Research Process and Research Instruments

I have been involved in market research ( we called it requirements analysis/user research) when we were developing a new software for researchers and Tissue Bank support staff, to help them get faster and more accurate access to the pathology report archive. I was responsible for defining the user experience for the software.

We pretty much followed the research process as documented in the book. Our steps were:

1. Define the goals for the research.
2. Identify what information/knowledge we need and lack.
3. Identify the best people who could provide that knowledge.
4. Choose a information collection approach. We chose observational research, and semi-structured personal interviews
5. Gather information.
6. Analyze information and extract requirements.
7. Use analysis in deciding on the product features.

Our choice of research instruments helped us gather different kinds of information. Our observational research data gave us valuable insights into the day to day functioning of the tissue bank and a comparision to existing tools that they used. However this did not capture all the user problems, and user desires. These were elicited from the user through a structured interview which had both open and close ended questions. However, since it was a personal interview, the interviewer could further investigate each choice made by the user and note additional comments that helped us understand the user's thought process better.