engineering and anthropology. In the South Pacific, Margaret Mead used this approach to study the way people used tools and drew conclusions from those observations. Observation is not a dialogue; it is not a survey; it is not content analysis. Don’t expect the findings to be statistically significant. It is a tool used to study a relative handful of people. Follow up what you find with other techniques, like surveys, to get statistically significant results. The goal of the observation stage of research is to understand the customer’s need.

• Make a plan

Don’t just observe. You need a comprehensive plan to secure useful Voice of the Customer input. Know what questions you’re trying to answer and focus your team on attaining that goal upfront. Observe them in the morning, interview them in the afternoon. Make a matrix of the different attributes and customer segments that match your target market. Brainstorm with your product development team on how and where to fill each of those cells to make sure you have all your attributes covered.

• Identify uses

There are two times in the product development cycle where it’s appropriate to use ethnography: one is in stage zero, or the fuzzy front end when you’re evaluating and scoping the opportunity. That’s where you look for workarounds, things they’re building themselves to make your product better and approaches to fixing problems that you’re not solving. The other is after a product has been launched, for example when you’re trying to iron out graphical user interface issues or figure out feature tradeoffs for future releases. Through observation, you can develop ideas about what issues your customers currently stumble over and what puzzles them.

• Engage lead users

It’s very valuable to include users on the market’s edge and thought leaders in your customer audience – people who are thinking farther ahead and who are solving problems that they themselves experience. These are people who are not just using your product as it is currently designed; they’re figuring out what’s next and already doing things along those lines. They’re already aware of your procedures and they’re more willing to be creative and solve problems than other users. But they are less likely to allow videotaping, so plan a productive interview.

• Cross disciplines

Build a cross-functional study team. Bring your engineers with you. When they start talking about what a customer wants, you’ve reached a whole new level of product development because now they know your customer and own that customer’s perspective. Engineers see things differently than marketing and sales people. They’ll absorb different information and it will make the research experience much richer. You will gain faster time to market, less rework, and products that are more in line with what your customer wants.

• Justify costs

Observational research is relatively inexpensive and focused on identifying customer needs, but it still needs to be justified. One approach is to recognize that it costs very little to change a product at Stage Zero. It costs a great deal more to introduce changes once the development process is well underway. Consider the opportunity cost of responding to the customer after they ask for a change. As a benchmark for research expense, use the cost of making late-stage changes and note the leverage that the results of early observation can bring to a project. The more understanding that can be brought to the earliest development stage, the better.    

This is part I of a III part series focusing on observational research.

Part II: Planning to observe customers

Part III: Conducting the observation

 

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