UX Research

Foreword

IN THE LATE 1940s, a psychology professor named Roger Barker ran a lengthy contextual research project in the small Kansas town of Oskaloosa. For over 25 years, researchers observed and logged the activities of the town’s 725 residents. The notion of doing research about everyday people’s behavior in context (rather than in a laboratory) was radical at the time. In exhaustive detail, Barker documented ordinary activities throughout the day. Because it was a new approach to studying people, it wasn’t obvious how this data would lead to any insight. And while the results of Barker’s work were considered significant, there was an element of notoriety simply because of the volume of banal data he captured. I’m obviously oversimplifying terribly here, but consider that Barker may represent an era of academic research that privileged data over questions.

In product design today, we start with questions. Those questions may include a hypothesis, an assumption, or a set of missing information, but for the most part we set out to conduct research because there’s something that we need to know in order to build or improve a product, tool, service, or the like. And with practice, we can learn to do a pretty reasonable job of answering the questions we start with. But a vital outcome of research (not just the data that is gathered but the experiences we have in gathering it) is learning about what we didn’t know that we didn’t know. The most important insights often lie beyond the questions ...