Market researchers: how fast can you qual?
Today, market researchers are under intense pressure to be more efficient (due to financial strain) and to generate insights faster (thanks to agile processes). While traditional qualitative methods already struggled to keep up with the pace, COVID-19 was busy disrupting face-to-face processes.
However, this was a good thing. It pushed many market researchers to search for better, more creative ways to get things done. It encouraged them to try things that maybe they never would have tried in the past.
As we know, qualitative and quantitative insights are better together. However, the pace of qualitative research can make it hard to leverage them both. What would it mean for you to get qualitative insights faster? What if you could have videos of your target audience queued up and ready to analyze in days instead of weeks or months? Luckily, there are platforms available to speed up the process.
This guide will give you strategies for getting qualitative insights faster and leveraging them to make your quantitative research more effective and productive.
What's inside
Lean on the power of remote research
Some research isn’t suitable for a lab. While there’s a time and a place for rigorous in-person testing, tackling projects earlier and breaking them up into smaller bites is better suited for remote research.
Here are some of the benefits of remote research.
Work faster and cost-efficiently
When testing remotely, you’re free from the logistics of in-lab testing. Without the constraints of scheduling and traveling, you can shorten your testing period drastically without sacrificing the quality of your insights.
Due to the speed and low cost of remote research, easily fine-tune messaging and concepts for your larger tests. Before jumping into a full-blown quant study only to realize there's a small error, test early phases of the project remotely. This will give you confidence that you've done everything you can to ensure the project's success.
Avoid geographical constraints
It's easy to get stuck testing close to home. That works for local businesses, but what if you're selling outside of your immediate surroundings? With remote testing, you can easily access a global population on a budget. Feel confident that you're presenting insights that are representative of a wider population without geographical constraints.
Before the pandemic, Deliveroo researchers conducted most of their studies face-to-face which meant they stuck close to home. However, they found that UserTesting made it easier to speak to the international market. Watch the video below to hear the full story.
More context equals better insights
Just because you receive the results remotely, it doesn't mean that your subject is removed from the real experience. With mobile capabilities, you can have live conversations with your subjects or analyze self-recorded videos of them out in the wild.
Get contextual insights that only emerge when a product or service is used naturally or when a subject is in their own home.
Streamline recruitment
With UserTesting, Freeletics creates and analyzes tests faster and with greater input. They were able to reduce the complexity of the recruitment process and create a faster and smoother process for discovery and hypothesis testing.
Test in-store experiences remotely
When COVID hit, Dick's Sporting Goods had to temporarily close 852 stores. However, that didn't stop the sporting goods chain from creating a contactless curbside pickup option and testing it remotely. The results were a 1,000% increase in online pickup business.
Speed up analysis
With UserTesting, the GoDaddy team drastically reduces time and resources spent on gathering insights by easily duplicating tests. This cuts down on time spent developing studies significantly. GoDaddy researchers are able to conduct more sessions and expedite their analysis.
Make quantitative research more effective
When asking market researchers how they feel about qualitative research, we got a lot of groans and heavy sighs. Let’s face it. Qualitative research is a struggle, and it takes a long time to do right—months even.
By the time you’ve reached a conclusion, it’s often too late. As one researcher joked, by the time her team finishes a qualitative project, stakeholders barely seem to care about the results anymore.
Speeding up the process of qualitative research, in a responsible way, of course, can be a game-changer for market researchers. With a fast turnaround, you give stakeholders more time to react and you position your work to have a bigger impact on the decision-making.
So, let’s go through how UserTesting can help you do that.
1. Combine the benefits of quant and qual
While quantitative data helps you see the big picture, qualitative adds color and context, adding human perspective to the numbers and helping you to tell a richer story. When combining both, you can get the why behind the numbers without sacrificing the quality of insights.
For example, you could run a survey through survey monkey through UserTesting or you could use our integration with the Qualtrics XM Platform. It enables joint customers to augment Qualtrics survey results with human insights from UserTesting.
Tammy SnowFormer Senior Director of User Research at Expedia Group"We're constantly doing a qual-quant mix of testing with UserTesting and Qualtrics. The two things working together provide an additional layer of confidence for the entire team."
2. Present rapid insights from a wider population
When looking for a qualitative insights solution, look for the flexibility and control to get feedback from anyone, even in narrow demographics. You’ll want a solution that streamlines subject recruitment for you. You should be able to:
- Easily schedule live same-day interviews with contributors
- Simplify or avoid the recruitment process. For example, UserTesting manages all test distribution, notifications, incentive payments, and more.
- Streamline the process of defining and building out audiences with Saved Audiences and screener questions.
UserTesting’s panel is called the UserTesting Contributor Network and it’s the largest first-party validated group of real people from around the world ready to deliver their perspectives. Thanks to such a large and diverse network, over 5 million test sessions have been completed with over 80% of sessions return within a few hours. With a focus on quality, integrity, and relevance, over 85% of rated sessions receive 4 or 5 stars from our customers.
Lydia HowlandHead of User Research at Deliveroo"My CEO praised my team for the speed and quality of our insights through UserTesting. The platform gives us clear decisions in less than a day."
3. Capture video of real people
Remote qualitative studies give market researchers fast, actionable feedback from real people in just a few hours. Market researchers can do this two ways:
- Unmoderated testing - use a software program to automate your study. For example, UserTesting Contributors get a list of tasks to perform on their own while their screen and voice are being recorded. They complete your test without a moderator present in their environment or at an in-store location. When they’re done, you receive the results in the form of a video, and we verify that each contributor is a real human being.
- Moderated testing - conduct in-depth interviews with UserTesting’s Contributor Network, your customers, or an alternate panel of your choice with live interviews via Zoom. Conveniently connect in real-time and enjoy two-way, interactive video conversations designed for market researchers to easily draw insights, observe non-verbal cues, and ask open-ended questions. Scheduling is flexible with 24/7 availability.
While this may sound too simple for market research, that’s the beauty of it. While the platform is simple and easy to use, your expertise is what brings insights to life. Videos are deeply influential. Easily pull together relevant clips to create video highlight reels. Embed clips and highlight reels into your presentations to capture the attention of executives and stakeholders.
Getting insightful, persuasive videos from well-targeted participants quickly increases your productivity and leaves more time for analysis. Plus, video feedback makes it easier to study people's reactions without the unintended intimidation factor that face-to-face interviews may sometimes have.
4. Use think-aloud methodology for different research scenarios
Video results are rich with data. You can see more than what people are saying (or not saying). You can speed up or slow down the video, toggle between the contributor’s face and screen recordings, and even scroll through audio transcriptions.
There’s no end to how researchers use qualitative insights. Here are a few examples:
Pretesting surveys
No one wants their data to go down the drain. We all know the pain of launching a survey online to find out a question was unclear or otherwise problematic. With the flexibility of a remote qualitative tool, easily run a quick test to iron out the details before a big launch.
Light ethnography
Do light ethnographic research by turning on the backside camera on a mobile device (link).
Shop-a-long
With a remote qualitative tool, you should be able to test journeys that cross online and offline seamlessly. It’s possible to do in-store research remotely. While it’s possible to have a project that would benefit from a more traditional shop-along, likewise there will be times when viewing an in-store experience remotely is exactly what you need.
Automate your analysis when possible
While it's nice to be fast, it's more important to be correct. We’ve shown you how to speed up the process of collecting qualitative data, but you can also automate parts of your analysis.
When choosing a qualitative research solution, make sure they offer ways to streamline your analysis. Check their product road map to make sure they’re prioritizing machine learning and other intelligent insight methods.
You can look for things like:
Intelligent insights
These are machine learning models trained specifically to analyze feedback and identify the moments that matter. Quickly identify moments when contributors express positive or negative sentiment. Access an at-a-glance view where important themes have been automatically tagged and are ready to be viewed. Easily focus on the most interesting responses with a summary of common keywords for verbal questions grouped by sentiment.
James LaneUX Manager, AAA Club Alliance"Having the ability to explore customer sentiment, probe for clarity, hear from targeted users, and share that learning quickly and easily…it was a game-changer for us."
Analytics and visualizations
A good qualitative research tool should offer deep analysis capabilities, including metrics, transcripts, and reports. Depending upon the type of questions or tasks included in a test, you should get different types of analytics and visuals. For example, for open-ended verbal prompts, the tool should analyze responses and present results in a keyword visual. For multiple-choice questions, it could present a bar chart summary of the responses tagged with associated clips that customers can select to watch specific video responses. When reacting to a digital asset like a website, the tool should record and identify where contributors click and scroll, and link researchers directly to the point in the video where each interaction occurred.
When asking several contributors to try and return a product on the website. A visualization tool should help researchers quickly identify how many contributors successfully find the ‘returns and refunds’ section of the site, which ones struggle, and which ones take the longest and shortest paths to get there. If the viewer is trying to quickly understand potential problem areas, they can use these powerful visualizations to browse through several videos in a matter of seconds and go directly to the points in the video where the contributors appear to get lost.
Collaboration and sharing
Lastly, a good qualitative research tool should offer several collaboration services to help larger and more distributed teams work together to capture and share insights. Teams can organize results in folders, invite others to workspaces, and manage workload and reviews with approval flows. Permissions and approval flow control who can create and launch experience tests, who must use pre-created templates, and which users need their work to be reviewed and approved first. They can be shared either directly to an email address or through pre-built integrations with other collaboration solutions such as Slack, Jira, and Trello.
If you've read this far, then you're probably interested in trying this out for yourself. After all, the prospect of speeding up qualitative research almost seems too good to be true. Check out the resources below to start a trial or get more information on fast qualitative feedback.
