The success of experience-focused products is contingent on everyone sharing an understanding of users and a vision for the experience, because so many people play a role in delivering that experience.
Creating engaging user experiences requires a solid understanding of the people you want to serve, which inevitably means doing research. Research is a reliable way to gain insight and deal with uncertainty, but to incorporate the ideas from Chapter 3 you may need to reconsider how you think about research. In our experience, a lot of research does nothing but keep research staff busy; however, well-executed research can transform your organization's understanding of its customers, and help your team create compelling experiences.
In this chapter, we'll share what we've learned about how successful, experience-focused companies approach their research efforts. We've already spent a lot of time discussing empathy and the importance of understanding the complexity of your customers' lives. Now, we'll look at some of the methods we use to capture that complexity. We'll also talk about some of the mistakes organizations make with research, and indicators that your research methods could use fine-tuning. Finally, we'll share principles and strategies for successful research.
Of course, every organization has its own needs and idiosyncrasies, so it's impossible to offer step-by-step instructions, but Adaptive Path's strategies have proved effective for our clients and us, even in an increasingly ambiguous market.
Research for product and service design is about two things: generating ideas and evaluating ideas. It's about answering fundamental questions such as: What should we make? How should it work? Why should people care? This is even true once you have tangible designs, prototypes, or completed products and services. Research will augment your work by giving you insight into customers' lives, and helping you develop empathy for them.
Businesses today may use several different types of research:
Evaluative research is a fairly well-understood endeavor, with established disciplines such as human factors, ergonomics, usability, and the like. These fields have developed out of—and have incorporated—a great deal of social and medical science. Their efficacy has been proven over and over because organizations have been doing acceptance tests, usability tests, and market tests for a long time.
Generative research deserves attention because it's a fairly fuzzy endeavor with few clear disciplinary origins. Perhaps this is best indicated by the fact that no one can even agree about what to call it. Your organization probably does some form of "market research" or "user research" as part of its design and development process. But what do these terms mean?
Market research has a fairly established set of techniques (surveys, focus groups, market segmentation), but tends to focus more on what to say than on how a product should work. This can lead to problems, which we'll discuss in more detail later in this chapter.
User research, a term that came out of the world of software and internet applications, is even less clear. It can include anything from observation and interviewing to simply applying evaluative usability techniques at an earlier stage in the process—for example, evaluating earlier versions of a product or offerings from competitors. In our experience, user research has a tendency to be more of the latter than the former.
More recently, design schools and some organizations are championing the term "design research" instead of "user research" or "market research." This term is extremely promising for those of us who are concerned with establishing effective research approaches for design and development. It pushes us out of the purely digital world, and focuses us on the ultimate outcome and measure for research efforts—creating successful products and services. We've been using the term "design research" at Adaptive Path, and will use it as our preferred term for the rest of the book.
Regardless of what you call it, generating ideas for new products and services is fundamentally important to the success of organizations. But keep in mind that research for product and service design isn't about proving theorems or hypotheses. In fact, it's seldom about proving anything. Instead, design research helps establish the constraints and opportunities that make great design possible. Together, the insight and empathy resulting from research provide both a wellspring for ideas and criteria for evaluating those ideas.
Of course, you eventually need to evaluate and develop ideas so they can become real offerings. The methods and strategies we discuss throughout this chapter are applicable for both evaluative and generative research.
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