Five interviews beat a ₹4 lakh survey
A survey of 200 “target audience” LinkedIn clicks will tell you people like speed. Five recorded calls while someone tries to book, pay, or raise a ticket will show you the OTP modal covering the submit button. Prioritise observation over opinion.
Recruit from real buyers: last month’s invoices, not college friends. Offer ₹500–₹1,000 or a credit note. Thirty minutes, one task, think-aloud. Stop when findings repeat.
Record the call, not a 40-slide deck
A timestamped clip of a user failing GSTIN is more persuasive than a persona named “Priya, 32.” Founders change wireframes when they watch; they argue with slides.
Steal the research already sitting in WhatsApp
Export labelled chats for a week. Cluster: “send brochure,” “price,” “is this available in Coimbatore,” “OTP not coming,” “can you do on call.” Each cluster is a screen or a microcopy job — see UX writing that reduces support.
If the close always leaves the site for chat, that is a WhatsApp-first finding, not a designer mood. Design the handoff instead of pretending the form is the till.
Support tickets are unpaid usability studies
Freshdesk, Gmail, Instagram DMs — same job. Tag by step in the flow (find, trust, pay, after-sales). The tallest bar is the first research priority.
Guerrilla tests in Chennai cafés and office lobbies
Hand a prototype to someone who matches the buyer — not your intern. Ask them to complete one task on their own phone. Do not explain the UI. Watch thumbs, not faces.
Factory, clinic, and CA-firm products need tests with shift staff, not only directors. Mobile app UX vs website UX changes what you put in the prototype.
What not to outsource on a thin research budget
Do not buy stock personas, “India Gen Z trends,” or a heat-map tool before you have a working URL. Do not run a 40-question Typeform. Do not pay for a branded research portal you will log into twice.
Do pay for a human who can write decisions: keep, cut, merge screens. That person can be us inside the ₹50,000 pack or your product owner with a template.
Stop buying persona PDFs from internships
If the persona cannot be matched to a real invoice, it is fiction. Replace it with three named customers and what they failed at last Tuesday.
A two-week research sprint Indian SMEs can finish
Week one: ticket dump, five interviews, competitor task (book the rival). Week two: wireframe the fixes, test with three new people, freeze the flow. Then visual UI. That sequence is wireframes first.
If ads are already running, research the landing, not the brand film — landing page UX that converts ads.
How Brevia folds research into the ₹50,000 pack
From Thousand Lights we scope ~12 screens: flows, wires, hi-fi, prototype. Research is the first days, not a phase-two add-on. If you need a website or Next.js build after, the same notes become tickets.
Start on consultation or contact. Bring the task that makes money.
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