UX Research / 2022

Market Research for Door-to-Door Journey Planners

Responsibilities: Market Research, Data Analysis, Reporting & Documentation

The Context

VR Group (a government-owned railway company in Finland) has decided to reform its journey-planning system to create the best future-proof door-to-door, intermodal journey-planning services in Europe where customers are able to plan the optimal journey. The solution should be scalable outside Finland. In the interest of innovating the door-to-door journey planner, the related market research must be first conducted before deciding to invest in costly development. My task was to form an investigative report on existing door-to-door, multimodal journey planners from European railway operators, MaaS actors, and relevant capabilities and solutions to support VR to conduct an early concept design of a smoothest, greenest door-to-door journey planner in Finland.

My Role​​​​​​​

As a lead UX researcher, I led the research process covering all phases of research (planning, data collection, analysis, and reporting). I developed research plans and defined research objectives as well as research frameworks and methodologies. I provided thought leadership to the research team and the clients, effectively communicating durable insights through writing, presentations, and conversation to build consensus and persuade action based on findings. I Helped de-risk research decisions, providing advice, guidance, and coaching to other researchers to ask the right research questions, develop testable hypotheses, and design research/testing approaches to improve insight quality. Eventually, I synthesized findings and ensured the delivery of high-quality insights via a visualized, professional, client-ready research report.

#Reflection

Market research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information about a market. Good market research should validate, explore, and provide insight and recommendations, all at the same time. After all, market research is often investigating the likelihood of potential customers choosing one thing over another. Research should be around listening better to clients and respondents. This results in market research that explores and validates at the same time. It produces richer and deeper insights, which provide answers instead of additional questions. To do the research right, one should plan the research right first. Planning is the first step in market research in general. First, ask yourself right, smart (and sometimes not so much smart) questions, like what research can we do to make sure our conclusions are the right ones for this business, what are we missing, why do people need your product/service, who is going to use it and in what context, how to create a competitive value proposition, etc. After that, you should decide what kind of data you would be looking for and the research framework, which guide you on where to start your research.
 
It is also important to identify the right actors for benchmarking. Benchmarking is an extremely complex and detailed process that involves some important elements of decision-making: identifying the outside actors for comparison; gathering information on that actor’s practices, and choosing which among these practices are advisable/feasible to adopt, and how. The first important assumption is that best practices are present in the best companies. To identify those practices is it thus necessary to start with the best entities and then

analyze them. That is, the external comparison group, whether limited to competitors or extended to companies belonging to other sectors, is based on a ranking in terms of a specific measure of overall performance (i.e., screening criteria). Within that screening the entities are identified that are at the top of the list, and then certain specific practices are analyzed. A benchmarking analysis must be conducted with great care, but at the same time, it is important to avoid excessive attention in the areas that don’t contribute to answering the research questions. In benchmarking analysis, this comparison group should not be limited not only to competitors but selecting those competitors that are similar or close to the company, also in terms of performance. If it is decided to use only competitors in the reference group, in addition to the difficulty of obtaining detailed information on their practices, the result is often limited to the reduction of a gap or reaching a situation of operational parity, but not achieving strategic advantage. The analysis is thus reduced to a single need (to know what competitors are doing) and to a dangerous and simplistic conclusion (if most of our peers adopt similar practices, then we should adopt them, too).  Choosing to adopt a practice only because it is widespread does not in fact mean adopting the best practice. If it is decided to include in the reference group companies belonging to other sectors, the exchange of information can be facilitated by the absence of mutual competition. This entails the risk, however, of examining situations that are so distant that it becomes difficult to use their practices or achieve the same results. Therefore, I recommend benchmarking reference actors in and outside the domain/industry to obtain a competitive advantage with respect to competitors, so as to adopt innovative practices not yet exploited.

I summed up my research process in the following steps:
1. Define the problem. Start by identifying the focus of the research. Knowing what research question you are trying to answer will help you structure your research effectively.
 
2. Define the scope. Once you have a tangible goal of the research, you should define the breadth of your reach, know what the client is craving, and what should be investigated to answer the research question under time pressure.
 
3. Design your method and needs. Identify what data needs to be collected and how you will gather it. 
 
4. Choose a sampling method. How and why will you select the participants for your research? Work together with the client to identify the research samples.
 
5. Plan for data collection. Afterward, you can then plan the deep dive. How you dive deep into the details (e.g., brand vision and strategy, service capabilities, product functionalities, technology, user experience, issues, problems, etc. )
 
6. Plan for data analysis. Decide how you will analyze your data. Will you need quantitative data for statistical analysis or qualitative data to give you a broad picture? Will you need objective data to complement subjective interpretation to find the one that will best answer your research question?
 
7. Data collection. Once you know what question you want to answer and have designed a research method to answer it within the constraints of your available budget and time, it’s time to get your hands dirty and collect data.
 
8. Analysis of the data. No matter how straightforward your data seems at first glance, you’ll want to use specific methods of analysis to ensure that you understand what it is telling you. The methods of analysis that you use will depend on the type of data you collected. This should also be when you check for errors, which can occur in your sampling method, data collection, and analysis.
 
9. Generate insights. The most viewed part of a research report is the insights and answers to the research questions.
 
10. Make a story to create your report. The final step of the research process is drafting a report on your findings. But how to structure the report? It requires storytelling. Your report should outline the entire research process, from developing your problem statement to the results of your data analysis.
Here comes a question, how to form a robust story? I would suggest using qualitative and quantitative data. When we present or interpret results from tracking studies, then, should we be expanding beyond what the study showed and looking at a bigger picture that includes qualitative and quantitative information? I think the answer is yes. In market research, you should always make use of a combination of research techniques in projects. This holistic approach enables one to generate validated answers instead of more questions.  It would provide a more robust story, and it would showcase that we’re doing our due diligence to try to take into account as many pieces of influence as we can. The resulting insights tell companies exactly which buttons to push in order to reach their goals. Therefore, I believe that research always needs to be qualitative with large numbers of consumers and customers. It enables researchers to validate what they want to know and explore what they might have missed otherwise. Quantitative data should answer the following questions:
  • What is the total size of your market?
  • What percent share of the market can you potentially have?
  • What is the demographic picture of your potential B2C customers (Age, Gender, Location, Income, Social class, Occupation, Education)?
  • What is the demographic picture of your potential B2B customers (Industry, Location, Size of firm, Price preferences)?
  • Where are your potential leads coming from?

As for qualitative data, it should answer:

  • What is the current demand in your target market?
  • What are the existing or new customers’ values and beliefs?
  • What are the trends in the target market — growth trends, trends in consumer preferences, and trends in product development?
  • What can be the growth potential and opportunity for your product and/or business of your size?
 
However, this research had some limitations. We were facing the call for faster studies and results, all aiming to produce deeper insights. That means we didn’t have time to wait for studies to be replicated, results verified, etc. Market research needs to validate the direction a company chooses to go in terms of marketing, but validating does not mean asking what you think. Validating is also understanding each of the reasons better and ensuring every detail that you expect is explored. However, this market research was unable to make use of the available data in an optimal manner; it solved only part of the puzzle. It uncovered the ‘how’ but not the ‘why.’