We have two high-level questions to ask during product development:
* Are we building the right product?
* Did we build the product right?
Generative research helps us define the right product by understanding customer pain points and treating our customers as valued collaborators.
As an experienced researcher, I have led teams into homes, restaurants, parks, libraries, retail stores, and tourism areas like San Francisco's marina to inquire about specific areas that are working and not working with various consumer products. The insights that have resulted from my visits with these customers have helped greatly improved products made by Motorola, Amazon, Netgear, Dell, and others.
Product teams are fast moving, more so than ever before. Some of the methods that I use to help inform them and stay ahead of their development are:
* Quick online surveys with fewer than five questions
* Cafe Feedback to quickly answer specific, finite questions of employees during lunch
* Contextual user testing to gather authentic, organic feedback on a photo app experience that cannot be replicated well in the lab.
* Lab-based usability studies with quick-turn results
My work with these techniques has recently helped define Motorola's Camera hardware specifications, Camera software and Gallery software, including front-facing LED flash and a wider field of view for the camera.
What happens after a product ships? How is it being received? How is it being represented in stores? If you don't know the answers to these questions, you may be iterating on the wrong part of your product.
My post-release evaluative work has helped prioritize v2 changes for the Kindle Fire tablet, Netgear routers, Sirius satellite players, and Yahoo! Music/SanDisk music players.
I have designed and managed build-out of design research labs for Kno, Dell, Zing, and Lab126/Amazon. Each project was built for a fraction of what a full-service design firm would charge and encompassed a simple video/audio set-up that was easy to learn and use.