I was having a coffee this morning with a couple of clients about a potential project we could be involved in and during the conversation the importance of customer insight came up. We talked around how for a very large investment, like this project, you would want to base your thinking on some pretty sound customer insight (not to be confused with customer research!).

As we were talking, I raised the idea of longitudinal insight gathering. I define this as touching base with same person across the development part of a project in order to obtain insights that can optimise the development process.

Coincidentally, when I got back to my desk and and Google reader I came across a couple of blogs that caught my attention around the same area.

The first about debunking social media myths by David Armano at HBR raised the idea of end-user innovation as social phenomenon that can evolve products and services. The point with end-user innovation is that the users have as much ability to innovate around an idea as we (the developers of ideas) do.  Also the whole panel can feed off each other to maximize the thinking they contribute.

The second blog by Ravi Sawhney at Fast Company talked about the importance of focus groups in the design process. I hate focus groups because the interference the other participants run on someone trying to make a point who ends up tailoring what they say to what is “okay” to say in a public environment. However, I do agree with his thinking about what customers say they do and what they actually do is sometimes alarmingly different. Business history is littered with ideas that flew through “research” that then failed miserably; or conversely great ideas that flopped in “research” but went onto huge success in the real world.  I also agree about the power of observing people in real world environments.

I also read yesterday a  Stage-Gate working paper about the idea of spiral development. The concept of spiral or agile development allows project teams to move rapidly to a finalized design through a series of “build-test-feedback-and-revise” iterations. It allows the team to get something in front of the user, fast – something the they can see, feel, touch and respond to.  Spiral development also allows for smart-and-fast failures; these spirals are relatively inexpensive, and if there are negative responses, not a problem: revise, rebuild and test again via the next spiral.

We have used longitudinal research in previous projects and it worked very well for several reasons.

Firstly, one advantage of this approach is that you take your participant on the development journey. The innovations and developments they are seeing are in context of previous discussions hence make more sense and they can make more worthwhile suggestions than if they saw it cold.

Secondly, in line with the point above, you can spend more time on the innovation than bringing new people up to speed at each stage.

Thirdly, you can now connect this group of people together in online space and get the group forum to work even harder for you as they feed off each others ideas. Asda in the UK is using a panel help them to make ranging decisions in the same manner.

So, how do you do it?

1. Develop your user personas and identify the difference between the primary and secondary personas. (Alan Cooper introduced personas as a design tool in 1998. Cooper’s journal has great background on personas.)
2. Recruit and vet a panel resembling your primary persona.
3. Connect them all together online in a closed forum. Encourage them to carry on the conversation in the forum.
4. Engage them either 1-1 or in affinity pairs. (Never put a group of strangers in the same room and expect the truth.)
5. Engage them heavily at the front end and continuously through the process (spirally).
6. Use ethnographic observation of the participants in real or prototyped situations with things they can see, feel, touch and respond to.

Usual story, great innovation occurs if you open your mind, open your eyes and innovate off the back of what you see and hear.