Chances are high that you have done some research before. This article will thus introduce five of the most common research techniques that you can use when further researching and validating your use case idea idea and the associated business outcomes.
The below table offers an overview of the estimated time, number of participants, when the technique is most useful and which technique complements it best along with the participants you need to involve - for example subject matter experts (SME), your IT team, or the intended target audience.
Research technique |
How much time is required? |
How many participants are involved? |
When is this technique the best? |
Which other technique can enhance results? |
Who needs to be involved? |
| Interview study | 30 minutes per interview | 5-10 interviewees | When little is known and too many factors that should be measured are unclear. |
Combine with surveys based on interview results. |
Members of target audience, SMEs |
| Surveys or questionnaires | 10-15 minutes per survey | 50-200 respondents | When you know what you want to measure or when you want to quantify status quo and suggested solution. | As part of co-innovation partnerships or A/B testing to validate results. | Members of target audience, SMEs |
| Co-innovation partnerships | Several hours over the course of weeks per partner | 3-5 customer organizations or departments | When you have strong partnerships based on trust or want to develop these. | Can include all over techniques during the course of the partnership. | Members of target audience, SMEs |
| A/B testing | 30 minutes per participant | 20 - 100 participants depending on setup | When you want to test differing approaches and do not want to rely on assumptions. Typically a bit later in the process or if the idea is fully fleshed out. | Combine with surveys to get measurable feedback. | Members of target audience, SMEs |
| Web analytics | Analysis time varies widely | N/A | When you want to quantify your idea or want to understand current user behavior better. | Can be the basis for questions in an interview or survey study. | Internal web team |
Table: Overview of research techniques
Interview study
Qualitative interviews are a great way to gather a lot of contextual information from your target audience. To ask the right questions, you should ensure that your subject matter experts are involved in developing the interview guide and conduct interviews sequentially, so you can learn from previous interviews.
Interviews are often time-intensive as they typically also contain transcription efforts and a deep analyses of the content through several SMEs or project managers to avoid biased interpretation. They are however a great tool to understand varying pain points and value propositions of participants of the same process, e.g. legal counsel, procurement department, supplier,and personal assistants.
Surveys or questionnaires
Surveys/questionnaires are typically great vehicles if you would like to validate or reject hypotheses and have an understanding of what you want to measure. Often surveys include open-ended questions or statements that are rated on a Likert scale. Open-ended questions should not be excessively asked and the questionnaire length kept to a minimum to avoid survey-fatigue.
Consider building your own survey in BRYTER in the same Application to keep all content together and to create a first touchpoint with BRYTER for the possible end-user.
Co-innovation partnerships
Co-innovation partnerships with customers allow you to build on a pre-existing relationship of trust which typically means that non-disclosure agreements are already in place and early designs or prototypes can be shared. The customer can help you identify target players in their organization to provide feedback or answers in interviews and surveys. Typically reaching out several times in an iterative approach during later phases of the ABC is also not an issue, so not all questions of interest have to be asked at once.
For the customer, this technique also offers several advantages: They are involved early on and can help shape the product to fit their requirements best. As early adopters, they could also get a head-start on their competitors or figure out early how much time or resources they could save and conduct a proof of concept (PoC) for free.
You should include more than three customers or, in a corporate context 3 - 5 departments or teams to avoid gearing your use case idea towards a customer development project.
A/B testing
For this technique to be most useful, you typically need to have a prototype or more detailed wireframes and sketches. But A/B testing, that is the presentation of two versions of the same solution (Option A and Option B) to users and their feedback or interaction with it, is a powerful way to analyze different approaches and to avoid relying on gut feeling alone.
For your use case idea, you might want to present varying ways on how to kick off the process, different entry points (mobile vs. intranet vs. email), and several modes to deliver the outcome (download vs email vs direct upload to a connected system). Based on the behavior of participants or by offering different options in a survey and assessing the answers (so called vignette study), you can make a more informed decision.
Web analytics
Your web and marketing team typically have access to consumer data that can also help validate or further refine your use case ideas. The gathered consumer data can allow you to gain insights into the attitudes and actions of the customer. Your web analytics team will be able to help determine usage or search patterns and which content resonates most with an audience.
This can also be used internally in your intranet to find out which topics resonate most with your internal audience. Another possibility would be to analyze the topics and volume of incoming emails to find out which existing processes are most reliant on email communication.
The above techniques and their results should always be documented internally and are a good starting point to understand and define the scope of your use case idea better. This will allow you to plan resources better and to communicate the value proposition opposed to the status quo.