About a year ago, I stumbled upon a TEDx Talk by Tricia Wang titled “The Human Insights Missing from Big Data”. She eloquently unfurls a story about her experience working at Nokia around the time smartphones were becoming a formidable emergent market. Over the course of several months, Tricia Wang conducted ethnographic research with around 100 youth in China and her conclusion was simple—everyone wanted a smartphone and they would do just about anything to acquire one. Despite her exhaustive research, when she relayed her findings to Nokia they were unimpressed and expressed that big data trends did not indicate there would be a large market for smartphones. Hindsight is 20/20.

One line in particular stuck out to me as I watched her talk— “[r]elying on big data alone increases the chances we’ll miss something, while giving us the illusion we know everything”. Big data offers companies and organizations plentiful data points that haphazardly paint a picture of human behavior and consumption patterns. What big data does not account for is the inherent ever-shifting, fickle nature of humans themselves. While big data continues to dominate quantitative research, qualitative research methods are increasingly shifting to account for the human experience. Often referred to as HX, human experience research aims to capture the singularity of humans and forces researchers to stop looking at customers exclusively as consumers. In human experience research, questions are asked to get at a respondent’s identity and emotions; for instance, asking how respondents relate to an advertising campaign instead of just how they react to the campaign.

The cultivation of HX research in the industry begs the question: what are the larger implications for qualitative research? Perhaps the most obvious answer is that moderators and qualitative researchers need to rethink how research goals are framed and how questions are posed to respondents to capture their unique experience. There are also implications for the recruiting process. The need for quality respondents is paramount in human experience research and will necessitate a shift in recruiting and screening practices. Additionally, qualitative researchers need to ensure that the best methodology is chosen in order to make respondents feel comfortable and vulnerable enough to share valuable insights with researchers.

Human experience research may just now be gaining widespread traction, but the eventual effects will ultimately reshape the industry and provide another tool for qualitative researchers to answer increasingly complex research questions for clients. At Corona, adoption of emerging methodologies and frameworks such as HX means we can increasingly fill knowledge gaps and help our clients better understand the humans behind the research.