A company’s research practice starts the moment a founder has an idea. You ask yourself who else might have this problem? How many of these people exist? How have they tried to solve it? What worked or didn’t work about those solutions? Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’ve already been doing research. But that research probably felt unstructured, yielding useful evidence in inconsistent ways.
People mistakenly believe that research is only about the act of learning. Learning is critical to research, but there are lots of things you can spend time learning about that will have little impact on your actual business, product, or customers. Learning, in the context of research, should serve a purpose.
A research process is a structured, repeatable way to understand customers and build a knowledge foundation.
Good research is the process of gathering and synthesizing evidence in service of making decisions. This is something that many of us do on a regular basis, whether that’s deciding where to go on vacation, choosing what to wear for the day, or — in the context of organizations — identifying how to best serve our customers.
In general, research tends to follow these steps:
The specific approaches can vary a lot, depending on whether you want to observe someone do something or have them share their attitudes and perspectives, as well as whether you’d rather go deep with a few individuals or go broad with hundreds. Experiments and beta test/pilots are other ways you can gather the evidence you need to make your decisions.
Research approaches can vary on a few dimensions, but two of the most important are whether you’re looking to describe something (qualitative) or count something (quantitative), as well as whether you’re interested in attitudes or behaviors.
This creates a 2X2 as follows:
| Quantitative | Qualitative | |
|---|---|---|
| Behaviors | Experiments | Testing |
| Attitudes | Surveys | Conversational Research |
In the following pages, we dive into each of these kinds of research approaches.