You don’t have to do research. If you’re an artist or a chef or a writer, you produce what is inside you to inspire or delight your audience. People buy your product for these feelings.* But if you’re an organization with products and services designed to support people, such as an insurance company, a library, or a data management company, it’s a big risk to operate based on assumptions. And, you lose out to your competition if you aren’t savvy about supporting different ways that people are thinking their way through their problem. Of course, some people can just buy their competition. If you’re not swimming in money, though, you have to be wise about spending it. Developing ideas based on superficial understanding of how people are thinking is not wise. Do research. Understand how people think their way through the problem space you hope to support.

Understanding the problem space you hope to support is not a one-time effort. There is not a big report at the end. It’s an ongoing process of small discoveries that you can space out over time according to your priorities. Here are some of the the priorities:

1. “Why aren’t people responding as we expected?” Maybe the market share isn’t where you thought it would be, or maybe the feedback and evaluative tests indicate your solution isn’t up to snuff. You can either lower your expectations or understand some of the nuances of the problem that your solution attempts to help with … nuances–not trying to understand how/why a person does things, but how/why a person thinks things.
2. “Why are our customers behaving the way our quantitative data depicts?” Your instrumentation, log files, and A/B testing show that users are doing something that you wish to change. But before you can put effective changes in place, you need to learn the different reasons why people are doing that thing. And the only way to find out why is to listen–not to explanations, but to inner thinking and decision-making based on personal guiding principles.
3. “How do we prioritize what to do in support of people first/next?” Your organization has a lot of solid ideas about what to create, but there are just too many ideas–or they are too generalized. One-size-fits-all. You need to define the patterns in how people take differing approaches to the problem and clarify significant audiences. Then you can more easily decide which direction to pursue.
4. “How can we define our support as unique from the competition?” You have secret sauce under the hood, in the code, but you can’t just tell everybody that. You have to show how you help them. Help people in stronger ways than the competition by allowing people to achieve their larger purposes in a more personal manner. Show people that you understand the unique way they think and approach the problem.
5. Additionally: disagreement between colleagues, loss of project momentum, team members surreptitiously seeking other employment … find patterns and priorities among stakeholders, understand why a project isn’t interesting, and explore why a person feels like looking another job.

Problem space research is different than user research. The data from problem space research is evergreen and cumulative; it does not go stale. User research, in comparison, goes stale as soon as you make the changes that the results indicate. Since problem space research is evergreen, you can accumulate it over time. Add to your understanding of the problem space continuously, but in small, skillfully selected scopes of exploration. Make this research available as a touchstone and a roadmap for your decision-making at all times. Add to the data whenever you encounter gray areas about the people you support and what they are trying to get done.

Problem space research is for when you want to look outside your organization to see what the future can hold. Indi is available to help.

*You could be an edge case, like a news agencies such as NPR or The Daily Telegraph, or you cater to fashion like Urban Outfitters or Chanel, you are balanced between creating for delight and creating in support. In some parts of your work, your inspiration for delighting customers comes from within; in other parts, you seek to support people by helping them seem knowledgeable, confident, and well-put-together. Research these latter types of topics.