Author: Krista Bradley

Senior Manager Market Research @ Microsoft

What is your philosophy about trying new approaches to understanding how users interact with you?

Posted on by Krista Bradley

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Innovation is just inherent in our culture. We are expected to innovate, and we have innovation budgets to use. The other challenge in doing innovative research is that stakeholders usually pay for the majority of the research, and I have to execute it. So with that, they hold their money in their budget very sacred – what that means is that it’s a lot easier to rinse and repeat. If you’re doing something more innovative, it is scarier, and you are taking a lot bigger risk. It is not just a risk of the stakeholder and me, but also of the business and all retail partnerships that we have – there is a lot at stake. So I really gauge how to approach innovation based on whether or not my stakeholder really wants to play and try new things or if they are a little more apprehensive. I will typically start with something more comfortable but then push the boundaries. So, for example, it’s a lot easier to say we’re making a quantitative approach with this study. We do those all the time, but if we do this quantitative study, we push this other little piece on top of it; it unlocks a whole different area. Are we willing to try that?

So I am just ticking away at those things and building on what’s comfortable, but always thinking a couple of steps ahead of what the stakeholder’s needs.

I think that’s where you get a nice secret sauce.

What was the role of behavioral methods in getting value out of the data?

Posted on by Krista Bradley

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This is where EyeSee comes to life for me – I love the fact that we could look at where the people’s eyeballs were looking on the page, we could get their engagement of what they click on as areas of interest, and then tie all of that together with a customer survey that goes on top of that. To be able to really utilize these three big bodies of information, we can understand on any given page are consumers even seeing the pieces of real estate that are on the page; if they see it, do they even care about it. We actually had one element on the page that was really passionate for us on our product description page, and we put a lot of value.

We found that only 34% of people saw what we were putting on the page, and of those, only 2-4% were clicking on it.

So it was a huge revelation for us as well. We were able to target some of those quantitative questions to gauge do consumers even care about this, maybe that’s why they are not looking for it, perhaps that’s why they are not seeing it. Being able to go at the research from those three areas is super valuable.

How should brands prepare for complex studies?

Posted on by Krista Bradley

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The biggest thing is talking to a wide variety of stakeholders: working in our field teams, directly with our partners, corporate teams that design the corporate strategy, and the Go-to-market team. It can seem really disparate when you think about the complexity and what each of those individual teams is looking for.

So it’s really important when I’m designing a study that I understand each of those cohorts.

I want to learn more about what are the things they are thinking about this year or the next few months. So what I typically will do is write a research brief, and I’ll typically send that to each of the stakeholders as well, and make sure that I have alignment. Once I have it, that’s when I reach out to the vendor.

Getting everyone aligned not only helps me get a very clear and concise view of what I am looking for but also helps me ensure I have a good partnership with my vendors right off the gate.