Different answer depending on whether you have a product built or not. Also different if you have a consumer product. My best personal experience with custome

Different answer depending on whether you have a product built or not. Also different if you have a consumer product. My best personal experience with customer research is for live consumer products. In that case we would recruit potential customers off of craigslist (offering $50 for an hour of their time). We would bring them into the office and sit them at the table. The entire team (small) would be in the room. We would give them a scenario and ask them to complete a task in our app in front of us. For example, you saw a really good video on Facebook made with this app and now you want to download that same app and make a video for yourself. Then we would ask them to complete that task asking us any questions they had and sharing their inner monolog out loud. Some questions we would answer but most we would ask them to figure it out. It was very important that everyone involved with building and designing the product was in the room experiencing the user test live. We would take notes on issues the customer faced and conduct about 5 interviews in an afternoon. Anything that came up 4-5 times we would attempt to fix. We would rince and repeat monthly.