The Problem

• Ethnography offers an invaluable look at the lives of research participants.  There is no substitute for being there!  However, conducting ethnography is time-consuming, expensive, and often inefficient.

• Social media tools such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr give you access to your customers in a way never before possible.  Yet, security is an issue and the conversation cannot be directed when necessary.

• Online research is a remarkable tool – with chats and bulletin boards we can talk to a diverse group of people anywhere in the world at any time.   But sometimes we simply need to see what people are talking about, watch them use a product, and hear the emotion in their voices.

The Solution

VideoDiary takes the convenience of an online bulletin board, marries it with the power of YouTube, and adds a healthy dose of security to create a research tool that allows you to see what your customers have to say.

An equivalent to ethnography it is not.  However, it does offer a compelling and close-up look at research participants in a variety of environments and situations that ethnography often cannot replicate.

And because we created VideoDiary from scratch, it’s chock full of features that will appeal to moderators and clients.

Enough talking though.  In the spirit of VideoDiary itself, you really need to see it to appreciate it.  Call us.

Note: VideoDiary can also be rebranded for use by other moderators and research firms.

Focus groups get a bum rap and for good reason.  Often they’re boring, predictable, expensive, and time consuming.   Why?  Because many moderators simply do not know what they are doing.  It’s easy to call one’s self a moderator.  It’s hard to be a good one.

Here are some of the things we think about before we conduct our groups:

• Recruiting - The foundation of any good group is having the right people in it.  We work with independent / non-facility based recruiters who are the best in the business.

• Time - There’s never enough time to do all you want to do in a focus group.  So how do we use the time efficiently making sure not to leave all the “good stuff” until the end when participants are packing up to go home?

• Technique - Getting “below the surface” is critical to any good group.  Too many times the moderator and client can get suckered in by what seems like a perfectly rational comment.  The use of specialized techniques is critical to get participants out of traditional modes of thinking.

Beyond focus groups, we conduct a variety of other in-person qualitative work including in-home visits and “store shop alongs.”

Online chats were the first type of online qualitative to emerge in the late 1990s as technology attempted to replicate traditional methods.  Similar to in-person focus group, they require that all participants and clients attend at the same time.  And just like an in-person group, the moderator “leads” the discussion.  Yet, versus an in-person group, there is:

• A more rapid pace enabling coverage of more topics.

• Quicker and often more blunt feedback.

• Less respondent-to-respondent interaction.

Chats are ideal for quick, gut type topics such as logos, ads, and rough concepts.

The typical online chat includes seven to eight participants and lasts for 90 minutes.  Clients can observe the discussion and make private comments to the moderator.  A full transcript is available at the end of the discussion.

Whenever clients mention that their buyers are all over the place, have no time, and like to talk a lot, we always think bulletin boards could be a good option.

Versus other methods, bulletin boards give people time to stretch their verbal chops and discuss our research topics at length.  Some example projects that would be ideal for bulletin boards include:

• Exploring experiences - understanding what people do, when they do it, who they do it with, and why they do it.

• Reacting to a plethora of product ideas.  We understand that R&D often has more ideas than you think it’s possible to cover.  Bulletin boards help lessen the pain.

• Refining a concept.  Because boards usually occur over several days, we can often schedule down days which give research teams time to refine concepts based on a previous day’s feedback.

Certain “rules” apply when it comes to how many participants we can include in a board and how long we run them.

Want to hear what one of our clients thinks about boards? Read the attached interview with one of our clients. This interview also appeared in Views, the Qualitative Research Consultants' Association quarterly journal.

When it comes to usability testing, our mantra is “test early and often.”  Our research has shown that a small number of users can discover a disproportionately large number of errors on a site.  What does that mean to you?

For starters, it suggests that you not blow your budget on a large sample usability study too early or too late in the game.  A prudent use of funds is to invite a small number of participants to test paper prototypes and HTML mock-ups early on and then repeat as site development progresses.  In other words, it is better to conduct a larger number of iterative studies than a smaller number of larger tests.

We can conduct studies in many different formats and venues some of which include web streaming so you never have to leave your office.