Can't do face-to-face research? Here are the alternatives
With the current climate, it is not possible to travel to conduct face-to-face research (interviews or ethnography) with your international customers. But you need to move forward with what you’re working on so you can keep the business running. What are other ways which enable you to understand your customers and markets? What could you do to ensure your products and services are fit-to-market and what you have planned for your markets are still relevant now and going forward?
Here are some of the recommendations I’ve been giving and services that I’ve been offering as alternatives to face-to-face user research:
Conduct the user interviews remotely
Task-based user research
Expert (global and local) insights research and guide
Assess what you might already have and know
The ‘action now and plan for next steps’ exercise
Expert/Heuristic UX fit-to-market review
Global cultural guide
Conduct the user interviews remotely is of course possible. Even before the lockdown happens, remote user interview has always been one of the popular research methods. This approach is a close substitution of face-to-face as you will still have access to your local customers to get their input directly (remotely from different locations). It possesses some challenges and limitations as compared to face-to-face, although there are always ways to minimise and mitigate them. You might not get to immerse yourself in the local culture, be in-person visiting the participants’ house or having a close connection with them, but you can still get their stories, feedback and thoughts without incurring any additional travel expenses. However, depending on the country you want to do research in (e.g. unstable or lack of Internet connection) or the topic (e.g. high sensitivity topics) or the types of customers you want to talk to (e.g. require careful handling), I sometimes would advise against this approach and recommend other research alternatives.
Task-based user research This is when we don’t talk to the local users directly, but still have access to their thoughts and feedback through various well-planned tasks. For example, we can provide them with a clear guide and have them complete a journal or diary for a period of time (supported by other media such as audio, photos, images and/or videos). Alternatively, we can communicate with them (e.g. via WhatsApp or their most familiar text messenger, or emails) every other day to get their input on a specific set of relevant questions.
Expert (global and local) insights research and guide This approach does not involve your customers (which often also means lower cost). The expert research could focus on the overall insights about a country/market as a whole, or it could be on a specific area (e.g. regarding their offline and online social aspect, about their economy, payment and subscription, etc). How I see this approach being useful when I do an expert insights research and review for my client (sometimes with complementing insights from my local teams) is not just to state the obvious, but to communicate the insights from the cultural and experience point of view. This means I would be digging into their history, politic, traditions, infrastructure and other more, then make the connections between them, where possible. I believe, a specific culture or mentality often stemmed from one or more triggers (such as the history of the country or its political situation many decades ago). That specific culture will then have a knock-on effect on, for instance, the locals’ behaviours or on how the country functions. These are powerful insights. Therefore, even if you are still planning to do some kind of user research (as mentioned above: Face-to-face, remote or task-based), it is still useful to have this expert guide in hand. It could provide you with a holistic view and full picture of your customers and the background stories that inform their behaviours, attitudes and mentalities.
Assess what you might already have and know. Companies often are in one of these scenarios: Feeling overwhelmed by various information and data gathered from different sources about one (or more) markets, or feel like they don’t know much about their customers and markets. In both cases, it is not easy to determine what they should do next. When all the information scattered around in different formats and possibly pointing to different directions, it can be challenging to know what to do with them. Most importantly, there is a danger that some ‘insights’ might not be accurate or valid, but was purely based on individuals’ subjective views (e.g. “Our local distributor says the only way to increase our sales in Japan is to replace the 2-dimensional wheels on our product to multi-dimensional ones because that’s what Japanese consumers want.”). The consolidation exercise I’m suggesting here is not purely amalgamating the data and stories that you already have. While going through the collected information and data, I would also be expert reviewing and assessing them. I would discard ‘insights’ which are not valid so you don’t waste your effort on them. I would identify which of them are facts, strong hypotheses, weak hypotheses and unknowns (based on my and my local teams’ expert knowledge and experience) so you can make good use of what you already have, to be efficient with the efforts you are going to put forward. Based on the outcome of this exercise, I’d normally also provide recommendations on next steps. The benefits of this exercise are, therefore, multifold.
The ‘action now and plan for next steps’ exercise is to define what you can do now (when we are still in the midst of fighting COVID) and what you need to plan for short- or mid-term goals (when things start to return to normality or countries and their economies slowly to re-open). Bear in mind that some markets will recover sooner than others. How can you support them when you and the markets are at different stages? You might or might not already have a plan set before or during this lockdown period which you would need to reassess. Other next steps could also be identifying the knowledge gaps (what you are not sure or not know about your customers and markets) and have a plan on how you could fill in those gaps. This activity could be a continuity of the last activity.
Expert/Heuristic UX fit-to-market review of your products and services to assess if they fit the individual markets and what you can do to improve them. This is a good exercise to conduct in general for sanity check. The expert review would (and should) discover and validate the components within the first and second level of culturalisation of this framework (Respect Establishment and Cultural Experience) and to a certain extent, the top-level too (Experience enhancement). The output of this review shouldn’t be only highlighting any positive adaptations, pinpointing potential cultural issues and obstacles (e.g. from logo and naming, to design to marketing to payment), but also providing recommendations on the best (most time- and cost-efficient) way to fix, amend and revise so that your product and strategy is fit-to-market.
Global cultural guide for a specific country is good when you are in the design phase and have a limited budget. The bespoke global guide a chosen market could be a design-specific guide (e.g numerical and address formats, fonts) or one that also includes some facts, insights of a specific country. It covers mostly the Cultural Experience level of this framework - elements which might hinder your customers’ experience when using your products. The details in the report are often tailored to be relevant to your product and industry.
Choosing the right approach(es)
These approaches, of course, are not mutually exclusive. One or more of them can be combined to complement each other, to give you a fuller picture and more accurate insights about your customers and markets. Some focus more on having an in-depth understanding and insights, while others prioritise more on the instantaneous fix and actions.
Some approaches might be more appropriate and cost-efficient to you than others depending on various factors (e.g. your products/services, your customer types, your current business focus, the stages you are in at this moment, etc). If you’d like to chat about the best approach option(s) for you and your business, please get in touch.