The Question:
A large technology client was facing the decision of whether or not to continue funding a top-secret, resource-intensive product that could serve the retail industry through emerging technologies. They needed to better understand their target consumer, collect vast amounts of complex data at scale, and do it quickly.
To gather enough evidence for executives to make a decision, our client team needed a large sample of 500+ sessions in a complicated, repeated-measures design under tight security conditions given the nature of the data—and, the findings needed to be delivered quickly so they could make a decision within 2 months for whether to proceed with the product.
We Answered:
AnswerLab offered the experience, size, and expert team needed to quickly and flawlessly execute the study. We quickly built a dedicated team of 14 researchers, IT support, and wardrobe specialists, and consulted with a retail executive to understand best practices and build a custom approach.
We turned our office into an eight-room research lab, reconfigured for the study to evaluate the effectiveness of the potential product, get consumers’ reactions to it, and collect highly-specific data points across a diverse pool of participants, taking into account gender, size, and body shape.
As you can imagine, body size and fit can be a sensitive topic for many people, which meant this study required careful planning and communication to work with participants at this scale. To ensure success, we:
-
- Developed participant communications and consent forms that set clear expectations for the study
- Coached our team members on how to create safe and comfortable environments to build trust with participants
- Gave our researchers the tools to address and solve for tricky situations as they arose
In the first phase, we conducted a higher quantity of shorter sessions, then dug deeper in phase two, conducting much longer 90-minute sessions over a longer period of time.
550 Research sessions
8 Simultaneous research sessions in 8 research lab rooms
14+ AnswerLab dedicated team members on the projects
We coached the engineering and product teams on how to get the prototype in a format appropriate for testing, designed the research protocol, executed the research, and delivered findings within their timeframe.
‘Nobody but AnswerLab could have pulled this off.” - Main client
The Impact:
The client not only received the high quality insights they needed to make their decision—which was a resounding ‘yes, continue’—but we also helped them identify several places in which their team, which had little experience with the target consumer, had failed to understand the needs of the primary audience for the technology. This gave them the steps and direction they needed to take the product to the next level, making a big impact for this client team.
...
The ever-expanding capabilities of emerging technologies present new opportunities for better user experiences. Learn more about our emerging technology capabilities.
