Just Enough Research, 2e

However, when practicing industrial or interactive designers refer to design research, they typically mean research that is integral to the design work itself—inquiries that are part of designing, not about design. This research focuses largely on understanding the people for whom we’re designing, often referred to by the dehumanizing but instrumental term end users. Research is a core part of user-centered design.

When you ask the hard questions, your job gets much easier. You will have stronger arguments, clarity of purpose, and the freedom to innovate that only comes with truly knowing your constraints.

But the concept of “liking” is as subjective as it is empty. It is a superficial and self-reported mental state unmoored from any particular behavior. This means you can’t get any useful insights from any given individual reporting that they like or hate a particular thing. I like horses, but I’m not going to buy any online.

People who make design decisions at any level benefit from asking more and better questions. Many of them also need a little guidance on what to do with the answers. In this book, you’ll find ideas and techniques that you can use to make your projects and design solutions better and more successful

To choose the best research tool for your project, you’ll need to know what decisions are in play (the purpose) and what you’re asking about (the topic). Then you can find the best ways to gather background information, determine the project’s goals and requirements, understand the project’s current context, and evaluate potential solutions.

Generative research can include interviews, field observation, and reviewing existing literature—plus feeling fancy about saying “generative research.”

Once you’ve gathered information, the next step is to comb through it and determine the most commonly voiced unmet needs. This sort of research and analysis helps point out useful problems to solve

Descriptive research involves observing and describing the characteristics of what you’re studying. This is what you do when you already have a design problem and you need to do your homework to fully understand the context to ensure that you design for the audience instead of yourself. While the activities can be similar to generative research, descriptive research differs in the high-level question you’re asking. You’ve moved past “What is a good problem to solve?” to “What is the best way to solve the problem I’ve identified?”

Once you have a clear idea of the problem you’re trying to solve, you can begin to define potential solutions. And once you have ideas for potential solutions, you can test them to make sure they work and meet the requirements you’ve identified. This is research you can, and should, do in an ongoing and iterative way as you move through design and development. The most common type of evaluative research is usability testing, but any time you put a proposed design solution in front of your client, you really are doing some evaluative research.

Establishing a cause-and-effect relationship can be tricky. Causal research often includes looking at analytics and conducting multivariate testing (see Chapter 10). You might review user paths to see how visitors are entering and moving around your site and what words they might be searching for, as well as trying design and language variations to see which ones are more effective. Causal research might indicate that you suffered from changes to search engine algorithms, or a site that sent you a lot of traffic shut down

The whole point of doing research is to have a stronger basis for decision-making; if another level of decision-making, such as executive fiat, trumps your findings, you will have wasted your time. Get ready to advocate for your research project—before you start.

In order to influence decisions with evidence, you have to work with existing beliefs, not against them. You need to create interest and establish credibility before the results come in, or your findings will pile up and gather dust. And you don’t even have to get people to care about “research” as a concept, as long as you can get them to embrace reality as a constraint. I like “evidence-based design” as a rallying cry, because if your design isn’t based on evidence, then what is it based on?

We don’t have the time You don’t have time to be wrong about your assumptions and you don’t have time to argue about whose version of reality wins. What are your key assumptions? What if they’re all wrong? How much work would you have to redo? How long would that take?

Upfront and continuous research can provide a basis for decision-making that makes the rest of the work go much faster. Nothing slows down design and development projects as much as arguing over personal opinions or wasting effort solving the wrong problem.

We don’t have the money Doing a project without research is a great way to end up with even less money and nothing to show for it. Objections about time and money are always a smokescreen using a bad model of what research is. Even with little or no budget, you can usually locate some related research online, wrangle representative users to interview, and do a little usability testing. Applying some critical thinking to your assumptions costs nothing, but changing your habits can offer tremendous returns.

It’s strange to think that you have the expertise to build something, but not to figure out whether you are building the right thing. Yes, research is a craft and a set of skills, but above all it’s a mindset. If you would rather be proven wrong quickly and cheaply than make a huge investment in a bad idea, then you have the right attitude

We need to be scientists This isn’t pure science we’re talking about here. This is applied research. You just need to have (or develop) a few qualities in common with a good scientist:

Your desire to find out needs to be stronger than your desire to predict. Otherwise you’ll be a mess of confirmation bias, looking for answers that confirm what you already assume. You need to be able to depersonalize the work. There are no hurt feelings or bruised toes in research, only findings. You need to be a good communicator and a good analytical thinker. Otherwise questions and reports get muddy, and results will be worse. This is just a set of skills that most people can develop if they have the right attitude.

The cult of the individual genius designer/developer/entrepreneur remains strong. In certain “rockstar knows best” cultures, wanting to do research can come across as a sign of weakness or lack of confidence. Fight this. Accept that asking questions is both terrifying and a sign of courage and intelligence. The faster you are proven wrong, the less time you will spend being wrong.

Healthy conflict is essential to collaboration. Challenging design decisions makes them stronger. Just think of all the bad design that made it out into the world because no one asked, “Is that really a good idea?”