Blending quantitative and qualitative research to make stuff people love.




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Designing_with_Numbers_

Hybrid Research Inspires Impactful Outcomes

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<p><strong>As practitioners of human-centered design</strong>, we aspire to design products, services and experiences that people love unconditionally. To do this, we must build empathy for the users as they are, understanding what they think, feel and need. Doing the right research helps us make informed, evidence-based decisions throughout our design process.</p>
<p>Spend any time with product managers, entrepreneurs or designers and you will likely hear strong opinions and fierce debates about the merits of quantitative market research versus qualitative design research. At frog, we don’t view any one method as strictly superior. Instead, we take advantage of every technique we can find, regularly blending quantitative and qualitative methods to design, build and ship stuff people love.</p>
<p>How we tailor the right blend of methods for a particular challenge is an art form—it’s impacted by the challenge itself, what we’re trying to achieve in that moment, and who needs to love what we’re making. The following examples of recent work illustrate how we’ve mixed quantitative and qualitative research effectively for three different purposes: to inspire ideas, to inform design, and to guide execution.</p>
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<h2>Inspire ideas</h2>
<p>Last year we published a <a href="https://go.frog.co/en/crossing-the-cannabis-chasm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> on business opportunities in the emerging legal cannabis market. Generally, the exploration phase of service and product design relies on qualitative research to uncover unmet user needs, but we began our research by doing a nationwide survey of American consumers. This survey enabled us to develop a foundational understanding of how the nation felt about cannabis. We asked people a wide range of questions about their lifestyles, from how they manage stress, to their likeness to adopt new technology, and even their perception of authority. One finding that really surprised us was that the biggest indicator of whether someone would support the legalization of medical and recreational cannabis was if they knew a cannabis consumer—more than age, wealth, region or even political beliefs.</p>
<p>When researching what people need in a completely new market (and especially one that is still taboo, like cannabis) we can’t directly ask people want they want. It’s our job to understand what users are trying to do and identify opportunities to help them get there. By beginning our study with a survey, we could indirectly observe users’ needs, motivations and values at a large scale. Our quantitative findings informed us of impactful opportunity areas, fueling our qualitative design research that followed.</p>
<p>A few tips for those blending quantitative and qualitative research to explore new market opportunities:</p>
<ul>
<li>Go wide with your audience target to learn about nuances between populations. Don’t limit your scope to particular demographic and interest-based information, otherwise you might miss some of the extreme users.</li>
<li>Design questions with as much relatable language as you would in user interviews. Ask survey respondents to identify with emotive statements or opinions.</li>
<li>Approach clustering and data analysis with insatiable curiosity. Use a method like K Means to group different respondents together and identify patterns.</li>
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<h2>Inform design</h2>
<p>We recently worked with a company that connects independent plumbers, electricians and engineers (i.e. service providers) with businesses like fast food restaurants and quick service restaurant chains. This client wanted to categorize the service providers in its network so they could better meet the needs of each type of service provider through new features and offerings.</p>
<p>We used a combination of survey responses and interviews to identify potential new features that our client could offer, as well as three distinct client types to target with these different offerings. The outcome was that our client was able to prioritize future business decisions, including which types of service providers to support and which new features to develop first. While qualitative research helped us identify what service providers need and expect from our client, quantitative research informed what design decisions would be most impactful to both service providers and our client’s business success. When you’re in the process of making something new, using a blend of quantitative and qualitative research to gain a deeper understanding of your customers can ultimately help you make better design and business decisions.</p>
<p>A few tips for blending quantitative and qualitative research methods to inform design and build momentum for business decisions:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ground both your quantitative survey questions and your qualitative interview activities in the same initial research so that the results of both research methods are better aligned.</li>
<li>Refrain from viewing the results of your quantitative survey in order to avoid biasing your qualitative interviews, even if the survey is complete before you finish your interviews.</li>
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<h2>Guide execution</h2>
<p>Our final example comes from our experience designing a workplace collaboration tool, which was an important leap into a crowded software space for our telecommunications client. We conducted in-person interviews with workers across the US and Europe to learn what they value most, and designed a product that we knew they would love. However, the workers who would use the product weren’t the only group that needed to love it—we also had to win over the IT departments that would buy it and the channel partners that would sell it.</p>
<p>To understand whether our collaboration tool would speak to these two groups, we conducted a global survey in which we presented variations of our product that emphasized different features. Through conjoint analysis, we learned the distinct selling points for each group: users cared most about functionality and ease of use, IT departments loved tools that were easy to test and implement, and channel partners wanted low-cost products that would integrate with what they already sell. Armed with this understanding, we designed a go-to-market strategy to ensure the needs of users, sellers and buyers would all be met, ensuring all three segments would love what we created.</p>
<p>As products like this get close to becoming a reality, we think not only about what users will love, but also what else needs to happen for the product to succeed. By combining quantitative and qualitative research, we help guide execution with our clients, evaluating last minute design tradeoffs, developing winning go-to-market strategies, and ensuring our products achieve large scale market success.</p>
<p>A few tips for blending quantitative and qualitative research methods to guide execution of new ideas:</p>
<ul>
<li>Go wide (again) with your audience, so you can accurately predict how the market will respond.</li>
<li>Think about every group who needs to love your product – not just the end users – so you can ensure incentives are aligned.</li>
<li>Test specific hypotheses that impact the final decisions around what you build and how you sell it.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>There’s no one-size-fits-all</strong> approach when blending quantitative and qualitative research to gain greater insight into your users. But the best advice we can offer is: don’t get hung up on methodologies. Instead, use the benefits of both types of research to meet the challenge you are facing. We explored three approaches above, but there are many more opportunities to blend research practices to get closer to your users. Bring your curiosity and appetite for empathy, and most importantly—keep experimenting!</p>
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Sally Darby

Sam Haddaway

Kristina Phillips

<p>Sally Darby is as strategist with a background in architectural design. Based out of the frog studio in San Francisco. At frog, she has delivered value for people and businesses through design and innovative projects in the healthcare, retail, and real estate industries.</p>


<p>Sam Haddaway is a strategist, a systems-thinker by nature, passionate about creating innovative solutions to complex problems by combining the powers of design, technology and business.</p>


<p class="b2-alt">Kristina Phillips is a strategist, researcher and brand-builder at frog. She has over a decade of experience bringing truly life-changing products and services to market, from white-space identification and concepting to campaign management and analysis. Kristina spends her time making sense of data and people to tell a compelling story. Bring on the ambiguity.</p>
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Illustration created in collaboration with Doug Chayka

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Physical Retail Will Play an Increasingly Important Role in an Omni-Channel World

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Omni-Channel

Brick and Mortar is Here to Stay

<p><strong>As a former architectural designer,</strong> I’ve always been interested in the role physical spaces play in our lives. Well beyond simply providing shelter, physical spaces can inspire emotions, bring people together, and shape how new ideas spread. Knowing this, the idea of the retail apocalypse – that all physical retail will disappear thanks to the rise of e-commerce – never resonated well with me.</p>
<p>By now most experts have reached the conclusion that brick-and-mortar retail is not, as was once hypothesized, facing imminent and unavoidable destruction. In this post-retail apocalypse era, most people agree that the physical store will continue to play a significant role in a retail customer’s shopping experience, alongside digital and mobile channels. But the major question for retailers is: What is that role? In an omni-channel world where customers comfortably oscillate between physical and digital spaces, what will continue to bring customers to brick-and-mortar stores?</p>
<p><strong>Here are three strategies retailers can leverage to design for optimized experiences that will keep their customers engaged both in-store and online: </strong></p>
<h2 style="padding-top: 60px;">Provide the Ultimate Convenience</h2>
<p>It’s no secret that online channels have made shopping more efficient and convenient than ever for consumers. Today, shoppers can browse and make purchases from the comfort of their own homes, and have the items they buy delivered within days, if not hours. However, a number of pain points still exist within the online shopping paradigm that physical stores are uniquely positioned to address. Despite the increasingly rapid delivery options available to online shoppers, the desire for instant gratification still drives consumers to physical stores. In fact, over the past few years, more consumers have exhibited <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/webrooming-vs-showrooming-are-you-engaging-both-types_us_5919c9dae4b086d2d0d8d144" target="_blank" rel="noopener">webrooming</a> behavior – in which they browse and research online before completing purchases in store – than showrooming behavior – in which they browse in stores before buying online. Retailers can enhance the convenience of online shopping by positioning their stores as fulfillment hubs, and connecting inventory databases across locations, to ensure products are located as close as possible to the consumer when they’re ready to make a purchase.</p>
<p>Another way physical stores can satisfy customers and bolster the convenience of online shopping is by providing easy and efficient ways to complete returns. One recent <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/americans-love-shopping-online-but-they-want-to-return-things-in-person/2017/10/13/2562df74-acfc-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.78ad0d871212" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> found that over half of consumers prefer to make <a href="https://www.chainstoreage.com/store-spaces/in-store-retail-remains-key-particularly-when-it-comes-to-returns/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">returns in stores</a>, including 55% of shoppers in their twenties. Major retailers are responding to this by developing the digital and in-store infrastructure needed to make in-store returns as seamless as possible for customers. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nike-store-curbside-pickup-like-walmart-and-target-2018-8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Nike</a> now allows for the curbside drop-off of return items at its new location in Los Angeles, while <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/americans-love-shopping-online-but-they-want-to-return-things-in-person/2017/10/13/2562df74-acfc-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html?utm_term=.74dff91680fe" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Walmart’s mobile app</a> enables shoppers to complete in-store returns within 30 seconds. With more than <a href="https://https/www.cnbc.com/2016/12/16/a-260-billion-ticking-time-bomb-the-costly-business-of-retail-returns" target="_blank" rel="noopener">30% of online purchases culminating in a return</a>, physical stores can play a significant role in a customer’s end-to-end experience by making the return process as seamless as possible.</p>
<h2 style="padding-top: 60px;">Strengthen Communities</h2>
<p>As online competition grows increasingly fierce, retail brands are searching for opportunities to distinguish themselves from other brands and reinforce customer loyalty. Many retailers have started to embrace the idea that they can play a broader role in their customers’ lives by providing physical spaces where customers can go, not just to complete transactions, but to have experiences that are supported by the brand and the products it produces. Starbucks has been doing this for decades, with its stores acting as coffee-fueled “third places” – spaces that aren’t home or the office, where people can go to socialize and work.</p>
<p>Both traditional and new brands alike are positioning their physical locations as spaces for their customer communities to gather. With the “<a href="https://archello.com/project/house-of-vans-london" target="_blank" rel="noopener">House of Vans</a>” in London, which features an artist incubator space, cinema, music venue and multi-tiered skatepark, Vans has created a place where customers can go to learn about, participate in, and contribute to skate culture alongside other skaters. The flagship location of athletic gear company <a href="https://blog.vendhq.com/post/64901830513/retail-examples-to-inspire-you-to-run-a-better-business" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Solfire</a> includes a fitness studio and smoothie bar where athletes can gather, exercise and recover together. The space also features a community board, which highlights all the places in the neighborhood around the store where people can go to get exercise and demonstrates the brand’s support for the local fitness community.</p>
<p>By positioning their physical stores as spaces for immersive and participatory customer experiences, and not solely transactions, retailers will be able to develop deeper, more emotional relationships with their customers and create loyal communities around their brand and products.</p>
<h2 style="padding-top: 60px;">Build Trust</h2>
<p>Today, consumers are not lacking options when it comes to where to shop. Where shoppers were once limited by time and geography to the few storefronts on Main Street, today they can make purchases from retailers around the globe with the simple click of a button. While this proliferation of options is certainly a good thing in many respects, it has also introduced a new set of issues and considerations for the retail consumer. How do they decide between multiple retailers offering similar products at the same price point? How can they verify that the product they are considering purchasing is of good quality, or that the advertisement they are looking at is indeed real, and not a scam?</p>
<p>In these instances, a physical store can make a significant difference, providing consumers with the “touch and feel” opportunities they need to feel confident in the product they are purchasing, and the retailer they are purchasing from. Direct-to-consumer brands like Away, Everlane, and Allbirds – many of which never planned to have a physical presence – have recognized the powerful ability brick-and-mortar stores have to convert would-be-shoppers into brand loyalists, and are increasingly opening stores in select locations across the country. In many cases, these brands have found that their physical presence serves to boost online sales; Indochino, a men’s fashion brand that originated online, found that <a href="https://medium.com/@brian.moran_91776/online-retailers-are-opening-brick-and-mortar-stores-heres-why-98191adbeba1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">online sales grew twice as fast</a> in areas where it opened a physical showroom.</p>
<p>Although it is inevitable that consumers will complete an increasing amount of their transactions online in the future, physical stores will continue to play a critical role in establishing the initial trust needed to convert browsers – online and offline – into buyers. Retailers will succeed by using online shopping data to inform where they open new temporary and permanent brick-and-mortar locations, and by ensuring physical stores are designed to generate trust, particularly amongst new shoppers.</p>
<p><strong>It’s clear that</strong> over the next few years the popularity of e-commerce and online shopping will continue to grow, profoundly impacting our retail environment. Brands that are unable to adapt will disappear, stores will continue to close and brick-and-mortar footprints will continue to shrink. Retail brands that design their physical spaces to work in harmony with digital and mobile channels by optimizing them for the specific purposes of building trust, creating convenience and strengthening community, will undoubtedly come out on top.</p>


<p>Based out of the frog studio in San Francisco, Sally Darby is a strategist with a background in architectural design. At frog, she has delivered value for people and businesses through design and innovative projects in the healthcare, retail, and real estate industries.</p>


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As malls continue to shutter across the US, what can we expect to see in their place as our collective needs and desires continue to evolve?

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When Malls Die

<p><strong>I was having dinner</strong> in a Korean restaurant with my son and a friend, and as we were enjoying ourselves among the lively dinnertime crowd, I looked out to see an empty, darkened food court of what appeared to be yet another “dead mall.” While this mall may have been semi-operational, it was almost entirely empty; not quite dead, but certainly dying. By some counts, America has seen the closure of over 300 malls since the peak of development in the mid 1990s. And experts predict this decline will only continue. It only takes a cursory search to uncover the Internet’s odd fascination with these fallen monuments to American late capitalism, with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/deadmallsmedia" target="_blank" rel="noopener">youtube channels</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-dead-malls.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmagazine&amp;amp;action=click&amp;amp;contentCollection=magazine&amp;amp;region=rank&amp;amp;module=package&amp;amp;version=highlights&amp;amp;contentPlacement=5&amp;amp;pgtype=sectionfront" target="_blank" rel="noopener">photo essays</a> dedicated to documenting these once vibrant, and now eerily empty malls. Perhaps it’s nostalgia by Gen Xers for their youth, but it’s likely more profound than that. Malls provide a place for gathering, meeting people, eating together, entertainment and, of course, shopping. Those basic human needs haven’t gone away, they’re simply evolving. Which begs the question: What comes next? What will replace America’s beloved Malls?</p>


<h2>Shifting Taste</h2>
<p>Two trends are driving the decline in traditional mall shopping: the shift in consumer spending from stuff to experiences, and the rise of online shopping for certain categories of goods.</p>
<p>Growth in spending on experiences is rising more rapidly than spending on goods, especially among millennials. Psychology studies show that shared experiences with friends and family drive greater happiness that is sustained over a longer period of time than buying more stuff. At a rather shallower level, Instagram and other social media sites allow us to share experiences widely, turning ephemeral experiences into permanent show pieces to drive envy and admiration of our friends. Witness the huge success of <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/selfie-factories-instagram-museum/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Museum of Ice cream</a> and other “made for Instagram” experiences. Malls that cater to experiences are going to be more successful than those that are simply shopping centers.</p>
<p>Second, retail is bifurcating. As my colleague Kristin Krajecki recently pointed out in her article on what <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/cannabis-gets-right-retail" target="_blank" rel="noopener">retail can learn from the emerging cannabis</a> market, shoppers are outsourcing as much as possible for low involvement categories. Batteries, dish soap, dog food, paper towels and toilet paper should ideally just show up in our houses, and always be available. For higher involvement categories, shoppers are looking for experiences that offer discovery, community and even entertainment. Successful malls in the future are therefore likely to cater to high involvement goods but evolve to be more experiential. Which means, anchoring a mall on a big box store is out, and providing multiple venues for exploration, discovery and entertainment is in.</p>
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<h2>What Comes Next?</h2>
<p>While the story of the American Mall is still unfolding, we’ve already seen some of signals from the marketplace that indicated the future direction. Santana Row in San Jose, California, and Coal Drops Yard in London are great examples of a new breed of mixed use experiential spaces. Set to open in October 2018, Coal Drops Yard is a highly anticipated, newly renovated shopping district that sits alongside apartments, condos, office buildings, a school and transit options. Both the design and the highly curated selection of tenants were inspired by the Victorian-era industrial heritage of the location, as well as the counterculture that thrived in the area in the 1990s, helping Coal Drops Yard feel locally relevant and integral to the neighborhood before it’s even opened. Project developers plan to entice shoppers with one-of-a-kind stores and boutique shops, a multitude of restaurants and cafes, and open park spaces including one that features a large water fountain park-goers can control using a mobile app. The district will be punctuated by experiential flagship stores, including the new <a href="https://www.tomdixon.net/story/post/the-coal-office/?___store=eu&amp;___from_store=uk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tom Dixon</a> store, The Coal Office, which will feature a furniture shop, haberdashery, gallery, restaurant and roof terrace.</p>
<p>Even traditional retailers have begun focusing on the shopping experience rather than the acquisition of goods. I call this, “<a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/retails-magic-moment" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Retail’s Magic Moment</a>,” when retailers compete to differentiate on parts of the customer journey beyond the traditional ‘buy’ moment. Zara’s inventory-less store in London’s Westfield Mall, Nordstrom Local in Beverly Hills, and the “guideshops” by men’s clothing retailer Bonobos are extreme examples of this. These stores have no inventory, but allow people to touch goods and try on clothes, which shifts the role of the store from a place where you go to buy something to bring home, to a place where you experiencing goods in a nice setting. It may take a while for this to catch on – a recently conducted frog survey of shoppers across the US shows that just 3 percent of shoppers like to order in a store and have goods delivered to their home or office, compared to 11 percent who like to buy online and pick up in stores. Another approach is to create a place people want hang out in, like <a href="https://www.restorationhardware.com/content/page.jsp?id=west-hollywood&amp;link=RHWestHollywood-WatchtheCreation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Restoration Hardware’s West Hollywood store</a> with its rooftop garden open to the public and outfitted with fire pits, a ping pong table and of course Restoration Hardware’s outdoor furniture.</p>
<p><strong>Not every mall</strong> will be able to adapt as a new experiential destination—but they may morph into other uses. Austin’s first indoor shopping mall, the Highland, has recently been converted into a community college. Vanderbilt University took over an entire floor of a mall in Nashville to operate as a medical center. Others are being transformed into churches, or used as fitness centers, activity centers and even AR/VR entertainment hubs. Some will no doubt be torn down to make way for housing (or nostalgic YouTube art).</p>
<p>Despite these closures, the core human need for social spaces and public experiences is more acute than ever in America. People like walking around and spending time together in a space that isn’t home or work. And they like to have a purpose or focus while they are there. The venue for that function moved from town squares to malls in the last century and will evolve this century as consumer tastes and lifestyles change. Successful retailers and mall owners will embrace the change and adapt to provide consumers with a new set of experiences.</p>


Timothy Morey

<p class="b2-alt">Tim Morey leads a global team of business and product strategists who work alongside frog designers and technologists to bring game changing innovations to market. He has worked in Silicon Valley for 15 years in a variety of product, strategy and marketing roles. <a href="http://twitter.com/timothymorey" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@timothymorey</a></p>
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