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Upon further examination, George recognized that many male customers were visibly ill at ease amid fluffed pillows and floral duvets. "The typical customer needs to be in the store for at least nine minutes to feel comfortable enough to buy," says George. "But if the spouse or boyfriend pulls her away too soon, we lose out on the sale." In the coming months, George will retrofit her 23 stores with entertainment centers where sports fans can watch live events via cable. Now, however, she might face a new problem: who would take her spouse or significant other to a place where he can watch the very thing she's been trying all afternoon to pry him away from?

But in-store observation offers only half the story. For the rest of the picture, entrepreneurs must be willing to take the cameras into the kitchens, the living rooms, and even the bedrooms and bathrooms of their potential customers. But you've gotta have the guts to enter.

When Kelly Franznick asks end users of his product if he can place a tripod-mounted video camera in their homes, they raise their eyebrows. "Customers typically agree once they learn about my purpose," says Franznick, who is the user-research manager for Lexant, a Seattle-based start-up with projected 1998 revenues of $5 million. The company sells health information, such as stress-management and smoking-cessation tips, to large employers and insurance corporations. The companies then pass the information along to their employees or agents. Lexant offers the product, called DoHealth, via the World Wide Web, in print, or by telephone counseling.

Franznick's in-home footage shows him not just how customers use the product but also how they live. In a recent study of customers using the DoHealth Web site, Franznick placed video cameras in the computer areas of five homes. With just a small number of participants and only about 36 hours' worth of taping in each house, Franznick began to answer a number of nagging research questions: What time of day did people access DoHealth? What other computer activities were completed before or after users accessed the on-line service? What else was happening in the room when they were on-line? What pulled them away from the computer?

And perhaps most important, the tape uncovered problems that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. For example, Franznick saw that on-line users became frustrated when they couldn't click from the bottom of the page to move forward or backward within the site, but he also saw that they had invented their own solutions, or work-arounds, for the problem. They simply scrolled to the top of the page and then clicked onward. "That's the sort of thing that might never have been revealed in a survey," says Franznick. It wasn't a tough problem to solve. Lexant's Web master simply added electronic links to the bottom of the page.

That was just one of several ideas the videos revealed. Franznick has developed a method for moving from idea to reality: After he's identified patterns among users from viewing the videos, he sketches out potential solutions or new products. The Web-site study yielded more than 25 penciled drawings. Franznick then presents the roughs to the designers and developers, who quickly estimate the costs in time, money, and resources. The objective is to pick the ideas that will give the greatest bang for the buck.

Even if you gain entry into the consumer's home, you still might find that you're cordoned off from touchy subjects. When Lexant began to develop an on-line area to address weight-management issues, Franznick quickly recognized that the company had stumbled into one of those sensitive zones. "It's very hard to get people to talk about their weight," says Franznick. "You need to use methods that allow them to reveal what they want on their own terms."

So Franznick mailed logbooks and disposable cameras to 30 potential customers from the Chicago and Seattle areas. They were asked to snap photos whenever they became "conscious of a weight-management issue." They were also told to scribble down a caption for the photo in the logbook.

The study lasted just five weeks. In the end, it revealed some intensely personal moments. All of the photos and captions were first sorted according to similar themes and ideas. "Here's where you start to see patterns," says Franznick. For example, a couple of participants took photos of the bathroom mirror still fogged over from the morning shower. One caption read, "This is the mirror where 'I size myself up' every day." There were a few photos of bridal magazines with comments such as, "Someday, after I lose weight, I'll get married." The information gathered from the study will help Lexant design the new Web site, and many of the issues raised will become on-line discussion topics.

Not all market-research opportunities must be so contrived. Life often provides windows to view a consumer's lifestyle, if you're alert to the possibilities. Blackwell suggests that attending real estate open houses in your town may give you ideas for products or services. "Look for problems that don't have solutions and for innovative consumer-made solutions," says Blackwell. "Here's where you might find ideas to commercialize or ways to improve an existing product."

Long before Bible Bread made the voyage to the United States, Zack Shavin and his crew had seized an opportunity to expose Americans to their product. Shavin moonlights as a tour guide in Jerusalem, and he tested the cracker, the packaging, and various slogans on the herds of Americans who make the pilgrimage to the Holy Land each year. "By the time we went to America, we were quite sure that our product and message would be accepted," says co-owner Moshe Shuster. He says that the company resisted more formalized focus groups because they were too costly and too risky. "We could have spent everything just to find out that people didn't like the product," says Shuster, "and then we would have been sunk."

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