Every great movie needs an angle that sets it apart. So does every startup. I certainly look to founders to understand their special angle on their market and users. Field research is a great way to do this.
Some founders find their angle through being insiders in a market and knowing exactly where the gaps are. Others do it by starting with a hunch, and iterating on an MVP. Yet others do a lot of customer discovery and user research work to uncover paint points.
User research is hugely underappreciated in general. I think it has special relevance in a country like India which is literally a sub-continent, with so much variety in culture, language, religion and socio-economics.
Good user research answers the “why” behind user behavior as opposed to all the app data you collect which is more about the “what” and maybe “how.” It helps you understand core motivations behind behavior — these tend to remain the same across decades and across changing technological/political/cultural dynamics.
Last week, I interviewed the king of user research — Jan Chipchase, founder of Studio D, in Bangalore. Jan was formerly head of research at Nokia for ten years. He also built out the global research practice at Frog Design. Jan has spent his entire career researching and understanding people and their behavior around the world, all the way from China to India to the USA to Myanmar. Here’s an example of a study he did in Saudi Arabia.
We had a stellar group of product managers, founders and designers in the audience who had great questions. Here are a few of Jan’s points that may be useful for early-stage founders and product managers building consumer services:
- Go into the field for a few weeks at a time. Stay there and get immersed in the environment. Don’t make judgments from an air-conditioned room far away.
- Your field team should be a mix of research professional(s), local fixers who are from the cultural context that you are researching, and sometimes your executives or founders.
- Reduce confirmation bias (mainly cultural bias) by hiring people into your team who are from the target culture/environment where you may not be comfortable
- Do 10–12 in-depth interviews with people from your target base, in their own natural environment. After that, the return-on-time starts tapering off. Perhaps 2–3 interviews per archetype.
- Collect lots of photos and videos and artifacts that can help you contextualize what you are hearing and observing. (A typical immersive project that Jan does may generate 10,000+ photos)
- Try and be a bit rigorous around your research. An example would be rapid calibration where you do the same research in two different environments that you care about. Jan gave an example of sitting at a bus station in Bangalore and Cochin for an hour each and asking the same questions in each place e.g. “Why is the architecture like this?” “Why are they selling tickets in that part of the station?” “Why are people walking in this way?” It helps you understand the similarities and differences and exposes the blind spots we have.
- At the end of each day of your user research work, do an hour-long exercise with the whole team asking yourself “What did we learn today?” “What should we do differently tomorrow.”
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