Note: This is Part 34 of the Ruminations for Aspiring Designers series.
Debunking the Myth of Research
Many aspiring designers learned to conduct research as part of a design process. More often than not, research is positioned as a pre-condiction to designing – how could we possibly start designing stuff without doing proper research first? That makes a lot of sense!
That’s the theory.
The catch is – in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not.
In practice, much fewer organizations afford pitch-perfect research for any project, product or service. Time is often limited to none, as are resources and people. Sometimes, an ambitious executive or middle manager would even throw out a few grandiose ideas on what the research should achieve. Occasionally, we even go so far as to believe them.
Both software engineering and HCI embraced empiricism enthusiastically, largely in the misguided hope that this would bring respectability.
–Daniel Jackson, The Essence of Software
In theory, decision makers respect research (who doesn’t?!). In practice, they don’t make decisions based on how much they do for both good and bad reasons.
In theory, you sketch, plan, and conduct research, analyze research data, synthesize findings, extract insights, and the resulting research report becomes the defining artifact that makes or breaks a product even before you start designing it.
In practice, everything happens everywhere and all at once. Facing constraints on time, budget, resources, people, and even the respect from others, you cut corners. You talk to fewer people but talk better. Your understanding from the research evolves iteratively, not incrementally. You make assumptions and sometimes you end up doing informed guessing based on lived experiences.
From your point of view, there may really be one right way to do research. From the organizaiton’s poitn of view, there may not. Just because you think research should be done in a certain way, it doesn’t mean you could do it in your organziation.
Sometimes, informed guessing based on lived experiences is the closest you get to an ideal research.
There is a professional jargon for “informed guessing based on lived experiences” – expertise.
Expertise takes years if not decades. Translating theory into practice is almost always NOT straigtforward.
Be patient. Be pragmatic. Learn slower to learn better.
The Danger of Inflated Research
An inflated reserch is hard even when it can be easily done. The hard part is not in its implementation, but in its value compared to the investment.
With constraints on time, budget, resources and people, managing the scope of research is as critical as managing clients’ expectations.
A common trap is reseach scope inflation – defining a research scope that’s bigger than you can practically afford is the first step to a lot of misfortunes, including but not limited to low ROI, disappointment, loss of respect, and loss of confidence. As the saying goes, take one step and you’re half-way through. Setting an unrealistically inflated scope for your research gets you more than half-way to failure.
The scope inflation is not just a research thingy. It happens everywhere in operations, projects, products and services.
More importantly, just because you could do it, it doesn’t mean you should do it. Even if you’re well supported by your organization to do the pitch-perfect research you think you want to do, that still doesn’t mean it’s exactly what you need to do – the return may or may not worth the investment. When you’re trusted to make the best decisions for the organization, it’s specifically critical that you don’t take it for granted – someday, someone smarter would come in and prove to everyone (esp. to your boss) that you’re wasting more time, budget, resources and people than necessary. Murthy’s Law applies here: if it could happen, then it will happen.
Managing the scope of research is career-winning skill to any aspiring designers.
So, what can you do then? Below I’ve distilled three principles from my experience.
Three Principles of Scoping Research
Here are three adaptable principles for scoping research:
- The questions are the strategy.
- The answers influence the decisions.
- The outcome specifies the goal.
Principle #1: The Questions are the Strategy
By definition, research is driven by questions.
The only reason you need to do research is that you have questions to answer.
If you don’t have questions you need to answer, then there’s no need for research. Sometimes, articulated assumptions are good enough.
What kind of questions?
How you ask them reflects how you frame the problem you’re facing. How you frame the problem reflects how you approach the solution. How you approach the solution is, well, strategy.
Principle #2: The Answers Influence the Decisions
The answers you’re looking for through research must be aligned with decisions that need to be made based on that very research.
Research is unnecessary unless the answers can and do influence the decisions. Sometimes, articulated assumptions are good enough, with or without research.
Some may argue that sometimes a research is not meant to inform decisions. But that’s misleading – to research is to know more, but if you know more without any intention to decide anything, then you’re basically just researching for fun, like as a hobby.
In theory, research is always meant to inform decisions.
In practice, “research theatres” are far more popular – doing research just to check the “look, we’ve done research” checkbox while decisions are already made. In that case, research is merely exploited as a convenient justification for political gains.
Before you think about the how, the first question you ask is: what decisions would this research inform?
Principle #3: The Outcome Specifies the Goal
To avoid scope inflation, research goal needs to be as specific as possible, as narrow as possible, and as concrete as possible.
How? Focus on the intended outcome. A specific, concrete, and well-defined outcome tells us everything we need to know about the research goal.
Imagine we’ve already done the perfect research – what would the future state look like? What do we think would happen? What do we think we would do with it? What kind of decisions would we be able to make based that outcome?
Aspiring designers may immediately recognize the approach here – describing a future state exposes how we frame the problem and the potential solution. The future state is not used to define the future outcome; instead, it’s used to explore the problem in the current state. If the client mentions “faster horse” in describing a future state, then we might as well infer what their current problem is about, and we might also articulate that “stronger horse with longer legs” might not be the only solution – cars, trains, and airplanes would be nice.
Always align the research goal with specific, concrete outcomes.
In other words, be grounded.
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Noah Fang 