"Using prose to create a data array is like using the edge of a fork to cut meat. It can be done, but not well, unless the meat is tender indeed (corresponding to very simple data arrays)."
- Edward F. McQuarrie
Colorful language is not what makes Edward McQuarrie's Customer Visits the best book I've read on the topic of user research. In fact, the book is overwhelmingly direct, cutting like a knife through the ambiguity and vagueness that surrounds the corporate customer research process.
As a hardcore human-centered researcher,I approached the book with a skeptical manner: its sub-title is Building a Better Market Focus, and I learned of it indirectly, through a brochure for a seminar that McQuarrie was giving. But I was quickly impressed by the organization and specificity of the content.
The book is structured around the processes for planning, conducting and analysis for site visits. While it's focused on researching business customers, such as medical equipment and software developers, the methods and advice can be applied to other cases (e.g. consumer research).
McQuarrie's to-the-point style is supported by case studies and referenced sources, providing both pragmatic and conceptual guidance. What I found most useful was that Customer Visits specifically addresses the key questions that many organizations face when planning and conducting user research, such as:
- What types of customer are appropriate for field research - "Customer visits are most applicable when there are some hundreds or thousands of customers in the market, the product is technically complex, its application is highly contextualized, and the underlying technology allows for differentiated product offerings."
- Defining the right level and wording of qualitative research objectives - "Note that objectives that rest on words such as 'identify', 'explore', 'describe' and 'generate' properly come early in the decision process....Specific verbs that do not match the capabilities of customer visits would include 'test', 'select', 'evaluate', 'rank order', 'measure', 'forecast' and 'track'."
- Number of participants to include in a sample and creating a sample frame - "a sample of thirty customers could be expected to identify 90% of all the needs that might exist in the total population of customers...a sample of twelve might uncover 70 to 75 percent of needs."
Obviously I can't articulate the full context and insight around a a topic in a quote, but I hope this gives you a sense of the level of detail that McQuarrie delivers.
Of course, the book is not perfect - much of the information on writing appropriate interview questions and conducting observations should be known to professionals, and McQuarrie does not get into any deep domain knowledge or tools for conducting more effective observations (e.g. observing ergonomic issues). But the strength of the book is in what comes before and after the observations. The section on analysis procedures is excellent, providing a clear analysis framework ("partition, cluster, connect, and array") and addressing how to handle quantitative expectations in a qualitative context.
Finally, McQuarrie updated the book this year and thoughtfully covers trends in corporate user research such as data visualization, research data management, and the explosion of the the term 'ethnography' -
"...there is no inherent opposition between customer visits and ethnographic approaches. A customer visit program can be made as ethnographic as you like...there exists a variety of business and market situations that require a broad range of approaches to information gathering. Let a thousand flowers bloom."
Perhaps, a little more colorful language than I had initially stated, but in the case of this book, the author has earned the right to use it.
