Lightning fast research tips to validate your idea
By: Asma Abbas
Tags: User Research, Market Analysis, Ideas, Qualitative Research, Product Validation

Thoughts become things. Isn’t it fascinating that everything you see around you : gadgets, commodities, machines, bridges were just an idea at one point. So, what was the one element or deciding factor that helped people achieve this and build something concrete? RESEARCH

In an organisation or any where for that matter all of us have a lot of good ideas, but we never really know how to validate them, so our ideas go for a toss. This is where research can help you bring them to life with data and user feedback.

Honestly, there are no good ideas or bad ideas until you know what is going to come out of them. All you have to do is research and find out if it’s really worth putting an effort towards the next step.

Credits: Satu Kyröläinen

I don’t know if it’s my recent move to Bangalore ( IT hub of India) or if it’s just one of those long showers, I came up with an idea too. Obviously, it was for an app but the process on how to go about it is applicable anywhere.

My idea was to create a platform between therapists and people who seek them. This was considering the fact that most people don’t find the right therapist on the first go & they end up spending a bomb on trial and error.

🧐 First Things First

Primary Research — You use customers interviews, online research etc to figure out if our product is needed and if it solves a real problem

Get an insight of the context as to “how do people find the therapists?” Platforms like Google, Practo, Quora, Facebooks groups etc.

Were they able to find right therapists on the first try?

Was it easy to find therapists?

What are the parameters that they consider while trying to choose a therapist?

While doing this research I used platform like Instagram poll to gain insights.You can even get insights from platforms like Quora, Reddit, Facebook groups etc. (Whatever works for you)

Secondary Research — Validate, Analyze and ask more questions

Get a pulse of the market and consumers, understand their needs and wants. See if the product can match the same.

Now with a general understanding and with my product idea, I tried to create a survey with more in depth questions to probe further. You can chooose to do a qualitative or quantitative research.

If a user was open to the idea of finding a therapist, these are some of the questions I asked

What do they feel about going to a therapist?

How did they go about trying to find a therapist?

What is the biggest pain point while finding one?

How can the process be better?

What’s the hardest part about finding the right therapist?

What are they currently doing to make the problem easier?

What other products or tools have they tried out?

Have they paid for any of these other products or tools?

How much are they willing to pay for the service

Are they looking for a solution or alternative for this problem?

PS : Of course there could be loads of other questions, these are the ones that I needed to work with.

AFTER ALL THIS, one can finally evaluate if they are a potential customer.

Once you have done this, you can discover patterns and create user segments from it , you might even get an idea from the user research.

Got to start making my own memes shh plagiarism 🙈

It would be this step before you do the big finale step.

Many companies and individuals start investing a lot of time and money in tech immediately. I would recommend adopting LEAN FRAMEWORK.

“The lean framework is a product development framework philosophy that revolved around cutting all of the unnecessary work or effort until you’re absolutely sure you need to do it.” — Cole Mercer

Give your idea/concept more time, use google forms/Excel sheets or even a PAPER to start off with. Do it manually instead of jumping head on with tech. The lean way of doing this is doing everything by yourself in the beginning trying to get as far as you can with least amount of resources.

In my own research, I implemented this step and found that I could dive deep and understand consumer needs in a granular fashion. This would have not been the case if I had taken a head first tech approach. This almost made me feel like the Oracle from The Matrix. I knew what was coming beforehand and take a proactive approach.

👀 I want to conclude by saying

From a business point of view, I kind of get it, the need to ship product/features to the users ASAP. Especially while adopting an Agile approach, this is key, but investing time and money on user research will give you clarity on your users and their expectations. There by you can eventually save effort, time and money.