Primary research techniques

- Even with all the secondary research that's available to you, there's just no replacement for getting your information straight from the source. When I was doing customer discovery for a product for doctors' offices, my first hypothesis was that office managers were frustrated with using fax machines to communicate with each other. Based on my assumptions and some secondary research, I knew that many of them were still using fax machines to send documents between care providers. I just couldn't imagine that those offices were happy with that process in 2016, but when I talked to target users and asked them about their problems, almost none of them brought up a problem with the fax machine. If I hadn't talked to hundreds of target users, I may have built a product that those users were not looking for, wasting my precious time and money in the process. Talking directly to your target user is called primary research. This is where the bulk of your time will be spent in customer discovery. The two most important methods of primary research are surveys and interviews. They're the most basic, dependable, and efficient tools that you have, but while they're both great tools, they serve very different purposes and need to be performed carefully. No one tries to write a bad survey, but if your questions are biased, leading, or skewed, you simply won't get responses that actually provide meaningful insight. Your survey data is only as good as the questions themselves. Surveys are great for measuring attitudes or collecting quantitative feedback, but not good for understanding the underlying user problems or needs. For instance, a survey would be perfectly suited for asking someone, how satisfied are you with your current job, and providing a rating scale for that user to answer. But, asking someone the open-ended question, please describe your current job satisfaction, would not be useful. These type of open-ended questions are best left for interviews, where you allow the user to speak freely right in front of you. This approach leads to more insight because you can watch the user's body language and tailor the conversation based upon their responses. Think about the last time you took a survey that asked an open-ended question or had a text box. Did you wanna sit there and type a long thoughtful response? Probably not. We find it easier to explain ourselves and speak to someone in person. Surveys let us quickly collect a lot of quantitative data and understand the degree to which someone believes something, how many users feel a certain way, or how a user's feelings change over time. Interviews give us the ability to dive more deeply with questions like, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about your day, what would it be? Good customer interviews really help shed light on who your customers are and whether or not the problem your product solves is important to them, and as you know, this is absolutely essential to this phase of customer development.