Telescoping

For a variety of reasons, there will be times when you can't maintain a long-term relationship with users. Your development cycle may be too short, your users may be too mobile, or you may be unable to sustain relationships with them for some other reason. Regardless, there will be situations where you want to know how people of different experience levels and lengths of usage experience your product over time.

One way to collect such information is to telescope your research. An optical telescope flattens out perspective, making distant items appear right next to closer ones. Telescoped research compresses time by bringing users of different experience levels together simultaneously.

Normally, when recruiting for a research study, you may get participants with a range of experience. Some may be newbies and some old hands. This is desirable in general since you get a perspective on the kinds of issues that affect people through their use of your site. By inviting a range of people, you can see which issues affect everyone across the board and what users value regardless of how long they've been using your product. Sometimes you may intentionally skew the recruit list in favor of one group or another.

Telescoping takes this idea one step further. If you keep track of the experience level of the people you invite, you can recruit people specifically for their expertise or for the amount of time they've been using your product. By keeping track of the problems and perspectives that people have based on their experience level, you can deduce the kinds of changes that people are going to go through as they use your product for long periods of time.

For example, running a focus group series with people who have been using your service for a month and a second series with people who have used it for a year will tell you how people's desires for the service change with time. It won't tell you when those changes happened or the context in which they happened, but you can see how people's visions differ.