Compelled to do more with less, companies are looking at community-driven insights to hit the mark on the first try.
The still lingering possibility of a recession has triggered an efficiency craze. Companies are doing more with less, especially businesses that incorporated a digital component to their operations since the pandemic restrictions hit.
Forward-thinking companies have developed a three pronged approach to efficient growth:
- ResearchOps: What we build and why?
- Design: How a product looks and feels?
- DevOps: How to build and deploy?
In each one of these cases, insights are key: when you need to do more with less, you have to build things that are going to hit the mark. There’s little margin for error. It’s also about scale and automation: how quickly can you get customers to try your product or service.
The benefits of introducing insight to the research and design stages is that it allows those teams to make mistakes earlier and find the right solution by the time you’re deploying and scaling in DevOps.
It goes without saying, the design and building processes use different kinds of insights:
Discover and understand > Generative research: Understand customers’ needs, motivations, and jobs-to-be-done, and identify opportunities to better serve them.
Design, develop, and validate > Evaluative research: Research and testing during prototype and development stages to evaluate solutions to problems and opportunities.
Monitor and iterate > Performance evaluation: Track the effectiveness of products, features, services, and the brand overall. Works also as an early-warning system for things going right or wrong.
How leading global brands are driving product innovation
Teams that can’t find the right user at the right time are essentially paralyzed by their inability to move at the same pace as their product and design team. Even if they do, research isn’t centralized and teams operate in silos. The challenge is to establish a single source of truth that the entire organization can use to inform their decisions.
The renewed focus on efficiency is leading to efforts to chase consolidation and eradicate redundancies. To achieve this, research teams must:
- Streamline participant qualification. Too many teams start from scratch for every single project. This causes a massive time lag incompatible with the speed product and design teams move today.
- Boost response rates and sample quality by engaging participants.
- Improve participant experience. Participants want to be heard and seen, particularly if they volunteer. Traditional methodologies are one-directional and often fail to accomplish this.
By inviting verified users into their communities, brands can create and improve on the products that better meet their customers’ needs. In turn, those customers get to have a voice in the product development process.
It all starts by identifying a need.
Companies can track the KPIs that matter to them, visualize, and identify themes and trends over time. Within minutes they can access their communities and identify what personas or user groups would provide the most pertinent feedback.
You may ask your community members to participate in activities to identify areas of improvement. Users can also interact with wireframing or prototyping technology and answer follow up questions without having to navigate to a different page. You can even embed interactive prototypes, have your customers walk through planned UX changes, and react in real time.
You can ask questions that unveil intrinsic motivators, assist feature prioritization, or capture surface thoughts in an unmoderated video response environment. You can also use these question types to test product messaging and ensure it resonates with potential customers.
Share results internally to demonstrate the value of the power of community and of consumer decision-making.
Community makes it easier for active members to build on each other’s ideas and create something truly innovative. By sharing results back, fostering discussion, and highlighting new features and functionalities, you’re all but securing the health of your community.
With Alida Community you can combine transactional and behavioral data and qualitative feedback in a single hub, so you can create a 360 view of each customer. Find out how.
