Customer research is not just about knowing what questions to ask, how to ask them, and then getting an answer, it’s about clearly communicating what has been learned (and the implications that follow) to those who need to hear it at the right time.
However, eagerness, inexperience, and fast approaching deadlines can often get us jumping into the solution phase of discovery & validation planning before fully understanding what the problem is. Remember, your research approach needs as much double-diamond design love as the products and services you’re helping to create.
And this leads to the need for carefully crafted research questions.
A research question is not a question you’d ask a user or customer in an interview, survey, or any other study. A research question states what you need to learn to help you or your stakeholders make a good, data-informed decision.
For example, what factors swing homeowners’ decisions when they’re looking to refinance their mortgage? What would our customers expect from us if we had to migrate their profiles to a new platform? Where should this new page live in our navigation structure to make it findable?
Only once you understand your research questions should you be thinking about how best to go about getting those answers, i.e. picking a suitable research method and scripting any relevant customer questions or tasks. Therefore, your research questions aren’t beholden to quantitative or qualitative methods either; the question itself will shine a light on which of those two paths to go down depending on what you need to learn.
Step 1 – Identify the underlying decisions
Believe it or not, customer research is a risk-reduction activity. That’s how I always sell it because it’s true. By providing decision-relevant insights to stakeholders as and when they need it (or before they know they need it), they’ll be able to make smarter choices that inherently reduces the risk of commercial failures, resources spent in the wrong areas, etc. As such, aim to discover what’s needed as proactively as possible so that the people making those decisions get their answers before the decisions become rushed and at risk of going the wrong way.
Start by asking, “What are the risky, non-reversible, or costly decisions you’re facing?”
Dive into what’s keeping the decision-makers up at night, what stakeholders and teams are arguing about, etc. Only once everyone is aligned on their understanding of these same decisions should you continue.
You’ll know you’ve got a well-defined decision when it’s answerable with a simple “Yes” or “No.” One week it might be the retail team wondering which store layout will be best optimised for browsing and the next week it might be the CEO being asked if the business should invest in redesigning their website. Help guide them.
Step 2 – Identify possible impacts
Now, take a minute to think of all the potential risks and impacts that a bad decision might result in. Recognising these downstream impacts adds stakes to the game which both encourages the decision-makers to free up the resources necessary to capture these desired insights and helps them better see that the cost of good research is far less than the cost of a botched decision.
This time, ask, “What are the outcomes you’d like to see or avoid as a result?”
Step 3 – Write the research questions
With your deeper understanding of the decisions at hand, you’re now finally ready to convert them into the high-level, yet specific research questions that you will not be explicitly asking to customers but used to guide your research approach.
So, your last key question to the decision-makers before you go off and start planning, recruiting, and executing is, “What is it that you’d need to learn that would make you feel confident that you’re making a well-informed decision?”
Take the decision to be made (a question in itself) and wrap in it a question that acknowledges the potential impacts in the context of the perceived problem.
For example, when assessing digital application off-ramps, imagine a Product Manager faced with whether to offer a click-to-call option for customers when their services are offline. Doing so would hurt the organisation’s cost-to-income ratio as calls are ‘expensive’, yet customer support also protects business interests. So, a suitable research question may then be, “What do we need to do to keep from losing potential customer acquisitions when our credit assessing services are offline?”
After drafting your research questions, consider doing a sense check on whether you’re ready to move forward on it using the FINER method to see if you “have the means and interest to conduct the study” by reviewing whether your question is Feasible, Interesting, Novel, Ethical, and Relevant.
And don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone if at this point you are so curious that there’s a million sub-questions that start coming to mind off the back of this key question – don’t lose those.
So, what now?
Now you get to do the fun part – deciding which research method to pursue and executing on that!
Take one research question at a time and identify all of the possible approaches you could take to answer it
In all likelihood, you’ll have a handful of related research questions that you’ll be aiming to gather insights on from each session, so be sure to work out their relative priority based on their risks and impacts to ensure you’re getting answers to the most critical questions if time became a factor.
And, finally, remember that whilst the answers will start rolling in, it’ll almost always take multiple research sessions to have enough data to sufficiently consider a question as solved.
I mean… unless you’re researching whether a pothole on the motorway should be filled and within the first 5 minutes you see car wreck after car wreck… then maybe a single observation session will be sufficient 😉.