From R&D to Reality: How IHUT Transforms NPD

Every product development department is racing to be faster these days. Which is understandable. You want to stay ahead of the competition, and it's not called a fast-paced day and age for nothing. But how do you create products not just faster than your competitor, but also better ones?

Getting from idea to great product is a journey. And any journey requires efficiency – to not waste time getting there – but also accuracy. You don't want to create a product that is just a bit off, after all. “Just a bit off” can translate to millions of dollars lost.

In this article, we'll tell you how to approach product development in a smarter way. Not to cut corners, but to show how engaging with your target audience early and in the right context can help you make better decisions, faster.

Why Some Product Testing Can Give You a False Sense of Security

In product development, being slow isn't the main problem. Being wrong is. Yet a lot of businesses still only rely on traditional research to give them insights for their new products. Which often isn't wrong per se, but incomplete.

Traditional testing methods like CLT create artificial scenarios that don't replicate how people actually interact with products in real life. Here's what you might miss:

• Context, context, context. There are only so many environments you can replicate in a lab environment. But it's in the unexpected ones that only happen in real homes that truly new findings can be done.
• The emotional reality. Traditional testing strips away real emotional states. When people use your products when they're tired, frustrated or in a hurry, outcomes will be different.
• Adaptation factors. People adapt to products in ways testers rarely anticipate. They follow their instincts and are guided by their environments, which is hard to replicate or ask of someone in a lab environment. They overthink it.

The gist of this is: stop asking people what they think—watch what they do instead.

Because the difference between stated preferences versus real behavior is where you find the gold that can make your new product stand out. R&D may have built a product that functions one way, but . consumer testing from someone's bathroom on a hectic Tuesday morning reveals an even bigger opportunity for a use case.

Real Homes, Real Routines, Real Results: The IHUT Advantage

Now, there is a way to get these insights from the homes of real consumers without standing in the corner of someone’s kitchen with a clipboard. With in-home usage testing (IHUT) you can step out of the restrictions of online surveys and lab testing and get fresh insights, straight from the source. Here's how IHUT can help you:

• Step outside your R&D bubble and see your product through consumers' eyes
• Catch unexpected friction, or even unexpected delights to double down on
• Capture practical visual feedback through video that shows, not tells, how people interact with your product

Highlight's approach to IHUT ensures that your products get into the right homes and that valuable feedback makes it back to you. Our technology-enabled platform handles everything from recruit to report.

Pre-launch Testing Isn't Just Validation—It's Ideation Fuel

Now you might wonder: how can I use IHUT for NPD if I haven't actually finished developing my product yet? And that is the right question to ask.

Most companies use product testing as the final checkpoint before launch—a simple yes/no validation of existing ideas. But IHUT is more than that. The earlier you incorporate real-world testing, the more valuable it becomes.

By putting even early concepts and rough prototypes into consumers' hands, or even through getting insights via competitor's products in your category, you gain insights that can fundamentally reshape your product direction before you've invested heavily in a specific solution. Let's look at how to use our IHUT research methods through different stages of the product development lifecycle.

From Insights to Implementation

Using IHUT in product development doesn't just reduce risk—it actively generates better ideas. But how do you go from idea to reality?

The feedback you'll get from IHUT will be more complex to analyze and draw conclusions from than a survey with a bunch of scales or multiple choice questions. But it's all worth it, in the end. To thoughtfully translate your IHUT findings into tangible product decisions, you "simply" need to reframe the feedback.

Reframing Consumer Feedback as "Design Opportunities"

What if you approached the consumer feedback you get from IHUT not as problems to fix, but as opportunities to innovate? With each piece of information, you can then lay out a path to improvement, with adequate testing and analysis to see if it's feasible and worth it.

Here are some perspective-shifting questions:

• What if the consumer "complaints" about your product are actually signposts to your next breakthrough feature?
• How might challenges with your product reveal broader unmet needs in the category?
• What would happen if you prioritized addressing the issues that generate the most emotional responses rather than those mentioned most frequently?
  
  

The Power of Visual Evidence

When product teams can actually see a frustrated parent struggling to open packaging one-handed, or witness the moment when a consumer discovers an unexpected benefit, the path forward becomes self-evident. These visual insights create emotional connections to consumer needs that spreadsheets and survey results simply cannot match.

Highlight's approach combines multiple data collection methods to ensure you get the complete picture:

• Video + open-ended responses capture nuance that quantitative measures miss
• Ranking methods guide feature prioritization based on actual consumer preferences
• Mixed-method data processing helps identify patterns across different feedback types

Based on what you'll see, here's what you'll get:

• Reduced risk of costly launch failures
• Avoidance of the classic "we didn't see that coming" post-launch panic
• Built cross-functional confidence across R&D, marketing, and operations
  
  

From Development to Demand: How IHUT Bridges the Gap

The ball doesn't stop at product development. Without the right messaging, these incredible improvements and innovations you've made to your new product won't land with your target audience. That's why it's crucial that product development and marketing speak the same language, and IHUT helps them do that.

Ask yourself: Who should determine how your product is described to consumers?

• Your marketing team with their understanding of positioning and messaging?
• Your R&D team who knows the technical capabilities inside and out?
• Or the actual consumers who experience the product in their daily lives?

There's a profound disconnect between how companies talk about their products and how consumers experience them. The most compelling marketing claims don't come from creative brainstorming sessions—they emerge from the authentic language consumers use when describing their experiences.

And let's be honest: consumer-led language is inherently more memorable and legally sound because it's rooted in actual experience rather than marketing hyperbole. That sentence was written by a marketing copywriter, so you know we're serious.

Create Products Real People Will Love

Want a product that resonates, performs, and sells? Start by getting it in the hands of the people who will actually use it—not in artificial environments, but in the messy, beautiful complexity of their daily lives.

Explore how Highlight can support your product development process from idea to launch—with less guesswork and more confidence.