Audience research
The brief
Write a 250-300 word post noting your progress so far. Identify one challenge and / or an obstacle and one SMART action to resolve the issue.
My experience in week seven
The source material this week takes a deeper look into audience research. This was the first time on the course I felt the content referenced an area where I have very little to no experience and it has caused me to question why.
Once I took the time to assess this, I realised that the reason for this is largely due to the bulk of my industry experience having been on the creative and technical side; I started as a designer, then a technician, then a technical lead and more recently a technical project manager and technical director. When you consider my career path it’s not hard to see that it’s the creative and technical areas where I have most experience and this is simply because these are the areas that interest me most.
When I’ve worked within an agency like at Tribal Worldwide for example, I knew about audience research being carried out but I was shielded from it and more often than not there is someone else, or even a whole other team (namely Marketing or User Experience) who is responsible for undertaking the audience research and by the time the idea gets to me it’s quite mature from a UX / UI perspective and my role is more about architecting the best technical solution for the wires and designs that I’ve been given.
When I’ve worked on a single product focused team like at Bloom.fm for example, there was certainly more exposure from a high level into what is going on outside of the technical scope, and to a degree I did get some insight into audience research. From this experience I was exposed to three areas where this was used and had value:
- Validating our idea: We’d proven there was a market and we’d identified our audience, research was then used to verify the level of interest the audience might have in a solution like the one we were proposing
- Improving our user experience: We’d created an experimental menu system that was proposed to drive the heart of the user experience, in order to verify it would be intuitive before introducing (and later patenting) we performed user testing that was directed at weighing this system against a more generic system
- Improving our product: We’d used data capture to grow an interest network of 500 subjects within our audience, we gave these users exclusive pre-release access to the MVP product and we introduced carefully placed questionnaires throughout the app in order to gain insight into the users experience. We also introduced logging to understand how the users were engaging with our application
When it comes to my own intellectual properties like Roadle for example, sadly I’ve done too little from an audience research perspective to validate the idea and it’s come back to haunt me. This is because, quite frankly, the research component doesn’t excite me that much and I’m guilty of wanting to get started on either the creative or technical parts which are of more interest. The problem with this of course is that you end up wasting countless hours designing or developing something that is potentially not viable or not well suited to the audience that then needs more hours of development to change direction.
Despite the fact that audience research does fall more under the marketing or user experience umbrella and I am more interested in design and development, I cannot ignore it’s importance if I want to create successful IPs. Aside from this, I’ve always believed that as a business owner it is good to have some high level understanding of every part of my company so that I can better lead my team and manage client expectation.
Tying this to my project
Being that my current focus is on creating an MVP for the Escape Room application, and I have validated that there is an audience for the app, I thought it would be useful to test the interest in the solution. I’ve created the following SMART action to support this:
- Making it Specific: The goal is to create a questionnaire and hold a structured interview with members of my audience to see whether they would be interested in certain key features of the application
- Making it Measurable: I will interview five subjects
- Making it Attainable: I will perform all five interviews over two weeks
- Making it Relevant: The response will be used to identify whether the idea is worth continuing to develop or whether I need to rethink things
- Making it Time-Based: I will take the first week to create the questions and then interview one subject each day over the following week
Summary
In the above post I’ve outlined my level of experience within audience research and identified why this is an area in which I am lacking. I’ve acknowledged that historically with my own IPs I’ve not done enough to validate my ideas before development and that it’s caused me problems. I’ve created a SMART action to use the interview method of research outlined in the Qualitative Research Methods video to gauge the interest for the Escape Room application within my identified audience.