How to Get the Most Out of Your Research

Tricks of the trade for firsthand interviews.

DeepBench helps its clients receive firsthand insights to do better research.

Research matters because products are an investment.

Ideating and innovating new products can cost companies millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours. Furthermore, failing to improve existing products could lead to any company’s untimely demise.

This begs the question… how do top-performing companies derisk these critical investments? The answer lies in primary research i.e. firsthand interviews.

UX researchers, design and innovation consultants, and enterprise innovation teams (and the occasional well-informed startup founder), all know the importance of the primary research process.

But do they know how to get the absolute most out of it?

A wide range of companies, from Fortune 500 innovation teams to pre-revenue startups, trust DeepBench with sourcing research participants. Our experience running thousands of projects over the years has given us a unique view into common pitfalls and helpful hints that we are eager to share!

1. Determine your End Goal

Aimless research leads to fewer answers.

Determining the end goal of your project is the most important step of all.

That doesn’t mean you can stop reading!

We need guardrails in research. Without determining your end goal you are aimlessly diving into a pool of knowledge without guidance.

Make sure your research initiative is closely tied to a key business objective. Make that objective known to all throughout the engagement. We have seen many teams who lose the buy-in of key stakeholders, and consultants who experience exhausting scope creep, due to a lack of anchoring to key business objectives.

2. Research and Discovery

Learn the basics of your research before diving in.

Researching the market, product, or company you are looking to study is crucial to the success of your project. Without learning the basics of “look both ways before crossing the street” you won’t be able to get to the other side to see what’s over there!

A tough analogy I know but you get the point.

You need to learn the basics of who’s who, what they’re doing, what could set you apart, and why you want to enter that market.

Start broad. One or two generative conversations with experts in your industry, market, geography, or specific application can help establish a landscape and rules of the road.

Often called “discovery research” or “problem-space research”, this involves building a view of who your customers are and what they experience.

From there you can begin to narrow in and go deeper on specific ideas by leveraging more and more precise experts for primary research.

3. Build a Roadmap

Loop in stakeholders, talk about those guardrails and map out the path to success.

Time to sharpen your pencils.

You’ve determined your end goal, performed some generative research, and studied your market to understand its quirks. Now it’s time to build out your roadmap in order to plan out what to do to make this project successful.

That means deciding what people you need to get those answers from, where you’ll find those people, what questions you need to ask them, how much you expect it to cost, and (of course!) what’s the timeline for all of this work!

Loop in your critical stakeholders early and often. Get sign-off on your roadmap — including goal, timeline, budget, and scope.

4. Ask Expansive Questions

Facilitate the acceptance of new ideas and expansion on topics to receive truly novel insight.

The whole purpose of research is to uncover new things and learn the stuff you don’t know.

Per step 3, pigeonholing yourself to the defined list of questions formulated by you and your colleagues would be detrimental to your research.

You can improve the quality of your research by asking expansive questions, giving the participant a comfortable amount of time to respond, or allowing them to introduce new topics.

Little things like budgeting 10 minutes of open time at the end of the call could allow the participant to revisit an earlier topic, expanding on the idea and offering novel insight.

The flexibility allows you to truly learn things you wouldn’t have vs. presenting a question to a participant and preparing to receive the answer that you’ve already deemed valuable in your head.

It is the job of the participant/expert/advisor, whatever you want to call them, to provide you with their insight.

And the only way for that to truly come to fruition, in the most organic way possible, is for you as the researcher to be flexible in your approach and open to your research taking the unexpected turn it needs for its overall success.

You can head to DeepBench for all your primary research needs and tell us about them here.