Chapter 15: Others Hard Work: Published Information and Consultants


Overview

Not all research has to be done from scratch. You can find out about important aspects of your audience without resorting to doing research from first principles. The judicious use of published information and consultants can save time, energy, and (occasionally) money when trying to know your audience and understand how they experience your product. It's even possible to get information that would not be feasible to collect on your own.

There are a number of reasons for going outside your company walls to acquire audience knowledge. Obviously you can often save money and time by going to external sources if the information you're interested in is readily available, but it's not just economic reasons that justify outsourcing your research. By going outside your immediate development context, you can quickly acquire a high level of perspective that you probably wouldn't be able to re-create in-house. You probably don't have the resources to do a broad survey of all of your possible target audiences to find out whether they have the basic needs and meet the basic requirements to use your product, but a market research company does. And although it may involve some amount of interpretation and extrapolation, a perusal of high-level data may quickly focus your research by eliminating some obvious problems. Moreover, a different organization is likely to see things with a different perspective. Approaching the same audience with a different set of goals and assumptions produces results that are different from what you can collect. This can be invaluable in giving depth and understanding to your own results.

But this is not a trivial process. Finding trustworthy and appropriate information is hard, and interpreting it correctly is even harder. And consultants aren't the cavalry coming over the hill either. For all of their value, their efforts need to be managed as carefully as you would manage your own research. External research is an important resource, but like all powerful tools, it has to be used carefully.




Observing the User Experience. A Practioner's Guide for User Research
Real-World .NET Applications
ISBN: 1558609237
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 144

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