In an era where an alternative to every product or service is just a double tap away, products that don’t instantly meet the needs of its audience will rapidly fail. For products to succeed and endure, it’s critical that companies promote an agile, customer-centric culture with Discovery Research at its core.

However, when change happens as quickly as it now does, conducting Discovery Research at the start of your product design cycle may no longer suffice. This is what’s driving the urgency for Continuous Discovery Research and the research tools that enable it.

The importance of Continuous Discovery Research

Discovery research (also known as Generative Research or Exploratory Research) is a critical requirement for successful product and experience design. Diary Studies, Digital Ethnography and Journey Mapping are some of the approaches used to do great Discovery Research.

Leveraging these UX Research methods in the discovery phase maximises your product’s chances of success as your product development will be built on a strong foundation of rich insights about the lives and needs of your customers. 

However, with so much change happening at an ever accelerating pace, the need for ongoing customer closeness research has never been greater. It is no longer sufficient to run a Discovery Research study at the start of your design phase and rely solely on the needs, pain points, problem spaces and insights that are surfaced.

To become truly customer centric and design products that endure and scale, you need to shift from one off discovery research to Continuous Discovery research.

What is Continuous Discovery research?

Continuous discovery research is agile. It is iterative. It is inclusive. Continuous discovery research is now viewed by many product and design teams as a critical approach to constantly capturing insights about customers effectively and efficiently.

Teresa Torres, a Product Discovery coach, and one of the pioneers of Continuous Discovery defines it as an agile approach that involves “weekly touchpoints with customers, by the team building the product, where they conduct small research activities, in the pursuit of a desired product outcome” (Tersa Torres, 2018).

Simply put, Continuous Discovery research consists of small, frequent research activities designed to better understand users on an ongoing basis. (Hotjar, 2022).

How do you conduct Continuous Discovery research?

If you are reading this, you’re probably thinking that one-off discovery research is already time consuming enough! In most teams there is a sense of lethargy when it comes to doing proper discovery research i.e. the type that surfaces the unmet, unarticulated needs of your users and customers and surfaces context-rich multimedia insights that build empathy and customer centricity across the entire team.

Many teams simply rely on running surveys or doing the occasional user interview. Surveys lack context and are always post rationalised. User interviews are convenient but you need to rely on claimed behaviours built on fallible memories.

To do great discovery research, you must adopt an approach that gets you into the every day context of your users and helps you experience their world from their perspective.

And with platforms like Indeemo, continuous discovery research is easier than you might think. We cover this futher down in this post, but first, how do you actually do continuous discovery research?

Build a research cadence that involves weekly Customer touchpoints

According to Torres, becoming (and maintaining) customer-centricity should involve decisions being made with as much customer input as possible. She recommends weekly, and for some of the best product teams, daily interactions with customers. At Indeemo, it is becoming more common practice with our clients.

At first glance, this may seem like a mammoth task. However, the objective is to have continuous communication with your customers. By designing and implementing iterative and soft touch research methods you can build up a strong cadence with your customers in no time.

Additionally, bring our customers snippets of your product, variations, and half-baked artefacts. Traditionally, the approach is to design, build, test and validate. However, with Continuous Discovery, the goal is to avoid designing the wrong product, but instead, to design the right and best product with those that will be using it. Essentially, co-create with your customers.

Continuous discovery means you must collaborate with your Product Team

One of the core principles of Continuous Discovery is to avoid hand-offs. Torres explains that by including other stakeholders in the decision making process, and particularly by including the product team in your continuous discovery, the benefits are profound - simply because product teams work fast, and often don't spend time reading research reports. 

Having your user research team and product immerse into the lives of your customers will directly impact the outcome of your product development.

Your product team will start to understand the true needs of your customers. They will see and appreciate human context. In a nutshell, collaborate with your product team. Indeemo’s flexible roles and permissions model allows you to create both Researcher and Observer logins so the entire team can get involved in your continuous discovery research and build true customer empathy.

When it comes to continuous discovery research, you must be experimental

By being experimental, the aim is to apply research methods and techniques that will allow you to explore the lives of your customers. Ask questions that are non-confirmatory. Instead, be open-minded and allow your customers to describe and converse with you and your team.

Ask them to show you their environment. The context of their lives will only have a positive impact on your product development. Whilst A/B testing is one the best ways to find flaws in our design, for continuous discovery, we want to run other experiments. Create experience maps. Run user journey mapping experiments, contextual inquiries, or dairy studies.

Our Continuous Discovery Research Tool

We’re seeing more and more researchers investing in Continuous Discovery Research to uncover insights and build a deep level of customer understanding. Frequent short and snappy projects are being integrated into their larger product development approach. 

When you purchase an annual licence for Indeemo, you have an always on, self service, discovery research platform at your finger tips.

Because Indeemo is a private, one to one connection to your users and customers, you can use Indeemo to develop an ongoing connection with your users and customers and capture context rich, in-the-moment insights at any time from every context.

If you have the ability to tap into your user table or CRM, Indeemo has proprietary capabilities that allow you to contact your actual customers and invite them to take part in your discovery research.

We also offer a capability for you to obtain participant opt-in consent as part of their Indeemo signup flow.

What Continuous Discovery Research Tools does Indeemo offer?

Once participants opt-in, they can log into the Indeemo app and share feedback with you using a variety of research tools that help you capture data via video, screen recordings, images or text. These tools allow you to capture in-the-moment insights into their needs, feelings, pain points and experiences.

Continuous Discovery research projects can be as short as a a few weeks or can go on for several quarters. Our flexible tasking tools allow you to assign tasks to participants either on a scheduled or sequential manner enabling you to pop up flexible, discovery research studies in a manner of minutes.

You can also leverage our pioneering Customer Journey Mapping tool to build out multimedia, contextual Journey Maps and Experience Graphs of their actual in the moment product experiences.

Let our tools support your Continuous Discovery Research

You might think that a continuous discovery approach requires significant investment and time. If you are committed to embracing this approach, you quickly develop a cadence and this becomes a positive routine.

Studies can run from 1 day to 1 week to 1 year depending on what you need and when you implement a continuous discovery research program you can produce compelling insights with as few as 2-3 participants per week. 

If you’d like to learn more about how Indeemo can support your shift to continuous discovery, please get in touch.

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