Chapter 1. Enough is Enough
Throughout 2001, the internet buzzed with rumors of “Ginger” or simply it, the revolutionary future of personal transportation. It would change everything. Jeff Bezos was into it. Bono was into it. Tens of millions of dollars in venture investment had been poured into it.
Finally, in December of that year, it arrived—and the Segway debuted with a counterrevolutionary thud.
These days, Segways seldom appear outside of warehouse corridors except as a novelty, miracles of engineering conveying awkward gaggles of tourists as they hum serenely by. It’s as though the finest minds of the late twentieth century envisioned a brave new world ushered in by amphibious duck tour.
Transportation is a complicated system with strong conventions. The more industrialized the society, the more people traveling faster, the stronger the conventions. Otherwise, more collisions and chaos. There are currently four fundamental personal ground-transportation options: walking (or wheelchair), bicycle, motorbike, and automobile.
For these options, there are two basic paths: the sidewalk and the street. Pedestrians and individuals in wheelchairs get to use the sidewalk. Vehicles, including bicycles, go in the street. A transportation journey has a beginning and an end. If you travel by personal vehicle, you have to store your vehicle at each end, either inside or outside. Bikes go on racks outside or wherever they fit inside. Cars and motorbikes go into authorized zones on the street, parking lots, or garages. Reliable transportation is essential to daily life, as a flat tire will quickly confirm.
No matter what our personal transportation preferences, we all share the rules and conventions of our locales, and most people share very common needs. People need to get to school or work on time. They need to carry groceries or children. They need to travel through sunshine and rain.
This established system is used with relatively small regional variations by billions of people around the world. But the Segway didn’t fit. It was slower than a car and at least ten times the price of a decent commuter bicycle. Even those who could afford it weren’t sure what to do with it. You couldn’t take the kids to school on it. You couldn’t commute twenty miles on it. You couldn’t pack the family into it or make out in its back seat.
Critics jumped on the dorky aspect and the high price, but those weren’t the dooming factors. Early adopters often put up with cost and ridicule for innovations that meet real needs. But no one needs a Segway.
What does the failure of the Segway have to teach design research? That where humans are concerned, context is everything.
Enough!
A little learning is a dangerous thing.
You like a little danger, don’t you?
To design, to code, to write is to embrace danger, to plunge ahead into the unknown, making new things out of constantly changing materials, exposing yourself to criticism and failure every single day. It’s like being a sand painter in a windstorm, except Buddhist monks probably don’t have to figure out how to fit IAB ad units into their mandalas.
You work one pixel or line or phrase at a time, and every strategy shift or miscalculation leads to rewriting and reworking and revising. Yet you’re shadowed by the idea that the best designers and developers and writers are self-motivated, self-inspiring, hermetically sealed units of mastery. The myth of the creative genius makes it very difficult to say “I don’t know.”
You may be on a team that sees enthusiasm as a substitute for knowledge, high-fiving your way along a primrose path of untested assumptions. Or maybe you are driven before the whip, no time to stop or even breathe. You may not be going the right way, but who cares because you need to get there fast. Or you might be in an organization where everything is done in response to marketing, sales, and the competition. Every day brings a new buzzword or trend.
In such settings, “research” can be a very scary word. It sounds like money you don’t have and time you can’t spare, like some egghead is gathering wool in a lab or library when you could be moving forward and building something. Scariest of all, it means admitting you don’t have all the answers. You may have a vague idea that research is a good thing, but the benefits are fuzzy while the costs are all too clear.
This book is for you.
Research is a tool—a periscope offering you a better view of your surroundings. It can be very powerful if applied thoughtfully. Rather than piling on the costs, research can save you and the rest of your team a ton of time and effort.
You can use the techniques and methods I’ll describe to:
- determine whether you’re solving the right problem
- figure out who in an organization is likely to tank your project
- discover your best competitive advantages
- learn how to convince your customers to care about the same things you do
- identify small changes with a huge potential influence
- see where your own blind spots and biases are preventing you from doing your best work
By the end of this book, you will possess just enough knowledge to be very dangerous indeed. Because once you start getting answers, you’ll keep asking more questions. And that skeptical mindset is more valuable than any specific methodology.
Risk and Innovation
A few years ago, one of the world’s largest insurance companies hired my company, Mule Design, to identify new product and service opportunities enabled by emerging personal technologies. This is fun stuff. Thinky. Lots of meaty problems to solve with our minds. We said, “Great, can we talk to some of your salespeople and agents to better understand how you operate and serve customers now?”
They said, “No.”
The reason? “We don’t want the way we do things now to inhibit your creativity. We want blue-sky thinking!”
Now, I like to think we have a clever group of people. We stay on top of technological advances. We have good imaginations and read comic books and speculative fiction. We have well-considered opinions about monorails, vat-grown meats, and how to defend a space station from a zombie attack. (Lure zombies into the air lock with vat-grown meat while escaping on a monorail.)
None of this tells us where the insurance business might be in ten years. And while we enjoy speculating about the future, we felt irresponsible taking our client’s money for guessing.
We ended up doing a lot of secondary research to learn their business, but reading reports and articles is more work and less fun than talking to live humans and hearing about their specific situations. And we didn’t get any information about our client’s business, which means that while our work was solid, it could have been better.
Businesses and designers are keen on innovation, as well they should be. But the better you know the current state of things and why they’re like that, the better you will be positioned to innovate.
What Research Is
Research is simply systematic inquiry. You want to know more about a particular topic, so you go through a process to increase your knowledge. The type of process depends on who you are and what you need to know.
A lot of personal research these days begins with a Google query (“Who is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi?”) and ends on a Wikipedia page. (“Oh, so that’s how you pronounce it.”) Finding information is relatively easy. The knowledge already exists. You just have to find a trustworthy source for it. Assessing credibility is the hard part. (“Is the Malabar giant squirrel real?”)
Pure research is carried out to create new human knowledge, whether to uncover new facts or fundamental principles. The researcher wants to advance a particular field, such as neuroscience, by answering a particular question, such as “Why do humans sleep?” Pure research is based on observation or experimentation. The results are published in peer-reviewed journals. This is science. Rigorous standards and methodologies exist to preserve objectivity and ensure the credibility of conclusions. (Things get squishy when corporations fund ostensibly pure research, as they frequently do.)
Applied research borrows ideas and techniques from pure research to serve a specific real-world goal, such as improving the quality of hospital care or finding new ways to market pork-flavored soda. While ethics are just as important, methods can be more relaxed. Maybe this means changing up the questions you ask partway through a study or making the most of an imperfect sample group because you’re tight on time. The research is successful to the extent that it contributes to the stated goal. As with pure research, sometimes you accidentally discover something valuable you weren’t even looking for.
And then there is design research.
Design research is a broad term with a long history. In the 1960s, design research referred to the study of design itself, its purpose and processes. This is still how the term is used in academia today. There are various institutes of design research around the world, mostly involved in large existential or small theoretical questions couched in highly specialized academic language. If you’re interested in transformative concepts of spatial intelligence or the poetics of the sustainable kitchen, this field is for you.
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.
Jane Fulton Suri, executive design director at IDEO, offered this elegantly phrased statement of purpose in her 2008 article “Informing Our Intuition: Design Research for Radical Innovation:”
Design research both inspires imagination and informs intuition through a variety of methods with related intents: to expose patterns underlying the rich reality of people’s behaviors and experiences, to explore reactions to probes and prototypes, and to shed light on the unknown through iterative hypothesis and experiment. (http://bkaprt.com/jer2/01-01/, PDF)
For a design to be successful, it must serve the needs and desires of actual humans. Strangely, simply being human is insufficient for understanding most of our fellows. Design research requires us to approach familiar people and things as though they are unknown to us to see them clearly. We need to peel away our assumptions like an extraterrestrial shedding its encounter suit.
Asking your own questions and knowing how to find the answers is a critical part of being a designer. If you rely on other people to set the agenda for inquiry, you might end up caught between fuzzy focus groups and an algorithm that chooses a drop shadow from among forty-one shades of blue. Discovering how and why people behave as they do and what opportunities that presents for your organization will open the way to more innovative and appropriate design solutions than asking how they feel or merely tweaking your current design based on analytics.
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.
What Research Is Not
Uttering the word “research” in some environments may elicit a strange reaction, arising from fears and false preconceptions. Be ready for this.
Research is not asking people what they like
As you start interviewing people involved in business and design decisions, you might hear them refer to what they do or don’t like. “Like” is not a part of the critical thinker’s vocabulary. On some level, we all want the things we do to be liked, so it’s easy to treat likability as a leading success indicator. 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.
Quash all talk about liking. Hating, too. Plenty of people habitually engage in activities they claim to hate.
Research is not about looking smart
Having the right answer feels really, really good. Most of us have been rewarded for right answers our whole lives, in school and at work. Along with the good feeling comes a deep terror of having our ignorance revealed. It’s hard to trade away warm, comfortable certainty, no matter how delusional. So, both humility and courage are a prerequisite for learning. You need to admit you lack all the answers. The more honest you are about what you don’t know, the more you will learn. Don’t let your approach be guided by a desire to appear smart or to create a superficial appearance of rigor.
Research is not about being proven right
Some organizations allow a little research, but only under the guise of “validation.” This means cracking the window open just enough to let some confirmation bias in. It is all too easy to give more weight to findings that support what you already believe—especially when that belief has a lot of previous investment behind it.
A “right” answer is an ephemeral thing. Commit instead to continuous learning, and embrace being proven wrong as quickly as possible. An ego is a beautiful thing to incinerate.
Research is not better just because you have more data
In addition to executives who prefer the authoritative appearance of controlled experimentation, you may run into sample-size queens who dispute the validity or utility of qualitative research. These people are often well-intentioned quants who are just applying the wrong standard of confidence because it’s what they know. Other times they are pollsters or marketers who make their money running surveys or peddle some sort of branded analytics. Avoid arguments about statistical significance; you will not win. Instead, focus on gathering useful insights in order to meet real-world goals.
More data doesn’t automatically create more understanding. Often, the sheer amount of information obscures meaning and enables cherry-picking data points to support any proposed plan of action. If you find yourself in a power struggle over data sets, take the conversation back to first principles and shared success.
Why We Still Need a Book Like This
There are hundreds of books about applied qualitative research and related techniques out there. Many were written by professional researchers for professional researchers. Very thorough individuals, professional researchers. Most of them are quite charming at parties.
You, however, may not be a professional researcher, which means you need a book written for you—a book that covers a lot of useful ground in few words and makes some of the basic concepts and techniques more accessible. That’s this book.
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. It is a sampler rather than a survey—and a biased sampler in that I have included only the topics and approaches I personally have found most useful in my design career.
It is also a pointed book. That point will help you cut through the laziness, arrogance, and internal politics that prevent more research.
Research is just another name for critical thinking. With a little encouragement, everyone on your team can open their minds and embrace learning. And together, we can fix it so no one facing an important decision ever mentions focus groups again.