Company Context
DISH serves millions of pay-TV customers across satellite and streaming experiences, including Hopper, the DISH Anywhere app, and account-management surfaces. As competition from streaming platforms increases, DISH needs to improve core customer experiences quickly while making research investments that are credible, efficient, and tied to product decisions.
Problem
You are the User Experience Researcher supporting the DISH Hopper and DISH Anywhere viewing experience. The product team is considering several opportunities for the next two quarters: improving first-time setup, reducing confusion in live TV navigation, and increasing adoption of DVR and voice remote features. Leadership is asking a practical question: how do you decide which research method to use for a given project?
Assume you are brought into three active requests at once:
- Product wants fast feedback on a proposed Hopper home screen navigation redesign before engineering starts.
- Customer care reports rising complaints that users cannot find recorded content in DISH Anywhere after a recent update.
- Leadership wants to understand why a large share of new customers never use voice remote commands in their first 30 days.
You have one quarter, a limited research budget, and access to product analytics, customer care logs, and a panel of current DISH customers. Engineering can support lightweight prototypes, but not fully built features.
Deliverables
- Explain the framework you would use to choose the right research method for each project.
- Recommend the most appropriate research method(s) for each of the three requests above and justify why.
- Describe how you would balance speed, confidence, and cost when selecting methods.
- Define what outputs you would deliver to product, design, and engineering so the research drives decisions.
- Identify the trade-offs and risks if the wrong method is chosen.
Constraints
- Research budget supports only 2 major studies and 1 lightweight follow-up this quarter
- Timeline is 10 weeks from kickoff to recommendations
- Customer panel skews toward existing satellite customers; streaming-only representation is limited
- No major code changes can be shipped solely for research instrumentation during the quarter
