5 minutes to read. By author Michaela Mora on May 24, 2021 Topics: Analysis Techniques, New Product Development, Qualitative Research, Quantitative Research
The use of qualitative and quantitative research in new product development often varies depending on the field and expertise of the stakeholders in the product development process, but using both is nothing new.
The use of consumer research in product development can be traced back to the origins of marketing research in the CPG industry, which traditionally has combined qualitative and quantitative research methods to develop successful products.
For many years, methods such as focus groups and concept tests based on surveys have been the dominant approaches. They are still in use today, but with new technologies and the proliferation of digital products (e.g. software, apps, websites), a call for a more agile process came in the ’00s. It was taking too long to get user feedback.
The ability to quickly create digital prototypes made it possible to allow for improvement through iteration based on continuous user research.
Unfortunately, instead of focusing on getting faster to user feedback, the focus has been moved to speeding the whole product development process while cutting costs. Ironically, user research gets often squeezed out of this race.
Quality decline, in both qualitative and quantitative research, is one of the unexpected consequences of this movement.
Designers, product managers, engineers, and developers, with little training in research, have taken over product development, especially in the digital realm. Most have a “UX/UI” label attached to their titles as if this on its own speaks to their research expertise.
Companies make it worse when they search to hire unicorns. They want people who can do everything (research, design, development).
Let’s be clear. They can’t. There are not enough hours in the day to do it all. There are fewer to do it well. Many are unaware of the training that takes to keep your biases in check when you are both the creator and the evaluator of a product. They are rarely, if ever, a good representation of the product users.
When I ask non-researchers in the UX field if they do user research, I always hear some variation of “We talk to our users.” If I dig deeper, I invariably discover informal conversations without clear direction (to be more natural) or with too much focus on specific product features (to solve the backlog).
As “talking to users” seems like something anybody can do, the quality of user interviews, the dominant qualitative research method used today, has gone downhill.
Qualitative research is unstructured and exploratory in nature. This is the best approach when we don’t know what to expect when we trying to define the problem or develop an approach to the problem. Moreover, it is very useful to go deeper into issues of interest and explore nuances related to the problem at hand.
Qualitative research often uses small samples, which by their sheer size are not representative of the target market we are trying to understand. Even if we include people with certain criteria, there are often not enough of them to be able to generalize to a larger population.
This is means, qualitative research is not the best approach for Go/No-Go decisions.
The most common qualitative data collection techniques are:
Qualitative research techniques tend to generate large amounts of unstructured data despite the small samples. Consequently, analyzing qualitative data to give it some structure to reveal hidden patterns in nuances is a time-consuming and arduous task.
Doing a short summary based on memory from an interview or discussion or a cursory glance at transcripts, (if any) leads often to a massive loss of rich insights that qualitative data can generate.
Unfortunately, the analysis task can’t be delegated yet to text analytics tools based on natural language algorithms yet to lessen the burden of the qualitative researcher.
You should use Qualitative Research in new product development to:
Primary quantitative research is conclusive in its purpose as it tries to quantify the problem and understand how prevalent it is by looking for projectable results to a larger population.
This type of research uses structured data collected from a large number of representative cases, which allows for statistical analysis.
The most common quantitative data collection methods are:
In new product development research, we collect data for specific analysis techniques that support new product development decisions. Depending on the objectives, we can choose one or more of the following:
Quantitative Research is useful in new product development to:
In conclusion, combining both approaches when developing new products, either physical or digital, will give you a solid foundation to make the right decisions for your business grounded in customer insights.
A version of this article was originally published on February 9, 2010. The article was last updated and revised on May 24, 2021.
Share on:
Subscribe to our newsletter to get notified about future articles
Subscribe and don’t miss anything!
Subscribe
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
