Menu
Close
.svg)
Early in my career, I almost exclusively moderated interviews and focus groups with healthcare professionals: physicians, nurses, pharmacists, payers were my purview. These were respondents who typically arrived for research ready, articulate, and deeply engaged. They came prepared to read data rich target product profiles, to dissect clinical trial results, to criticize campaign ideas, and to debate the nuance of real world medical practice. In short, they didn’t need us to accommodate much - besides maybe a Diet Coke.
That changed the day I was asked to moderate my first study with patients living with cystic fibrosis (CF). I quickly realized how naïve I’d been.
Bringing these respondents into a traditional marketing research facility wasn’t just logistically complex -- it was potentially dangerous. CF patients are highly vulnerable to pathogens, and even brief in-person exposure to others living with CF can have severe consequences. Suddenly, every assumption I’d made about “standard protocol” went out the window. We sanitized the environment obsessively. We limited contact. We rethought proximity and pacing. In effect, we learned to conduct research that optimized respondent safety, not just gathered insight. In subsequent CF patient research, we started to utilize what was then the nascent FocusVision InterVu platform for remote, virtual research.
That study reshaped the way I saw respondents forever. It wasn’t just about testing educational materials in the CF community; it was about the ethics of engagement -- recognizing that every person who participates in our research brings with them a set of abilities, limitations, and vulnerabilities that demand respect and accommodation.
Fast forward to today. More than half of the qualitative research I conduct -- and an ever-growing share of the studies that ThinkGen leads -- now involve patients and caregivers rather than HCPs. This evolution reflects a larger movement within healthcare: the steady consumerization of medicine, where patients are no longer passive recipients of care but active participants, advocates, and decision-makers in their own health journeys.
This shift has fundamentally changed what it means to be a moderator. In the days when our focus was primarily on medical professionals, the work revolved around precision, medical fluency, and analytical depth. The moderator’s task was to listen carefully, probe intelligently, and distill insights from highly trained minds.
But when your audience expands to include patients and caregivers, the craft transforms. It’s no longer enough to be a good listener -- you must become an empathetic designer. Every element of the research experience, from the wording of a question to the visual design of stimuli to the pacing of an interview, must be constructed with sensitivity to the participant’s physical, emotional, and cognitive realities. In essence, we’re not just gathering data anymore; we’re designing experiences that make participation possible, meaningful, and humane.
And as my colleague Kara Olds reminded me during a ThinkGen Strategic Summit in Providence we convened this week, many of the patients we speak with are navigating invisible disabilities that we often fail to recognize or anticipate. We talked about how marketing research itself must evolve to become truly inclusive — not only in who we recruit, but in how we engage them.
What Kara said hit home. I realized that we often take for granted that everyone can read, process, and respond to our materials in the same way. But that’s simply not true. A lot of people struggle with written and visual information -- not because they’re disinterested, but because it’s just harder for them to process. Still, we hand them complex concepts and polished brochures without really thinking about whether they can fully engage with them.
The academic literature underscores this reality. According to studies compiled by the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity and corroborated by recent epidemiological research, as many as one in five adults (20%) show some degree of dyslexia or reading impairment -- a rate that’s remarkably consistent across developed nations.
That means that in almost any patient or caregiver study, a nontrivial percentage of participants may struggle to process written content at the pace or depth we assume. They may hesitate to admit it. They may mask it through verbal cues. They can seem frustrated. But the net effect is the same: comprehension gaps that can distort feedback and reduce the validity of our insights.
This isn’t just an academic concern -- it’s a design challenge. If we want to gather authentic reactions to communications, we must ensure those communications are cognitively and linguistically accessible.
Over the years, I’ve also encountered participants who mention being color blind -- an estimated 8% of men and 1% of women. In creative campaign testing, this can create obvious problems: a respondent who cannot distinguish green from red may interpret a “traffic light” metaphor completely differently, or fail to see contrast in a logo or trade dress (i.e., pill design) that others find striking.
If our research stimuli rely too heavily on color differentiation, we’re not testing comprehension — we’re testing visual capability.
Likewise, we meet respondents with partial hearing loss, speech impediments, motor challenges, or cognitive fatigue from chronic illness. Each of these realities affects how they can engage with surveys, interviews, or group discussions.
And while technology has made participation more convenient -- virtual platforms, remote interviews, voice-to-text -- accessibility must go deeper than convenience. It must be intentional.
One of the key themes that emerged from our strategic summit was inclusion -- not as a buzzword, but as a design principle. How do we build market research that ensures every person, regardless of ability or limitation, can participate fully and meaningfully? Here are some of the ideas that surfaced and that we (and our clients) have started implementing across our studies:
1. Test for comprehension before testing for preference. Use AI-powered readability tools to assess all written stimuli. If 25% of potential respondents may have dyslexia or lower literacy, then your content should be tested at multiple reading levels -- ideally between 5th and 8th grade for general comprehension.
2. Write for simplicity, not simplicity’s sake. AI can help here too. Large language models can instantly rephrase stimuli, discussion guides, and survey items to varying literacy levels without losing clinical precision. This allows researchers to tailor communication dynamically to each respondent’s needs.
3. Rethink color strategy. In creative testing, use both color and shape cues -- not just hue -- to communicate meaning. For example, pair “red stop” with a clear “X” icon, or “green go” with a checkmark. Always test visual stimuli in grayscale to ensure contrast-based comprehension.
4. Make hearing and visual aids standard. Closed captioning, adjustable font sizes, and text-to-speech options shouldn’t be “special requests” -- they should be default features in virtual and digital research environments.
5. Design for pacing and fatigue. Chronic illness can make long surveys or discussions exhausting. AI-enabled tools can detect fatigue through lag, voice modulation, or shortened responses -- prompting breaks or adaptive timing automatically. This isn’t surveillance; it’s empathy in practice.
6. The Moderator must listen beyond words. Inclusivity starts with awareness. Our ThinkGen moderators who work with patients and caregivers on a day-to-day basis learn to spot signs of struggle -- a pause before reading a slide, a respondent’s body language when faced with dense text, or the quick “I get it” that may mask confusion.
As we learned from our ThinkGen AI strategy team during our Summit, AI can become a powerful ally in this transformation -- not as a substitute for empathy, but as a systematizer of it.
Imagine a platform that can automatically adjust font, pacing, and readability for each respondent. One that provides alt-text for visuals, or even uses generative voice assistants to “read aloud” stimuli for those who prefer auditory processing. Or an interface that automatically converts visual contrasts into accessible palettes for color-blind respondents.
These aren’t distant possibilities; they’re practical applications of AI that are already emerging across our field. And the more we, as an industry, continue to share and adopt inclusive practices, the closer we come to making accessibility an inherent part of how we do research.
Accessibility isn’t simply a matter of compliance; it’s a strategic advantage and a professional responsibility. When we build inclusion into our design, we don’t just reach more people; we learn more from them. The insights become richer, the empathy more authentic, and the choices we guide more informed and impactful.
This shift requires more than process updates. It calls for a mindset change: seeing respondents not just as data sources, but as individuals with distinct realities that shape how they can participate.
As I think back to that first CF study -- and to my recent conversation with Kara in Providence -- I’m reminded that many in our field have already been navigating these same questions. We all approach inclusion from different angles, and I’m eager to learn from others:
What kinds of unique disabilities have you encountered in your research respondents? And how have you sought to accommodate them to make your work as inclusive and equitable as possible?
Our field has always prided itself on understanding the human experience. Perhaps the next evolution of that promise lies in making sure every human voice can be heard -- clearly, comfortably, and completely.
