Immerse Yourself!  That is our theme for the summer and we'd like to help you get more actionable insight from your customers.  How?  With our Immersive Research platform. 

Revelation's specialty is Immersive Research™.  Immersive Research draws from a number of offline methodologies – ethnography, contextual inquiry and blends them in an online environment.  Like traditional contextual methods, the goal of Immersive Research is to capture participant experiences and behaviors as they happen, and make those experiences meaningful in the context of a business question.

Below we've highlighted the five characteristics of Immersive Research:

 1.     Online
Immersive Research is a framework for in-depth online qualitative research, and the impact of being online manifests in two important ways.  First, it gives researchers the ability to simultaneously capture the experiences an behaviors of a large number of geographically dispersed participants – something that would be extraordinarily expensive to execute via offline methods.

Because the research occurs online it enables any person within an organization, from product and marketing managers to CEOs, to access the data generated by an immersive research study.  In this way, entire organizations could be immersed in the experiences of their customers.

2.     Primary interaction is individual
Immersive Research, like the offline methods it draws inspiration from, is on an individual basis. Participants capture their experiences through diaries (online/mobile), videos, photos and other tools.  Researchers can aggregate participant experiences both by individual and the group interaction.

Due to the ease of including both individual and group interaction in the online environment, there may be group interactions that support the individual interactions.

 3.     Captures experiences, behaviors and emotions as they happen
Like ethnography, Immersive Research seeks to capture the behavioral and emotional moments in context as those moments happen.  However, a big difference between ethnography and Immersive Research is that Immersive Research tends to rely almost entirely on a participant self-reporting, whereas observation is the very heart of ethnography.

Like ethnography, Immersive Research can produce two different data types.  The recording of behaviors, occurrences, purchases, etc … often generates volumes of structured data delineating the what, where, when and why.  On the other hand, the emotions and attitudes that accompany behaviors often generate open-ended text responses that need to be coded. The presence of both of these data types is a strong indicator of Immersive Research.

 4.     Sustained interactions
Another important aspect of Immersive Research is that interactions with participants are sustained long enough to capture applicable behaviors.  Spending time with participants over time is an important part of capturing the natural rhythm of participant experiences.  Whether it’s over the course of days, weeks or even months depends on how often experiences of interest tend to occur during the course of participants’ everyday lives.

5.     Rich media
Perhaps the most powerful part of the Immersive Research experience is the ability to literally see through the eyes of the participants.  The use of digital images or video to record behaviors and experiences let participants tell their stories with a richness that text descriptions simply cannot match.  On occasion, images posted by participants can simultaneously capture both the behaviors and the heart of the emotion underlying the behavior.  The use of rich media by participants to convey their experiences goes a long way in creating a sense of immersion in participants’ lives.

Helping Clients understand the “White Space”

Immersive Research is a great methodology for understanding the “white space” of customer experiences.  The understanding generated by Immersive Research studies can provide fuel for creative efforts for new products, services and messaging. 

Online qualitative research has been predominantly rooted in the focus group framework and text-based bulletin boards and chats; Immersive Research is marked by the adaptation of in-depth qualitative frameworks.  By fully utilizing the latest technologies, hundreds of customer stories are at the fingertips of researchers.

Are you ready to get started?  Want to find out if Revelation’s Immersive Research can help you get in-the-moment with your consumers -- email us at sales@revelationglobal.com ?  If you have never used Revelation Project, we recommend that you attend our weekly product demo to register click here.