Product development success hinges on a critical pivot: zooming past broad market trends to focus intensely on individual human behaviors and aspirations. When Joe McQuaid, the LiveWell chief product officer, observed a yoga instructor, he sought data on physical tracking but unexpectedly uncovered a prevailing theme of mental health and anxiety. This qualitative turn illustrates that understanding what people do is secondary to grasping how they feel and why they act.
Unexpected theme uncovered in yoga instructor observation by LiveWell's product officer
Moving Beyond “What” to “Why”
Behavioral insights—the core of design research—are local, discrete, and specific signals gathered by spending time with people in their natural environments. This process is distinct from focus groups or surveys, which typically collect retrospective opinions or hypotheticals. Instead, product teams must observe people in real-time, engaging in a physical dialogue with the user as they perform tasks. The goal is to gain true empathy, approximating the feelings of another person by temporarily taking on their perspective. For instance, a researcher observing an elderly driver might impair their own vision or augment their body to simulate arthritis, striving to feel the participant’s challenges firsthand.
Ethnographic Research and the Ritual of Transcription
Gathering behavioral signals is simple: be in the context where the behavior happens, watch it occur, and talk to the person doing it. Effective ethnographic research requires establishing a clear focus and preparing open-ended questions that provoke action, such as asking the user to demonstrate an activity or show an example [77, 78t, 79]. Critically, research teams must capture this experience through audio, video, and notes. The most challenging but essential step is transcription: typing the research verbatim. Transcription forces the researcher to relive the experience, achieving a vital meta-analysis and integrating the customer’s perspective into their worldview. This deep internalization is how sense is made of the raw data.
The Synthesis Wall: Complexity Made Tangible
Raw observation data lacks contextual depth and stops short of answering the question: “What should I build?”. The product synthesis wall is an external, tactile, collaborative tool designed to overcome this limitation. Researchers first explode the linear transcript into thousands of individual, modular utterance cards. Pinning these notes to a wall forces a visual, non-hierarchical organization, enabling the discovery of hidden connections, patterns, and anomalies that might otherwise be missed in a spreadsheet. For example, Joe’s team clustered seemingly negative quotes about work stress into a group that described participants feeling emotionally depleted at the end of the day.
The Risky Leap to Profound Insight
Interpretation of these clustered behaviors yields two outcomes: identifying simple needs (low-hanging fruit with minimal risk, e.g., “The subway kiosk needs a shelf for juggling items”) or generating complex insights. An insight is a “provocative statement of truth” about human behavior that is inherently an inference or educated guess. For instance, Joe’s team observed stressed employees who did nothing to fix their situations, leading to the insight: “People are generally aware of the stress in their jobs, but aren’t specifically aware of the stress at any given moment or day. They feel the cumulative emotional burden of stress only after it’s too late to do anything about it”. This process introduces innovation risk—the statement may be wrong—but insights are the source of breakthrough innovation precisely because they are unexpected and challenge existing norms. Insights are “gold” because they identify a causal relationship and generate mandatory product constraints, dictating what must be built to drive desirable behavioral change.
The Simplicity Beyond Complexity
Moving from local, factual observations to global, authoritative insights demands thoughtful interpretation and intuitive leaps. Although the final insight statement should feel simple—so simple that one might ask, “That’s it?"—it is the result of working through the chaotic complexity of human behavior and data analysis. This rigorous design-led research process, which marries psychological and anthropological techniques, provides the foundational “big rocks” upon which a successful product vision can be built.