What led Sonic Solutions to want to conduct field research?
When we initially met with Sonic’s executives, they were already aware of the power of field research. Their biggest challenge was deciding what kind of users to study. The design team believed that the majority of their users were *early adopters* of DVD creation technology, willing to do whatever it takes to become technically proficient with relevant video and PC hardware and software. For the next generation MyDVD, they wanted to target a larger mass market. But they weren’t sure how well field research on early adopters would help with a design for mass market users. How hard was it to find customers who would let you in their homes? To find customers, we sent email messages to registered customers. As is typical, our acceptance rate was approximately 10%. Since the list of registered customers in our target locale was quite large, the recruiting was fairly easy. We are often surprised at how willing people are to invite us into their homes. In this case, most of our participants
