One way you can make a research report really pop is to carefully select and edit quotes from the people involved in the study. For qualitative research, that means pulling quotes from transcripts of in-depth interviews, focus groups, online bulletin boards, social media, etc. For survey research, it means pulling quotes from open-ended questions that…
Clients tell us that one of the biggest challenges they face is writing great research reports. There is the overwhelming difficulty of turning data into stories — making sense of volumes of data without losing the big picture or the details. And there is the difficulty of truly communicating research so that it is heard,…
Market research isn’t dead. It just keeps moving around and re-inventing itself as organizational needs for primary research change. Some of it has moved to operations groups, and now focuses exclusively on Customer Experience (CX). Some of it has moved to User Experience (UX) groups, as we have noted in a few recent articles (6…
I pulled this list of six books on user research from a much larger list of recent books and articles compiled by a colleague in the research industry. These books offer valuable ideas for all types of market research because UX research has moved far away from just website usability. It now encompasses a broad…
Every year I review and suggest summer classes that researchers might consider to learn all the newest techniques for research design and analysis. But for researchers who work in corporate settings, many of those classes are not practical. Who has the luxury of hanging out in Ann Arbor for six weeks to brush up on…
Besides market research, another job I have (as a labor of love) is working for Henry, an organic farmer. He knows a lot more about “marketing” and “marketing research” than a lot of egg-head researchers I know. So if you want to understand consumer barriers when it comes to buying healthy, delicious, and sustainable food,…
The Economist ran an article a few weeks ago from which I have borrowed the title of this post. It puzzles over British politicians railing against focus groups for message testing and trying to understand voter sentiment, while continuing to rely on them as heavily as ever. “In an era when voters are monitored, tracked…
Here is an excellent quote from the New York Times’ Ana Marie Cox in her farewell commentary after two years of conducting in-depth interviews with famous people for the weekly “Talk” column: Being a good interviewer takes skill, just not the skill most people assume: You don’t have to be able to ask or come…
The best innovation in qualitative methods over the last decade is not online focus groups or bulletin boards or MROCs (Market Research Online Communities). It’s the smartphone. Your customers can snap pictures, take videos, and document all their thoughts and behaviors as they go about their everyday lives, generating some of the richest qualitative data…
A really good qualitative researcher knows how hard (and how frustrating) it can be to get respondents to tell us things we want to know. We have our interview guide, with all our questions laid out in a nice logical progression. But often when we ask questions, respondents have less to say than we had…