Most research still treats customers the way it did twenty years ago: as people we study, not people we build with. We send the survey, run the focus group, watch the usability session, then take what we've heard back into a meeting without them and decide what it means. The customers speak, we, as researchers, interpret. That gap, between hearing something and acting on it, is where a lot of good insight quietly goes to waste.
Participatory research closes that gap by changing the customer's role, from respondent to collaborator. Instead of reacting to questions we've already written, they help shape the answer alongside the team that owns it. The output isn't a set of quotes for someone else to interpret later, it's something built together, or decided in the room, that a product or marketing team can pick up and use straight away.
Customer Closeness
We tend to measure customer closeness by volume and frequency e.g. how many survey responses we collected or how often we run interviews. Participatory approaches measure it differently, by how close customers sit to the decision itself. A team that runs a co-design lab with ten people and finalises with a prioritised concept has a different kind of closeness to a team that runs a thousand-response survey and comes away with a set of averages. Each method is built to answer different questions, and it's worth knowing which one you need to get the result you want.
Insight Co-Design Labs
An insight co-design lab is a structured workshop-style session where customers and your team aim to work together to tackle a specific problem. Instead of just judging ideas you’ve already made, a facilitator helps everyone build or create something new from scratch using shared materials. It differs from a focus group, where people react to stimulus that's already been created, and it's quicker than gathering ideas and feedback from a customer community. It sits somewhere in between, which is what makes it so effective and productive to run on shorter timescales.
When a co-design lab session is run, it generally has several stages. It usually opens with something that builds empathy within the group e.g. sharing experiences, observing a real interaction or sometimes a role play, so customers and internal teams start communicating and collaborating from the start. The groups would then start to generate ideas, using prompts and structured exercises to keep people focused on building rather than just discussing. Next is where the facilitator aims to get the ideas turned into something tangible; this could be a quick sketch, the making of a simple prototype or even the wording of a letter or piece of marketing material, so people have something real to react to. The reactions of the resulting product then also become feedback, which feeds straight back into refining the idea. At the end, the session closes with implementation planning, where the strongest concepts are pulled out and the team maps out resources, timeframes and considers the challenges that might come up.
Effectiveness of a Participatory Co-Design Lab
To make a co-design lab session successful, we need to choose and brief any participants carefully and fully. Participants need to understand they're there to build or create something, not just share an opinion, and that shapes both who we invite and how we prepare them beforehand. The facilitator is extremely important because if no one directs the group, the customers and stakeholders can drift back toward familiar territory, reacting to ideas rather than generating them. A good facilitator keeps steering the group toward creation, using prompts and structured exercises rather than letting the conversation run free. We also need someone to take the lead on what happens after the session. A good session generates a lot of raw material, these could be sketches, half-formed ideas or initial concepts, but someone must turn these ideas into something a team that wasn't actually present can really understand and use.
Other points to consider, those making decisions must listen properly: if customers are invited but the real decisions get made without them anyway, it undermines trust and produces weaker ideas than genuine collaboration would. We must ensure dominant personalities are managed by the facilitator so they don't take over and steer the group, with other voices not being heard. We should also make sure the Insight team's write-up after the session is clear, concise and in a format that can be understood and communicated well across the business.
Run properly, a co-design lab has several advantages over other research methods. It bridges the gap between your brand and your audience by making customers part of the process rather than just data points, and the bonus is that the feedback is immediate. That means you can move forward with actual proof rather than guesswork and it supports more informed decision-making. Plus, if done consistently, it can also drive a genuine cultural shift toward a more customer-centric way of working and because the process is iterative, it tends to produce faster innovation, with rapid testing replacing the slower back-and-forth of traditional development.
Co-design labs often work well for open-ended problems like launching a new product or service, running a major redesign, or tackling a tricky repositioning. They are less useful for straightforward evaluative research, where a survey will get you there faster and more cheaply, for example, if you just need to know whether something works, or whether customers are happy with the price of the product or service, run a survey instead.
Ultimately, if we as researchers, want customers to help shape decisions, we need to bring them closer to where those decisions actually happen. A co-design lab, like the ones we run at FlexMR is one practical way to enhance or build customer closeness and this participatory approach helps businesses create products and services that resonate deeply with their audiences, drive innovation and build lasting customer loyalty.
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