So you’ve convinced your organisation or a client to conduct research, you present the results and everyone is impressed and glad they went through with the research. Then what?
Option one is that the company runs with the brilliant idea you’ve validated through research and spends a lot of time, money, resources and effort building a product/service. A few months down the line and this product/service isn’t been widely used within the company or by the customers.
What went wrong?
They didn’t do continuous and iterative research as they build the product.
This brings us option two which is to test, test, test! The company may have had their initial idea validated by real people; however, they didn’t continue to research and test with users as they build the product. The product or service could have veered far away from the initial idea and stopped meeting the user’s needs by the time it was developed. This; therefore, leading to a product that wasn’t useful for the people it was created for.
This brings us to why it is important to foster a research mindset within your company or for your clients and be the one that advocates for continuous and iterative research.
These are a few ways to do this:
- Show the monetary value of research – A common view of stakeholders is that it is too expensive to do multiple rounds of research; however, but showing them how much money they could waste if the product or service is a failure and not utilised it will motivate to spend more money on research.
- Upskill within the business – Iterative research doesn’t have to be expensive. You could upskill an organisation or members within your business to be able to implement basic research or testing at smaller touchpoints throughout a project.
- Use case studies – Show how other big global businesses have used simple research to improve and launch successful products or services.
- Share resources – Share interesting articles and podcasts showing the power of fostering this research mindset.
At the end of the day, As Kurt Lewin said – “No research without action, no action without research”.