All of these must be asked, and answered, in the context of your intended audience. We specialize in getting useful answers, and actionable information, for high tech consumer firms.
In short, we work with you to determine the most important information you need for any stage of product development or lifecycle. Then we customize a program to cost-effectively determine the answers to your questions.
Bowen Research has for many years developed and refined a proprietary list of qualified research participants for the console and mobile game industry, now over 40,000 strong. Bowen Research also has excellent sources of lists for conducting online research in Europe and other parts of the world.
Since 1992, Hugh Bowen has developed special expertise in online research techniques, as well as the moderation of focus groups and one on one usability sessions.
Traditional focus groups (face to face), usability sessions. We moderate small groups who have been selected to match your project’s requirements. Hugh Bowen has personally moderated hundreds of focus groups and usability sessions.
Real-time interaction on the Internet can reach more consumers, from more locations at a lower cost than traditional face-to-face groups. This cost-efficient geographic diversity is especially important in cases where regional differences come into play. Chat groups provide an unprecedented level of flexibility for clients and participants, and give us the ability to use on-line product and design presentations.
These provide yet another flexible, low-cost tool which includes statistical analysis of different demographic groups — do "whales" really like your mobile game concept, vs. lighter MTX spenders? Web surveys can be ideal for many product and service categories, especially new product concepts. Running a brief web survey first lets you easily and reliably collect all numerical responses, and get the general "lay of the land" to help identify key topics for a follow-on chat session.
We have the latest conjoint pricing analysis, the "menuing" version which lets you test a "menu" of many item prices — ideal for online micro-transaction pricing optimization.
We recommend this starts with a usability test — if the usability is weak, that alone will make the retention poor, and the retention test will be a waste. For the home section a client must provide downloads of the game for consumers to play at home for 1-2 weeks. Online surveys during the play period determine consumer response. An "immediate problem" button in the game, is excellent to get notes tied to a screen shot of a specific place in the game. At videotaped small group sessions after the at home play, consumers can walk us through the game, so we can thoroughly understand why retention was good or bad.