Understanding your customers is foundational to building products that work in the real world. Design research goes beyond what customers say they want and gets into what they actually do, in the environments and conditions where your product has to perform. That distinction is what separates products that fit from products that fall short after launch. Design Research is a type of user research or consumer research that helps you understand not just what customers think they want, but what they don’t yet know they need.
These behavior-based, ethnography-inspired observational research methods lay the groundwork for your future efforts and potential customers—whether you’re looking to craft a new marketing strategy for an upcoming launch, embark on product development concepts, come up with new product ideas, or identify an unmet customer need in your target market.
For 25+ years, Highland, the award-winning product design and development firm in Chicago, has helped experts, entrepreneurs, and innovation leaders develop over 300 new products, services, and businesses.
Why in-depth behavioral research?
Every product decision is shaped by assumptions about how people will use what you build. Ethnographic research tests those assumptions against reality. This type of research shows you exactly what’s going on through methods that place researchers directly in the environments where behavior happens rather than in surveys or focus groups where customers reconstruct it from memory. AI tools can analyze patterns in the data you already have. But they cannot observe what happens in the field, what customers adapt, work around, or abandon when a product runs into the conditions you didn't design for. That's what behavioral research surfaces.
Unlike traditional market research methods such as focus groups, questionnaires, and quantitative studies, exploratory and qualitative research studies are grounded in ethnography and help us go deeper into the why: what drives various audiences’ motivations, how they make decisions, why they struggle with certain problems. Using research methods like in-depth interviews, in-home visits, and contextual fieldwork to gain a detailed level of insight is extremely valuable. Such clarity on user behavior is a hallmark of ethnographic research and not commonly gleaned from quant survey respondents or data analysis.
Peek into the context of your target audience
Qualitative research, or primary research, is an important part of the new product discovery process as it reveals previously unknown or hidden insights into a user's experience with new or existing products and services. By observing users or customers in their own environments or natural settings, Exploratory Design Research enables you to:
- Ask open-ended questions that result in accidental discoveries and valuable insights
- Observe user behavior in-person or in their own natural environment through mobile ethnography and grasp the bigger picture
- Utilize this research data to understand problems your users are facing and what’s driving their decisions
- Synthesize all information gathered to better understand the cause and effect relationships of user behaviors.
Define a research-informed strategy
When we work on crafting a new product, defining a new value proposition, or working out a market segmentation, we start by taking a step back and looking at the problems that need solving. Most new products and services fail because they don't target a need that a customer finds important enough to solve, or they solve the need in a way that doesn't fit easily into the context of the customer's experience. It’s vital to think in terms of the end user.
Exploratory design research solves for this. It’s an ethnographic market research tool that can provide the building blocks for a research-informed strategy, allowing you to:
- Uncover more conclusive results around consumer behavior and how your target audience will use your product
- Be sure of how deep the pain points or opportunities are, how much value users stand to gain, and inform your business decisions
- Begin idea generation or developing solutions with stakeholders that are better aligned with these needs and decision-making behaviors
- Gain competitive advantage, refine your hypotheses, and determine ways to scale qualitative market research findings through quantitative research or secondary data collection.
Getting started with behavioral research
Clarity on users’ or customers’ needs, motivations, and behaviors helps you identify a coherent vision, informs business decisions you make on your path to innovation, and ultimately allows you to create products, services, and experiences people will purchase and use. Ethnographic, behavioral research will help you truly understand your customers and their experiences with valuable customer insights.
For exploratory research projects, we choose methods that put us in the actual environments where your product gets used. Field visits, contextual observation, and shadowing allow us to see the difference between what customers say they do and what they actually do. That gap is where the most useful findings tend to live, and it's the gap that no amount of survey data or AI-assisted synthesis can reliably close.
Read more here about how our full service research team chooses from various available methods for different research needs and and market research services.
