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usecases-pdd-product-user-testing

Physical environment and product user testing

Product Design & Development

Gather visitor reactions to new displays and environments. Observe the visitor experience and capture opinions, pain points and areas of delight to refine retail environments, displays and services.

How the process works

  • Work with our Research Managers to design testing protocol for physical products or environments
  • Deliver physical products kits or instruct participants to visit the location of the environment to be tested
  • Use mindswarms remote video capture to gather participant responses to their experience using products or visiting environments
  • Conduct inquiries to fully understand user expectations and the cognitive models they associate to the product and environment experience
  • Capture the product/environments context and the artifacts and elements influencing the user experience

Methods used

  • Product and environment experience trial kits and instructions
  • User narrated walkthroughs of physical product usage and environment visits
  • Ergonomic audits of product and environment features
  • Contextual tours of related elements influencing the experience

Timing and cost

  • Product Concept Test can take from 7-14 days or more to complete depending on study complexity
  • Typical projects involve 15+ participants
  • Fees including screener development, study management, recruiting, hand-selecting the best candidates, QA of videos, respondent incentives, and transcripts @$500/person for US respondents, and $1,000/person for international markets (additional incentives may be required if travel or retail visits are required)
  • Fees for optional analysis start at $7,500 for a report on a 15 person study, and $12,500 for a 30 person study
  • Fees for optional edited video start at $5,000 for a 90-120 second highlight reel with title cards and music (B roll and motion graphics are extra)

Deliverable

15 participants each answer 10 questions using the video on their smartphone or laptop. That produces 150 x 1 minute video clips and corresponding transcripts (both Google Speech, and a parallel service that includes a human’s eyes to capture important nuances).

All delivered via a cloud-based link that is shareable, and assets that can be downloaded (videos in MP4 format) to be used to bring the insights to life for presentations, and highly engage audiences

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usecases-pdd-prototype-analysis

Early stage prototype analysis

Product Design & Development

Develop products with the right features. Test early stage prototypes and successive iterations to identify the features that will ensure market success.

How the process works

  • Identify prototypes and prepare physical prototype for participant delivery or digital prototypes for upload for participant feedback
  • Work with our Research Managers design the testing protocol and possibly assemble a participant panel to test multiple prototype iterations over time
  • Use mindswarms remote video capture to gather reactions reactions to prototypes
  • Use inquiry methods to delve deeper into user expectations, needs and desires.
  • Capture the product’s intended context of use, environments and artifacts that influence user experience

Methods used

  • Prototype testing kits and instructions
  • Cognitive usage walkthrough with physical and digital prototypes
  • Ergonomic and cognitive analysis of features
  • Context of use tours
  • Asynchronous remote interviews to gain a deeper understanding of product expectations, desired and unnecessary features

Timing and cost

  • Product Concept Test can take from 7-14 days or more to complete depending on study complexity
  • Typical projects involve 15+ participants
  • Fees including screener development, study management, recruiting, hand-selecting the best candidates, QA of videos, respondent incentives, and transcripts @$500/person for US respondents, and $1,000/person for international markets (additional incentives may be required if travel or retail visits are required)
  • Fees for optional analysis start at $7,500 for a report on a 15 person study, and $12,500 for a 30 person study
  • Fees for optional edited video start at $5,000 for a 90-120 second highlight reel with title cards and music (B roll and motion graphics are extra)

Deliverable

15 participants each answer 10 questions using the video on their smartphone or laptop. That produces 150 x 1 minute video clips and corresponding transcripts (both Google Speech, and a parallel service that includes a human’s eyes to capture important nuances). All delivered via a cloud-based link that is shareable, and assets that can be downloaded (videos in MP4 format) to be used to bring the insights to life for presentations, and highly engage audiences

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usecases-pdd-customer-unbox-product

See visceral and emotional reactions first-hand as customers unbox product

Product Design & Development

If you’re unsure what the out of box experience is like for consumers, watch and learn as they open product packaging and provide unvarnished reactions to the process.

How the process works

  • Identify product(s) to investigate in the study
  • Develop a research protocol to explore how to best capture out of box consumer reactions
  • Recruit key audience segments (e.g. Loyalists, Casuals, Lapsed)
  • Use Fabric remote video capture to have participants provide insight on the unboxing experience, including perceptions of messaging, packaging materials, first sight of the product, and product use

Methods used

  • Brand blind: in some cases, new product concepts are shipped without any branding to gauge reactions absent of any brand influence
  • Pre wave: in some cases, we recommend a pre wave of perception gathering prior to having product shipped to customers’ homes
  • Product use and preparation: we have shipped food products and had consumers prepare and eat product on video. We have shipped make-up to women, and had them apply it and take it off, while recording their reactions
  • Packaging parallels: we have had consumers show examples of other packaging they either like or dislike to learn from other types of packaging consumers relate to

Timing and cost

  • Out-of-box experience projects can take from one to four weeks or more to complete, depending on study complexity (i.e. if a product needs to be sent to participants, it can take longer). 
  • Studies can be set up in minutes and usually involve 15 or more participants. Videos, transcripts, and analysis through Fabric’s AI show up as soon as participants complete their surveys.
  • The “Bring Your Own Recruits” option starts at $50 per person. Each person you invite from your list answers up to 10 questions per study, yielding 10 x 1 minute video responses per person. Includes transcripts (machine & human for accuracy), and access to our sentiment and emotion based AI.
  • The “DIY + Recruit” option starts at $250 per person, and you create a study recruiting from our proprietary database of over 250,000 respondents. Each person answers up to 10 questions per study, yielding 10 x 1 minute video responses per person. Includes screening, transcription (human + machine for accuracy), and access to our proprietary sentiment and emotion based AI.

Deliverable

15 participants each answer 10 questions using the video on their smartphone or laptop. That produces 150 x 1 minute video clips and corresponding transcripts (both through Fabric’s AI, and a parallel service that includes a human’s eyes to capture important nuances).

All delivered via a cloud-based link that is shareable, and assets that can be downloaded (videos in MP4 format) to be used to bring the insights to life for presentations, and highly engage audiences.

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usecases-pdd-customer-journey

Find unmet needs along the customer journey

Product Design & Development

Identify, understand and catalog the unmet needs of your current customers along their customer journey to inform existing product and service improvements.

How the process works

  • Identify the journey to investigate in the study
  • Develop a research protocol to explore different points along the journey continuum
  • Recruit key audience segments (e.g. Loyalists, Casuals, Lapsed)
  • Use Fabric remote video capture to have participants provide insight on their journey, touching on rational or emotional touch points

Methods used

  • Before, During and After check-ins
  • Physical environmental reporting (e.g. drive thru menu ordering experience, in store signage perceptions)
  • Diaries (e.g. report on the changing relationship with music having a smart speaker in the home)
  • Micro moments (e.g. have consumers report when a key event occurs)
  • Compare the ideal journey to the actual
  • Identify pain points and frustrations (ideally with a Show + Tell type demonstration)

Timing and cost

  • Studies can be set up in minutes and usually involve 10 or more participants. Videos, transcripts, and analysis through Fabric’s AI show up as soon as participants complete their surveys.
  • The “Bring Your Own Recruits” option starts at $50 per person. Each person you invite from your list answers up to 10 questions per study, yielding 10 x 1 minute video responses per person. Includes transcripts (machine & human for accuracy), and access to our sentiment and emotion based AI.
  • The “DIY + Recruit” option starts at $250 per person, and you create a study recruiting from our proprietary database of over 250,000 respondents. Each person answers up to 10 questions per study, yielding 10 x 1 minute video responses per person. Includes screening, transcription (human + machine for accuracy), and access to our proprietary sentiment and emotion based AI.

Deliverable

Example: 10 participants from your network each answer 10 questions using the video on their smartphone or laptop. That produces 100 x 1 minute video clips and corresponding transcripts (both through Fabric’s AI, and a parallel service that includes a human’s eyes to capture important nuances).

All delivered via a cloud-based link that is shareable, and assets that can be downloaded (videos in MP4 format) to be used to bring the insights to life for presentations, and highly engage audiences.

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5 Advantages of Mobile Video Over In-Person Ethnography

Leslie Stone, director of strategic services for Ogilvy NYC, cites 5 advantages of mobile video over in person ethnography (watch her video interview here): liberating respondents to speak freely, saving time and money, seeing contextfirst-hand, hearing first person accounts, and getting teams up to speed quickly on a topic.

Following a recent mindswarms project with Leslie Stone, director of strategic services for Ogilvy NYC, mindswarms sat down with her in Brooklyn to talk about her perspective on using mobile video ethnography. You can watch that video here.

In our conversation, she raised a number of great points about the advantages of mobile video ethnography over in-person ethnography, and I’d like to take a closer look at a couple of them:

1. Liberating participants to speak freely

In no other methodology are people so self-directed.

Leslie Stone

Moderator bias and group-think are two common factors in live interview sessions. Mobile video surveys invoke the online disinhibition effect, whereby people communicate more openly and honestly without another person present because they feel less afraid of conflict or disappointing the interviewer. You can read more about this in my LinkedIn article, 5 lessons in Mobile Video Study Design for Emotional Results, about our study of Millennials & Home Cleaning.

In the study we did with Leslie and the Ogilvy team, we were asking people about their homes. Therefore, we had people answer questions from inside their homes and even give us a narrated Show + Tell tour of their favorite room. From a study design standpoint, because people are typically very comfortable at home, they’re more relaxed and natural in their responses than they would be in another setting. Additionally, getting people moving and doing something unscripted helps people speak more freely because they’re not the focus of attention.

2. Saving time and money finding customer truth

Leslie says she used to travel all the time, conducting in-depth interviews (IDIs) and ethnographic studies. Today, her responsibilities at Ogilvy mean she has less time for field research. Nevertheless, for the world-class, award-winning work that Ogilvy does, she still needs to achieve a deep understanding of consumers—and there’s no substitute for hearing from and observing people directly.

One huge benefit [of mindswarms] is that I don’t have the time or resource to go do this myself. It’s amazing to go home, come back in the next day and just watch videos. It saves a gigantic amount of operational time

Leslie Stone

Despite the fast turnarounds made possible by online research tools, you don’t want to sacrifice quality for speed. (People want good sushi, fast; not just fast sushi.) That’s where totally DIY video survey platforms sometimes fall short.

With mobile video ethnography, it’s especially important to ask the right questions in the right ways. For that reason, at mindswarms we collaborate with researchers to design studies, closely screen participants, and curate the resulting video responses to keep quality high. We view our platform as an effective technology enabler of the fundamentally human-to-human act of ethnography.

3. Seeing context first-hand

One of the great strengths of mobile video ethnography is being able to see what’s in the periphery as people answer questions and to peer into people’s lives and environments.

Some of the richest insights came back from what we saw. And sometimes, that’s the richest and the biggest point.

Leslie Stone

That’s why mobile video is a great fit for in-home qualitative research. As Leslie said, “It’s a no-brainer for anything in the home. And ‘anything in the home’ could be any consumer goods or any food or anything in your closet or shopping.

4. Hearing first-person accounts

There’s tremendous power in hearing directly from consumers in their own words. Mobile video ethnography is a great tool for collecting first-person stories rich in detail and emotion. It helps you understand the language actual customers use to talk about a brand, product or experience. It also helps you confirm you’re not making assumptions based on false familiarity.

Brand decks can be beautifully written and clearly articulated, but seeing and hearing how those ideas, platforms or concepts are manifested in the lives of real consumers helps bring teams closer to the people they are trying to reach.

5. Getting colleagues up to speed quickly in an engaging way

I think it’s fair to say a lot of business presentations are…anesthetic. Uninspired and unengaging. Video, however, has become the new language of the world, as you’ve seen in the explosive growth and volume of online video. Bringing that rich, vivid cultural element into the world of business is a highly effective way to get a point across in an compelling way.

For the ad campaign Ogilvy was developing, Leslie needed to bring a broad array of stakeholders up to speed, quickly. So she selected clips from our mobile video study to share with the client, her creative team, PR and others involved in the ad campaign.

Even if you had already had your brief but you just wanted to pump it up with extra insight or give people thoughts to react to, [mindswarms] would be great. Or in the middle of a pitch to show clients people talking about your strategy, it helps to engage them. mindswarms can also be helpful when you’re stuck.

Leslie Stone

The richly visual content and first-person stories were powerful for validating ad campaign strategy and building empathy for the campaign audience. This helped the Ogilvy team develop a unique and compelling ad campaign that connected with people in a genuine way.

You have to find a human connection to your audience if you want to elicit a human response.

Leslie Stone

You can watch watch our video interview with Leslie here.

On our website, you can also download several case studies showcasing the effective use of mobile video surveys for ad campaign testing and business pitches.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Leslie Stone for sharing her insights about the experience of using mobile video for qualitative research

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