Hello, and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast I might pass. And I'm the CEO of quality tents, and we are on a journey of design thinking. And I hope you're enjoying the series thus far, because today we've got another goodie for you. We're going to be talking about how research. Can help you build empathy for understanding who your customer is.

And it will all be inspired by design thinking. And, uh, I'm just actually in the middle of conducting an enormous global research, uh, for a consumer product. And so I'm living this right now, so I'm hoping that I can share with you, um, all sorts of insights and tips and tricks on how to get the most out of this because.

Frankly research, you can just, you can just get lost in, in research data and then, you know, arguing about the insights and then arguing and tossing up between the recommendations. And it's a kind of, I can get very swampy when you do your research. So what I'm hoping to do is to give you sort of the fast track, if you will.

On how to really validate a phone generation product or service, um, and how you can really have what I hope is right. Confidence in your idea, because really that's what it's all about. We don't want to be guessing anymore. We want to know what our users need. We want problem solution fit. Okay. So we're talking research and there's primarily two types of research that I've very powerful in early stage ideas.

And in particular for brand new products and services, we can get into all the other variations and permutations of research that. Maybe more relevant for an existing product or service. Um, we can talk about NPS and all that sort of stuff, but we're focusing on creating something brand new and between you and me, that's kind of the exciting stuff.

So let's talk about these two types of research. One is quantitative and the other is. Qualitative. Now you might hear these referred to very often wanting qual, um, cause they're kind of like a mouthful. They self help things, but let me make it even simpler. You know, quantum research, um, is very much based on numbers and statistics and it's all, uh, largely conducted in the form of a survey.

Okay. Now qual research is much more about opinions. Um, the sample sizes, the number of people participating in the research is much smaller because if you think about it, you know, you can get hundreds of people to take a survey. That's fine. Particularly taking the, uh, the survey online, but if you're going to do really good work in your interviews, You only want to conduct five or 10 in a batch before you actually need to reflect on them.

So it's a much smaller number of people. And, um, it's all about the interview when you do a qual research program and, um, these interviews are really essential ways for you to gain a better understanding, a deeper understanding than what you had in the qual. In the Kwan. Sorry. So let's talk about, let's go back to and talk about that.

Um, I think that the output that you might expect from a quantitative survey is you really want some clear stats, so it's quite okay just to ask, uh, do you like this, or which of these do you prefer? Cause you weren't real stats and data, so yeah, you can do the key thing here is to compare and contrast now.

The reason that I like Kwan is, uh, it gives you sort of a baseline. It gives you a context. It gives a little bit of tangibility. I like the idea of just knowing we surveyed a ton of people and actually a majority of them have this really big problem. That would be an example of a piece of data. Um, that came out of a survey that would be really instructional because you'd be able to say, well, geez, Hey, it seems like a lot of people have this problem.

Um, and this is a confirmation that if we could solve that, that this has a clickability to a large amount of people. In fact, it's a majority of our sample size. So. That's really, really good. Now, when you, you get really fancy with your conservation, you can do a lot of filtering comparing, contrasting, and, um, Really, this is where you can do all sorts of interesting things, uh, where you can, for example, compare the entry points on your screen are people who answered your survey by age.

So you could compare younger versus more mature. Customers, you could do it on geography, those from East coast to West coast USA, um, perhaps you even have some other screen is, um, is really interesting, you know, really basic, uh, users or premium users. You can see all sorts of permutations, you can compare them and contrast them.

So that's, that's really the world of Kwan. And, uh, to wrap that up, If you're thinking about doing a survey, uh, I would encourage you just to go largely molded in your questions and maybe one or two open ones. They're always good, but don't do too many because you'll just be like working like crazy to try and process all those open questions.

What's interesting. Is we back to the call? So this is an interview. You know, the researcher sitting opposite the customer, just having a chat, asking the questions, obviously, please, please, please record the interview because you'll want to refer back to it and do some other things. But the output of this is some in depth research and analysis.

If you talk to 10 people and they all, haven't had a significant problem, trying to get a particular job or tasks done in this given area, then the big thing is why. And that's where you want to use your, your discussion guide, get some context, probe understand, and, you know, generally I wouldn't go into, um, uh, like a discussion guide with 20 questions.

Cause that feels pretty exhausting. So good measure. Once again, 10 to 12 would be good, uh, for our 30 to 60 minute interview now. So both of those are gonna give you, um, Great insights. Now, I really want to give you a bit of a gift. I want to explain how you can use them together. So once you to imagine that you did your first survey and you've got your baseline, you know, generally who the user is and what their pains and gains are in the first round of, uh, discussion, uh, and interviews that would come after that.

You really want to understand the motivations and be asking why a lot here, you want to know why is this, why is that a lot of people have this problem? Why is time such a big issue? Why is the cost such an issue and really dig in and get some context around not only some of the behaviors associated with the task, but motivations as well.

Now at this point, this is gonna sound a bit crazy. I want you to go back to doing some more quant. I want you to go and do another survey, but what I want you to do now is to start propose to propose those and validate not only the problem, but the solution to what if we did this? How might this work and really start to maybe use some stimulus?

Yeah. Posters, videos, sketches, whatever you want to do. You use that in your next round of Quentin. See what feedback you can get in order to distill from the user, what the problem solution model looks like. Lastly. Go back and sneaking a few more user interviews, a last round of qual here. And in that what you really want to do is understand what it would take for them to adopt this new product or service.

Now, if you do this four part approach, you will get enormous levels of validation. And this is really key to design thinking. This is why I love it so much. It has a test and learn ethos at the heart of it. So we don't do guessing we only do knowing. And so by doing Kwan qual Kwan qual in that order, what you distill is.

A very strong, uh, you know, signal through the noise, uh, validation of where you might go with your given product or service. So I really encourage you to run all of these together. One of my favorites. A quick tip here would be do a survey one week interviews, the next s...