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- Robinhood founder Baiju Bhatt on the importance of qualitative user research
Robinhood founder Baiju Bhatt on the importance of qualitative user research
One of the more formative insights Baiju came to while building Robinhood was the difference between quantitative and qualitative user research.
Asking a user to use a prototype and talk through it is an example he points to as qualitative research. If you show the prototype to 5 people and they can’t figure out how it works, it becomes very obvious what about the prototype is giving users trouble.
However, if you only do quantitative research — A/B tests, surveys, looking at your metrics, conversion analysis, etc. — you probably would not come to same insights.
As Baiju puts it:
“If you just do quantitative stuff, you gloss over stuff like that. You gloss over the questions you didn’t ask. And the questions you didn’t ask might be more important than the questions you did ask.”
He continues:
“Another way of putting it is that in the breakdown between qualitative research and quantitative research, the qualitative side is valuable for hypothesis generation. It’s like: ‘We talked to 10 people and 7 of them said this thing. We think that a lot of people might be experiencing this, so let’s try to solve it because it might be a problem for a bunch of people.’”
Then you can use a combination of quantitative and qualitative research to verify that your hypothesis was correct.