“Mobile ethnography on the dscout platform allowed for tremendous depth of understanding about our users—more than any other project that I’ve worked on. We built relationships with our participants, and got prolonged exposure into their mental models, life situations and emotional journeys.”
"The project started in December, which was holiday shopping season—it actually seemed like a perfect time to do a diary study and ask people about their shopping experiences, because people are doing a lot of online shopping during that time."
“[Brands need to start] thinking about brand expression in less rigid terms and about the ways that your brand can come to life. Gen Z is a group of people who are so incredibly aware of their own identity, culture, and of how brands work. And they're able to kind of connect multiple touchpoints to decipher or create their meaning of what a brand is.”
“One of the differences between in-person research and remote research is the longitudinal aspect. With dscout and diary studies, we can engage with a particular group over a period of time. That’s so valuable for us in talking about things like money and work, because it’s not something that people feel the same way about every single day—so being able to interact over a long period of time is important.”
“Getting kids to speak freely about things on their own time and in their own language can be a challenge, and that’s why we paired dscout’s mobile ethnographic approach with in-home interviews.”
"The client doesn't care about your tools—they just care about the information."
“The way we access our users greatly affects the methods that we use. I’ve worked in places where you could do guerrilla research and you can access people that use your product quickly.”
“We’d recruited scouts in the path of Hurricane Irma before it made landfall. We were simultaneously watching reports from scouts come in at the same time as we were seeing events unfold on the news.”
“We had this observation that the technology was fairly complex and could only be totally understood by kids in the nine-to-ten-year age range. But that was also exactly when kids moved away from toys they played when they were younger. So we got to this conclusion in a week or two about what we called the ‘abandonment chasm,’ which was exactly when you want to be selling them something.”
"Instead of having simple well-crafted tools that can all work together, companies are incentivized to create big, bloated all-purpose mega-platforms."
“The treasure maps that the scouts submitted were amazing. They were so creative and rich that one of our designers made a Google Slides gallery of the different journeys so that the team could reference them as we were building our journey map, and we still have that as a deliverable today."
“It was exciting to watch all of the participant responses appear in real-time on the dscout dashboard. We collected tons of quotes, videos, and images that we later used to engage many stakeholders across the organization. It helped us understand our users and their needs.”
“We've been able to take on 40% more studies. I don't even think I could put into words how much time Private Panels saved us. It's completely changed the game for us.”
"We really needed quick and punchy content to engage our team and help them focus. So for us, this meant prioritizing succinct video clips, and other really engaging formats that would hold people's attentions in order to deliver our insights for maximum impact."
"Being able to do remote qual, mobile ethnographies, journaling, and robust screeners allows you to learn quickly and make sure that the time you spend with people in-person is as rich and meaningful as possible."