This the second in a series of blogs around building a successful startup. Blog 1 gave advice on building your product story. This blog explains how to use research to ensure that product story is simple, logical and true.
What is research?
Research isn’t about gathering large amounts of data and statistics - it’s about asking the right questions to inform your decision-making. Every piece of research you do should be linked to a key decision - if it isn’t, then it may provide some useful background information, but it’s unlikely to move you forward very much.
When developing an idea, the first question you might want to ask is ‘What problem are we solving?’ or ‘What need/want are we fulfilling?’ These seem like simple questions, but answering them may not be as straightforward as you think, as it requires a deep understanding of your potential users and their needs as well as the wider environment that they live/work in. The goal of asking this question is to ensure that your product or service will do something useful or desirable, something customers will pay for.
Asking these questions will help to ensure that you don’t make any of these common startup mistakes:
- Solving a problem that doesn’t exist/solving the wrong problem
- Solving the right problem in the wrong way
- Solving a problem that is too niche/obscure for the solution to be financially viable
- Solving a problem that is so complex, even a basic solution will take years to deliver
Usually, if you’re fulfilling a real need, or solving a real problem, solutions will already exist. It’s worth exploring these solutions, as they will give good insight into what users need, what’s missing and what is possible.
Planning and preparing for research
When planning a piece of research, the key things you need to consider are:
- Decisions the research will influence
- What (if anything) is already known
- Questions you want to answer
- Potential constraints to the research (e.g. this is a new area, so content is sparse)
- Potential research methods
You can find more advice on planning research, as well as a simple template for laying out these key pieces of information in our blog on "How to plan effective design research".
Methods
Start with a search engine
One very simple form of research that often goes overlooked is what is known as ‘desk research’ - the fancy term for sitting down and searching for information on a topic. No matter what type of product or service you’re developing, there will be blogs, articles, reviews and reports that will provide valuable insight and information. Depending on the area you’re working in, there may also be a wealth of basic research available in journal articles and books. This includes the nature of the market, other products and services in that space, your potential users/customers and anything else that may be relevant to your business, such as regulation, legislation, policy, changing technology and potential physical or technological facilitators and barriers. It’s also worth finding out if someone has tried to deliver your solution in the past and failed - if possible, learn from their mistakes.
With desk research, it makes sense to begin at a broader, more general level, narrowing the focus over time. It’s very unlikely that desk research will provide all the knowledge you need - as you delve more and more into existing content, specific questions about your focus area should start to arise.
As you’re reading, record what each piece of research is telling you:
- Is it confirming what you thought, or challenging it?
- Are some aspects of what you’re reading confusing or inconsistent?
- Have you come across new concepts or ideas that are relevant to your area of focus?
- What key questions remain unanswered?
The background and context of your product story should be starting to take shape at this point, with a clear and realistic overview of the situation in which your future product or service will begin to develop and grow. You should return to your desk research again and again during the development of your business, as new questions and information come to light.
Talk to those in the know
Once you’ve done your initial desk research, the next step is to talk to industry experts. Many experts are happy to share their knowledge for free, but it is usually polite to offer to compensate someone for their time. They might provide you with contacts or with places you can go to find further information. Use their insight - they can cut through a lot of confusion and provide the sort of detailed, up-to-date information that can be difficult to get from written sources.
Research your user before you begin your build
Your user is the person who will engage directly with the product, while your customer is the one who will pay for the product. They may or may not be the same person - for example, a nurse may use your product but the customer may be a hospital or NHS trust. There may be multiple user groups, who operate in different contexts and need different things. Both the customers and the users must be taken into account when designing your product or service - balancing their needs can be a tricky process, particularly if there is a clash of priorities.
Traditional startup wisdom advises founders to create a prototype or minimum viable product (MVP) and start to push that out to users as soon as possible to see if the product gains traction and to gather feedback. This is the wrong approach. Research with your users must come first.
Without research you run the risk of making many important design decisions, from the basic concept of the product to the look and feel, based on guesswork, rather than on any real understanding of what your users need. If you go ahead and push this guess-based MVP out to the market and you find it fails (as many MVPs do), it will be very difficult to untangle which of those design decisions were wrong - is the basic concept flawed, or are users struggling because the structure of the pages is back to front? There is the obvious risk that you will waste time, money and effort on developing an MVP for a product no one wants, needs or will pay for, but there is also the risk that MVP failure prompts you to abandon the idea, when in fact the idea is solid, it was just your execution that was poor.
If you carry out research with users first, then you can:
- get a clear picture of who it is you’re designing for and what they need before you create any sort of design.
- verify and test design decisions, to understand which ones work and which ones don’t, making it far easier to refine your idea quickly and effectively.
- discover you’re on the wrong track before you’ve spent a lot of money on an MVP that was doomed to fail.
At the same time, good research can often show you another, more promising direction to take.
Ready to get started? Our free resources will help you to plan what research you need.
Get in touch for advice or research support. Sign up to the newsletter to get latest updates delivered to your mailbox.
