How do you talk to a trucker?

Steven Rivas had a problem. The young UX researcher had been given a task to interview truck drivers. The project’s problem was immediately obvious: When Rivas was working the truckers were driving. And after a long drive, the truck drivers didn’t feel too warm and fuzzy about sitting in front of a laptop for an hour to do an interview.?

Market researchers have always had this problem: How do we get our target users to sit down and actually talk to us. No participants, no insight. No insight, no money. No money, no Gucci loafers.?

The pandemic changed most people’s attitude to video calls. Unsurprisingly, the market research industry embraced this with 70% of qualitative interviews now happening online.?

And yet, if we prize our participants' ease and comfort, and from experience it’s a lot easier to get good answers from people who are relaxed, shouldn’t we let them talk to us whenever they choose, not when it fits our schedule.?

The rise of companies like Qualtrics and Survey Monkey all follow this trend. You can bang out a survey and by the time you’ve woken up, people have answered it. However, the challenge is this: People prefer talking to typing.?

For those under the age of 50, the voice note is becoming the predominant way that people communicate. Talking into your phone is the equivalent of leaving an answering message in the 90s. I shudder writing this sentence as many doors were slammed in our house when my father ‘accidentally’ deleted my sister’s boyfriend’s voicemails.?

So if people are happier talking than typing, and we almost certainly get more insight when people talk, why aren’t we getting more people to do this? The reason is threefold: Firstly, Steven Rivas might be busy when the truck driver’s ready to talk. Secondly, voice to text transcription up until the last few years was so bad it was pointless. And thirdly, there was no-one for our favourite truck driver to talk to.?

Enter, with a drumroll, Jad and Jade. Jad and Jade are my favourite avatars. You program them to ask any question you like and when our trucker has eaten his steak, talked to his wife, watched his Netflix show, masturbated vigorously and is just about to turn in, he can spend five minutes answering Jad’s questions. Because voice to text transcription is now so good and sentiment analysis tools have got so much better we can synthesise what the trucker, and other truckers, have said instantly. So, like a survey, you can have the answers overnight. Just with less typing.??

Some market researchers I’ve talked to are rather scared of Jad and Jade. They really shouldn’t be. The reason, as everyone who has been in this game for a while knows, its not just the questions you ask, it’s what you do with the answers that people give you.?

So if you see a trucker talking to an avatar in the future, wish him the best of luck. Unless he’s driving. In which case ask him to pull over.

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fortell.ai launches on the 6th of March. You can try a very ugly and early version of the product here. It only works on desktop (for now!).