3 Test Your Access
Can You Really Reach Them?
Run an Access Test
By now, you’ve chosen a group of people to focus on — not just as an audience, but as the starting point of your innovation journey. You’ve explored widely, converged thoughtfully, and selected with care. But before you dive into deep research, there’s one more step that can save you enormous time and frustration: access testing.
This is where you ask a simple but essential question: Can we actually reach the people we want to learn from?
It’s easy to assume that because you can imagine your people, you can also find and talk to them. But innovation fails when teams build for people they cannot observe, engage, or understand. Access testing protects you from designing in a vacuum.
What Counts as Access?
Access isn’t just about sending a survey or getting a few people to answer DMs. It’s about confirming that you can build a reliable, ethical, and ongoing channel of interaction. For your access test to pass, you need to satisfy all three conditions:
You can find them.
You know where they gather — online or offline — and can reliably locate them. This might mean a subreddit, a neighborhood, a school, a profession, or a specific setting like a hospital waiting room.You can engage them.
There’s a viable way to initiate interaction: surveys, interviews, conversations, observations, social media engagement. The format should fit their lifestyle and comfort zone.They respond — and open up.
Access isn’t just reach. It’s reciprocity. Your people reply, share, reflect, and reveal. They’re willing to talk, and they’re willing to go deeper.
- You know where your people are
- You can interact with them directly
- They are responsive and willing to engage
If any of these are missing, your access isn’t yet strong enough. And that’s not a failure — it’s a signal. Better to learn this now, while there’s still time to adjust.
What You Actually Do
A good access test is low-effort but high-signal. You’re not gathering formal data yet — you’re testing your ability to gather it later. That might look like:
- Posting an open-ended question in a relevant group or subreddit
- Sending cold messages or emails to 5–10 potential participants
- Visiting a physical location to observe flow and availability
- Asking for brief conversations and tracking how many say yes
You’re looking for early traction — signs that your group is not just real, but reachable in ways that matter.
What Happens If You Struggle?
If your messages go unanswered, if you can’t find where your people spend time, or if conversations fizzle after two sentences, pay attention. The issue might not be your concept — it might be your choice of people.
You may need to loop back to your short list from convergence and try again. This isn’t wasted time — it’s forward progress. It means you’re protecting yourself from building for an invisible audience.
- You can’t find where your people spend time — physically or online
- You rely entirely on personal connections (friends, classmates, roommates)
- People are willing to talk but only give surface-level responses
- Your target group is too broad to locate or segment effectively
- You’re targeting vulnerable or stigmatized groups without a path through gatekeepers or clear ethical strategy
- You assume access is working because one person responded — but can’t replicate that across the group
A Word About Sampling
We’ll return to the topic of sampling in the next chapter. But it’s worth saying now: access problems almost always lead to sampling bias. If you only talk to people who are close to you, highly responsive, or especially available, your insights will skew. A successful access test tells you that you can reach a broad and representative slice of the group you’ve chosen — not just the easy-to-find few.
Note: You’re Still Defining Your People
Even though you’ve “chosen” your group, you haven’t fully defined them. Not yet. That definition will evolve as you learn what pain unites them. You started with socio-demographic clues — age, role, setting — but you’ll eventually define your people by shared unmet needs.
When those needs start to surface in the next stage, your early conversations may sound chaotic. If you’re hearing different themes, it may be because you’re talking to multiple pain subgroups. That’s not a failure — it’s how discovery works. You’ll converge again later, using personas and journey maps to isolate pain-defined boundaries.
If this happens, don’t worry — it’s part of the process. Keep listening. The real community is just beginning to take shape.
Before moving forward, try it yourself. Use the Access Test Guide to design and run a quick access check with your chosen group. For inspiration, see how the Halo Alert team confirmed access in their Access Test Demo.
What You Need to Move Forward
You’re ready to begin ethnographic discovery when:
- You can locate your people in specific places or digital communities
- You can interact with them in a format that matches their lives
- They respond — not just once, but with depth and openness
- You know you’re not relying solely on personal convenience samples
- You’re prepared to adapt your definition of “your people” as patterns emerge
Access isn’t a checkbox. It’s a gate. Pass through it, and your expedition can begin in earnest.
You’ve now chosen a group, confirmed you can reach them, and begun to feel the pull of their experience. What comes next is discovery — the core of ethnographic exploration. You’ll step into their world not to validate assumptions, but to learn what they cannot yet articulate: the quiet signals of persistent pain, workarounds they’ve normalized, and needs they may not yet know they have.
This is where real innovation begins — with curiosity, humility, and proximity. You’re no longer circling from a distance. You’re entering the field.