Bose Broadens User Reach on an Accelerated Timeline With dscout
Sara Ulius-Sabel of the Innovative Insights team at Bose takes us through how her team used dscout as a complementary tool to deepen fieldwork insights.
At Bose, meeting their users’ needs means remaining on the forefront of innovation. That requires a laser-like focus on their users in order to create designs that work for them.
We sat down with Sara Ulius-Sabel, Senior Researcher on Bose’s Innovative Insights team to discuss how the company leverages remote-mobile research to complement their other tools and tactics—a supplement critical to unearthing insights they couldn’t otherwise attain.
Case 1: Learn fast, fail fast
It's safe to say that the Innovative Insights team moves quickly. They often find themselves in need of week-long results in days or even hours.
"We are challenged to learn fast and fail fast, but traditional market research is slow. You’d typically have to find a facility and get it on the calendar, which can take 3-4 weeks. Then it takes two weeks to recruit, plus setup. By the time you're actually talking with someone, it's 2-4 weeks later.
Luckily, we used dscout and their screener. In one of the questions, we included a term and said, "When we say this, what does that mean to you?" Over the course of a weekend, we got hundreds of responses, some typed, some in the form of videos.
We thought, "When we design the study, let's make sure we're probing on all of those major themes from the screener." We realized that the focus or the priority for people around this topic was different than what we thought it was."
Case 2: Let’s do it Live
Sara and her team utilized dscout Live not only for remote interviews, but also to supplement their in-person interviews.
"We would set up Live to capture the discussion from the conference room to record the participant’s responses and another silenced laptop for the moderator. We'd set up another conference room as our virtual backroom, where the team could observe.
That allowed us to record our sprint research sessions using the dscout Live recording functionality. It would give us a transcript as soon as the sessions were over. This setup allowed me to discreetly tag things as we were going and allowed the people in the backroom to make notes.
Coming out of a day of five or six sessions, we would already have our video and transcripts basically done. We'd already had a robust note-taking session because the people watching were taking notes in dscout, allowing us to move really fast afterwards."
The Impact
Bose was able to use dscout to complement their research tools in order to attain more comprehensive insights from their users.
"Being able to do remote qual, mobile ethnographies, journaling, and robust screeners allows you to learn quickly and make sure that the time you spend with people in-person is as rich and meaningful as possible."
They were also able to engage their users on a deeper level than if they were to just stick to their traditional method sets, allowing the users to walk away with a better experience.
“When co-creation is coupled with a diary or journaling, it leads to introspection that sometimes you don't get through other methods.
If I can do something that's ongoing like journaling, it causes people to think about their own actions more closely and provide responses that are more substantive. I had a project where participants told us after, ‘You know, I usually don't think about this aspect of my life. I don't feel like I usually have the time to reflect on this, so I really appreciate it.’”
That's really rewarding as a researcher, to realize that you're actually helping to cast a light on something or helping people to think deeper or perhaps think more sensitively about things that maybe they take for granted otherwise."
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Stevie Watts is the Brand Marketing Manager at dscout. She enjoys telling compelling (rhyme alert) user research stories, growing social channels, and exploring all things video production. As a newer Chicagoan, you'll likely find her at a concert or walking her corgi, but undoubtedly heads down looking at Google Maps.
