Humans v tech

Editor's Notes

• #3: Sally: Good evening. Katharina and I are delighted to be here with you this evening to share our thoughts on the role of humans vs. technology in research techniques. We’d like to start with a brief introduction on who we all are and what we do, then discuss the background on the question we’re asking about the role of humans vs. technology in research. We’ll take you through our thoughts with the help of a case study of Untapped Innovation working together with BECOCO.
• #4: Sally: Untapped Innovation is an end to end agency that helps clients make better products & services. We believe they are better because we are untapping 3 things - human needs, technical possibilities & future trends. This leads to brilliant ideas, faster.
• #5: So as we untap unarticulated human needs, we then fuse these with technical possibilities and future trends to turn them into actionable products, services and ideas. There are four founding partners and we work with around 50 global expert associates to help clients achieve their business growth through their innovation programmes. Let’s talk a bit more about how we do this
• #6: Sally: Talk through innovation cycle We were contacted by Katharina from BECOCO back in 2017 to ask for our help with defining who to target with their proposition, what the ideal experience for these consumers should be and translating this into a great product, which Katharina will now introduce you to.
• #7: Katharina – talk through what BECOCO is and offers
• #8: Katharina – we saw increasing numbers of people buying fashion online but with one of the highest levels of return, which was causing a loss to retailers of around £20 billion per year. We knew that BECOCO had the fashion style expertise and artificial intelligence capability to help shoppers make purchase decisions that would be better suited to their personal body shape, colouring and style preference. We brought Untapped in to help us on a journey of consumer research to define the target consumers who would most benefit from BECOCO’s offering, what each target needed and help create innovative ideas and build working prototypes of our online user experience.
• #9: Sally: Before we get immersed into the world of fashion, let’s take a step back and look at the question of humans vs. technology in research. Technology is an integral part of our daily lives, enabling us to connect with others, efficiently get our work done, run our homes and so on. Artificial intelligence is playing an ever greater role, also in offerings like BECOCO’s.
• #10: Sally: If we look at research techniques, it’s impossible to name them all, but technology has transformed the industry in terms of speed, cost and the insight digital tools can bring. The biggest challenge to the researcher in this rapidly developing and innovative market, is finding out what’s needed and what’s possible. In a moment we’ll talk about how Digital Diaries and an Omnibus type of survey helped us with the Becoco project but we’d like to touch on a couple of other examples of tech enabled research techniques.
• #11: Sally: Online Communities are a great way to reach specific targets of consumers globally and get their instant feedback in a cost effective way. We use them qualitatively in co-creation incubator sessions where we work with a client over a few days to develop conceptual ideas, then can get overnight feedback on these concepts from a community of target users, so the next day the team can rapidly refine the ideas and start to build minimum viable prototypes. This sort of approach takes months off a product development cycles and is hugely motivating for the team to see real time insights. We also set up futurist online qualitative communities of both cutting edge consumers and category experts that help us to work with clients defining their innovation programs for 10 to 20 years into the future. We ran a hugely powerful community recently in India, China and the US where we shared mood boards and future technology ideas over the course of a week to identify strong insights and optimize ideas, defining a future innovation program. It’s becoming easier to reach these sorts of future focused people, if you no where to look. We also wanted to say a few words about Concept Testing. This technique has been around for over 20 years but has evolved to be increasingly tech-enabled with fewer face to face interviews globally. With the increase in high quality online panels, it’s becoming faster and cheaper to validate concepts. Whether we’re working at the Front End of Innovation with clients needing to make choices about where to invest when developing their products or services or with products already on the market that need their stories told, we work with clients to screen large numbers of concepts quickly to identify the winning options.
• #12: Sally: With every trend comes a counter trend, so while we are all increasingly connected via technology, there’s an increasing need to unplug and rediscover human interactions and experiences away from technology. While technology provides the speed, convenience and efficiency we crave in every day living, human interactions fulfill our higher order emotional needs around a sense of belonging and self worth.
• #13: Sally: Similarly when it comes to market research, our premise is that the critical “why” behind the “what”, the deeper insight including higher order emotional needs will be most likely to come from face to face market research techniques. We must not forget that many non digital market research techniques are still evolving to bring enormous value and we would argue that without these, it’s almost impossible to design products and services that don’t touch the humans that use them at an emotional level. At Untapped, we’re not a fan of the traditional 8 person focus group. It’s hard to dig below the surface and get 8 people who don’t know each other to open up about their feelings and spend the time with each getting to the why behind their needs. We feel there’s a place for mini groups of like minded people to debate the pros and cons of new ideas or prototypes, for example in a co-creation setting or incubator programme. These sorts of incubators can be very fast moving and engage multi-functional teams to work closely together to design minimum viable prototypes, starting with 2D sketches or rough mock ups. By bringing consumers into these sessions at pivotal moments, we can watch them engage with the prototypes, set the context of them being rough and ready and have them help us design in the critical attributes.
• #14: Sally: Big companies are often drowning in big data. More sophisticated tools are enabling us to make sense of this data to guide our innovation and strategic choices. However, we believe that the biggest ideas will come not only from harnessing the power of this big data, but digging behind it to look for human stories. Once we find an opportunity, how will this idea affect people? We use a Story methodology at Untapped to connect consumer, product and trend insights to write story-led ideas that put humans at the centre. That would be a whole topic for a different talk, but wanted to mention it as a very human research tool.
• #15: Sally: The argument we are making here today is not humans VS technology but humans AND technology in research. We see both as critical and as researchers, need to get adept at knowing when to reach for each technique. All too often we see clients spending a lot of money on gathering vast amounts of data, but not being able to action it. We believe the sweet spot comes when you make informed choices about which technique to use for what and this, in our experience, includes a healthy balance of digital and face to face techniques to bring scale, efficiency and depth. So where do you start in considering what sort of technique to choose?
• #16: Sally: Too often, clients come to us and say “we’d like to run some focus groups or we’d like to run a story workshop”. We always start this discussion by asking them what their big business questions and research objectives are. Consider for each stage of your project, what do you need to know? In working very closely with your client or stakeholders, you’ll have a detailed overview of what is known already and where the gaps are and then you can determine the best way to fill these gaps. Ask the client and yourself a number of questions to help you design the right research. What will be done with the outcome? What are the timing and budget constraints? How in-depth do you need to go with each consumer or is it numbers that are required to validate an idea? Do you need to observe people interacting with the category? Is this best done by going into their home or having them keep a video diary? We often find a combination of both works best. For example, having them keep their own diary means we don’t disturb their usage habits but then spending time with them face to face afterwards having seen their diary allows us to probe the why behind the what. Let’s now to look at some real examples on the BECOCO project.
• #17: Sally: As with every project, we started with our research questions and then we could decide which was the best research technique to answer this question. It’s like having a toolbox of both human and tech led tools woven together and we need to pick the right tool for the job each time. Let’s look at each of these in a bit more detail.
• #18: Sally: The first thing we needed to do was define the type of female online shopper that would be most interested in BECOCO. BECOCO already had a database of Instagram & Facebook followers engaging with its daily style tips, so we were able to analyse these followers and put together mini personas. But we were looking for something a bit more concrete than this.
• #19: Sally: As we discussed the business needs with BECOCO, including their persona hypotheses, we also learnt about time and budget constraints and knew we needed to tap into an existing large scale community in the UK to ask them some specific questions, so turned to Quick Survey, powered by Toluna. We could define who to survey from a rep UK population and quickly input our 15 questions. Within 24 hours, we had 343 responses back and could use Toluna Analytics to cut the data any way we chose. A powerful example of technology enabling a fast, agile, cost effective research technique.
• #20: Sally; Once we had identified some target user groups we then had to answer the question of what these different targets wanted in terms of an ideal experience with a platform like BECOCO. We knew we needed to get to know these women really well and spend time with them face to face which meant some in-depth ethnographic style qualitative research. But before doing this, we wanted them to capture a snapshot of their daily life in the fashion world for us, so designed an online diary with an app they can access on their mobile phones.
• #21: Sally: We asked them about shopping and dressing occasions to get a feel for how they were making shopping decisions and how they were puttlng outfits together and get them to take photos. We also had them select and upload some images to represent their thoughts and feelings about their current and ideal experiences of shopping for clothes online. We use imagery and other metaphors such as music to try to get to unarticulated needs and emotions, since often consumers can’t tell you exactly what they would like or are feeling. We then explore this rich material when we meet them face to face.
• #22: Sally: Once we’ve captured these insights digitally, we were ready to meet the ladies in their homes to understand how they were interacting with fashion and shopping online for clothes within their daily lives. We had them take us through their diary entries, showing us their wardrobes and how they were putting together outfits. They told us all about the images they had selected and we used metaphor ellicitation techniques to help unlock the deeper feelings and motivations. These were all avid online shoppers so we watched them engage with online sites as well as those offering some online fashion advice today. It was important to not just hear their views but watch their actions and facial expressions as they interacted with these sites.
• #23: Sally: Another research question we nearly always ask is culturally, what’s going on within a category and neighbouring categories today and what’s coming in the future, to provide us with the cultural language, imagery and idea inspiration to project our design work into the future.
• #24: Sally: This brings us to the world of Semiotics and we find this beautifully compliments qualitative research. (Talk through qual research vs. semiotics)
• #25: Sally: Once we had determined who to target, what they wanted, which cultural elements and trends would shape the future of this category, we were able to give BECOCO specific design criteria to prototype against, building in different elements to suit the 3 different targets. As these early prototypes emerged, we then needed to get our target consumer feedback on them. We used a combination of closely intertwined tech and human led techniques to do this.
• #26: Sally: We recruited a panel of the 3 target users and had them evaluate the early BECOCO prototype online in their own time. We wanted to test out how well the questionnaire could differentiate the 3 different targets and how good a user experience it was to ask about colour, shape and style preferences.
• #27: Sally: We then met with these women face to face over a few weeks. We probed their reactions to the online prototype and observed them while they interacted with the newly developed platform and discussed with them what was working page by page and what wasn’t. We were able to set the context of it not being a fully developed prototype and therefore try out some early ideas without biasing the results. We could also observe their emotional reactions and probe for unarticulated responses, to ensure that the prototype had a much needed human feel to it. So we’ve talked about how Untapped went about selecting a variety of tech and human led tools to help BECOCO identify a target audience and design a great user experience for them. Let’s now hear from Katharina about the outcome and what she did with it.
• #28: Katharina – As a start up company, I have investors that I’m accountable to and I also need to sell my proposition into retailers. I need data to do this but as an AI tech-led proposition, I want to stand out from competition and show my point of difference by showing how we have put real humans at the centre of the product design. The combination of tech and human led research techniques that Untapped used allowed us to keep to a tight budget, move quickly, yet design a very human centred proposition.
• #29: Katharina: The first big point of difference for BECOCO was the identification of 3 different target consumer groups. It was obvious that one size doesn’t fit all and we were excited to be able to design a proposition that could offer 3 different experiences. All 3 groups of consumers were very interested in the BECOCO proposition of buying clothes online from a site that could offer them bespoke advice based on their colouring and body shape. But these 3 groups of women were also very different in terms of their level of style confidence and the type of help they wanted with online advice. It was great to be able to go into homes with Untapped to meet all these ladies for ourselves. The 3 different target profiles were really brought to life when Untapped presented back to us. We could see the value in the smart agile online diary combined with the time invested getting to know the women face to face. The outcome from the Semiotic work was very consistent with what we were hearing from the consumer but added so much richness and perspective around why today’s online style advice is missing the mark. There were numerous examples of how current sites don’t relate to the world of fashion, don’t engage with consumers emotionally and feel detached, more like a form you’d fill in at the doctors than a fun shopping experience. It also then gave us very detailed examples of how we could design in ideas, language and imagery to form a close relationship with our target consumers from the outset, make the user experience engaging and enjoyable and put them at the centre of the world of fashion. So armed with target consumer profiles and a cultural guide of what was needed, Untapped were able to translate these into exactly what the product must do. They defined each step of the online user experience. For example, they defined what the right way is to establish a style relationship when someone first downloads the shopping app. And for each of the different user types, what does Becoco need to do to show, for example, a Fun Fashionista that we understand her and are listening to her and so on. We had 10 user experience design principles to work from, each with very clear guidelines of how the user experience should be designed and pointed out how to differentiate between the 3 targets. This enabled our BECOCO designers and programmers to build a first prototype of the online experience, page by page, with different options for the different targets. While not all the prototype elements we shared back with consumers during the co-creation panel work were appealing, we were able to quickly make changes. Untapped also provided us with a pipeline of longer term innovation ideas that could feed into future generations of the BECOCO offering.
• #30: Katarina: We wanted to finish with a short video that shows the research in action. You’ll see some of the consumers in their homes and then 2 online sites contrasted, one that consumers told us felt very tedious and boring and didn’t relate to them, almost as though it’s been designed by a robot and then one from another category that felt much more human and engaging. At the end of the project with Untapped, we still had work to do to turn this early prototype into a fully functioning online product, but we had all the ingredients to design something we knew would delight 3 different types of BECOCO consumer and be a step change vs. other offerings in the market. We also had great stimulus to take to investors and retail partners.
• #31: Sally: Hopefully this has given you a flavour of how increasingly sophisticated tech-enabled market research techniques can be interwoven with powerful human based techniques to answer business questions and transform insight into action in an agile, human way. Thank you for listening and we would be pleased to answer any questions.