September 19, 2019
September 19, 2019
Over the past five years at dscout, I've supported hundreds of research projects—from 48-hour prototype feedback sprints to multi-month homebuyer journeys.
And time and time again I’ve seen the same thing stall processes, derail data-collection, and hold up projects amidst ever-shrinking deadlines. Teams come to the table with research briefs, plans, and documents that aren’t ready for the platform they’re planning to actually do research on.
And this is understandable. Sometimes, we’re concerned about the ballooning number of stakeholders involved in a project—stakeholders who best understand traditional research briefs and are looking for assurance that their questions will be answered. Sometimes, we’re just not sure exactly how to translate our goals and processes to a remote-mobile setting.
In any case, remapping our research blueprints will help us collect the data we need on the efficient timeline remote research facilitates. We’ll go through the most common “remote study design flaws” I see—and tactics you can take instead to ensure your next project is executed smoothly.
A note: we definitely think of remote-qual through a “dscout” lens—but many of these tips can help improve your remote project implementation on any platform. Some dscout specific vocab to be familiar with, in case you’re not a user: we call our research participants “scouts” and our studies “missions.”
Traditional surveys
Sometimes, we just have a ton of questions we want answered. We see the remote research as a way to supercharge our reach, boost our sample size, and heighten our resultant conclusions.
Believe it or not, these are the very characteristics that make surveys difficult to fit into remote, mobile platforms. Think of the participants' thumbs! Surveys are often brought to us at dscout because they’re inherited from another researcher, team, or stakeholder set; it may even be an old survey that produced some "OK" results in the past and is being recycled to save time.
Discussion guides
In a traditional research environment, a good in-person discussion guide can be invaluable. But when we go about the (usually difficult) process of designing one, we generally do so assuming we’ll be in the same room as an interviewee.
We lay things out believing that we can branch into different ideas and explore different lines of questioning based upon a participant's response. As a result, this doesn't naturally fit with remote, unmoderated, mobile research platforms like dscout Diary (although we do have an in-house moderated interview tool called Live that facilitates conversations a discussion guide would benefit).
(Almost all) video prompts
It’s difficult to find the sweet spot between “too much data to analyze” and “not enough data to be confident in your results.” When researchers say they want as MUCH data as they can get, 9 times out of 10, they’re not being realistic. Who can sit through 15 hours of participant videos? I always pause when customers tell me "We just want a lot of videos!"—because there's so much more context awaiting with a few other question types.
Whatever your research document, there are three strategies worth considering before leveraging a remote research platform generally, and a mobile qualitative one like dscout, specifically: 1) Chunk it up 2) Determine your trigger and 3) Start with analysis.
Let's cover each in turn.
Chunk it up
dscout's Diary tool affords discrete research activities called Parts. Each part has its own set of questions, and participants can be required to complete a “part” as many times as you’d like (yup, just like a diary).
The most successful projects I see in dscout use these parts to their advantage. A common framework includes an intro, outro, and a part in the middle participants complete multiple times.
It's this second part that harnesses the magic of remote qualitative inquiry; it’s where you'll take advantage of experience sampling methodology. Instead of mashing each and every question you have in your research document into a single, ever-scrolling part—why not chunk it up? This will provide you a lot of flexibility. For example, you can design a “multi-moment part” to collect:
Paired with an intro part (where you ask a few questions to get to know your sample) and an outro part (where you ask your sample to reflect, co-create, or ideate on an concept), you've got an impactful and digestible study design that will answer your stakeholders' bigger questions without all of their smaller ones explicitly included.
Determine your trigger
The "trigger" lets participants know when to submit a moment in your mobile qual study. The trigger also sets the altitude and/or focus of the study. Types of triggers include behavioral (e.g., anytime you want to snack), emotional (e.g., moments when you're feeling productive), activity (e.g., when you use our app), and others.
You can't (shouldn't!) ask everything in any remote study, so choose your trigger wisely. This allows you to fast forward through the “not-very indicative” stuff and focus on the data that’s most meaningful and impactful.
Another way to think about triggers is the phrase “show me...". At dscout, we often phrase our triggers using "show me" language because it grounds participants in an actual, in-the-wild moment, and helps fight recall bias. Partnering a "show me..." sentence with a trigger makes for clear instructions for your participants, which in turn produces on-target data you can more easily (and quickly) make sense of.
Here are some specific triggers we recommend frequently:
Start with the end
Making sense of your data is the most interesting and difficult part of research. Set yourself up for success by thinking about your analysis and synthesis timelines as you design. Remote qualitative data is thick and multifaceted, containing different input types (e.g., photo, video, open and closed-ended questions). Here are some things to consider when designing that will save your future-self time:
Conducting qualitative user research remotely offers flexibility and time-saving benefits when you can't be in-field. And because you're not in-field, dscout and other platforms require some tweaks to your research design.
Most traditional qualitative research is augmented and benefited by a remote component, but it takes a shift in approach:
Remote research platforms like dscout, if used strategically, can serve as an additional set of hands on your team. Keeping in mind these strategies will get you rich but digestible data that you can use to make a real impact.
Charles got his start investigating the motivations that drive behavior as a film student. As a Solutions Consultant, he’s helped hundreds of dscout customers meet urgent and strategic research needs that impact critical business metrics.