You have started thinking about a product or service idea, but need to explore how your customers typically choose how and why to buy this product or service.
Or, you started selling a product that has since received bad feedback, and you need to gain insight from customers into why they have these opinions, and what improvements or changes they would like to see and why.
Or, you need to write an instruction manual and FAQ guide for your product, but need to gain insight into how and why customers use it.
These types of research needs involve open-ended questions. They are not “rate this on a scale of 1 to 10”, but instead ask questions like “What do you think about that and why?”
This is called qualitative research, and it is used to explore and dig deep into topics with consumers. This type of information is typically gathered in interviews and focus groups, where the interviewer or researcher can ask follow-up questions and gain exploratory information.
This type of research is ideal when you are creating a new or upgraded product or service. These are the types of questions you ask when you don’t already have data to work with.
If you already have a product and want customers to rate its features on a numerical scale, you would want to use quantitative research. This type of research typically uses a hypothesis, and is used to confirm ideas that you already have.
These types of research can also be combined. For instance, you can ask customers to rate a product feature on a scale from 1 to 10 (quantitative), and then ask them why they chose to rate it that way (qualitative).
It’s essential to choose the right type of research for your research question and the phase that your business or product is currently in.