Adaptive Path Blog

In preparation for teaching the Design Research day of our upcoming UX Intensive in San Francisco, from June 15-18, I’ve been reflecting on the different roles that design research plays in the design process and in the organizations we work with.

One interesting role that design research plays through personas, and other representations of qualitative research findings, is helping businesses escape from their usual organizational frameworks of personality, position, history, and silo dominance. I have seen personas become peace-keepers, in that they allow people to acknowledge and address an outside truth that they couldn’t otherwise talk about. I have also seen research findings act as a disruptor, allowing people and organizations to think outside the confines of their departments, roles, and day-to-day tasks.

It seems to me that organizations seeking to evolve their products and services, or even revolutionize their offerings, can benefit greatly from something like a fourth estate for design.  Just as good public governance relies on high quality journalism to illuminate the important stories of the day, I propose that organizations making design decisions can greatly benefit from hearing the important stories of the day from their constituencies, their customers or prospective customers.

It is this proposition that directed me to look further into the analogy of the fourth estate and journalism in relation to design research. Perusing the Wikipedia I came across a list of guidelines for journalists that may also be relevant for people doing design research:

According to The Elements of Journalism, a book by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, there are nine elements of journalism. In order for a journalist to fulfill their duty of providing the people with the information they need to be free and self-governing. They must follow these guidelines:

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.
2. Its first loyalty is to the citizens.
3. Its essence is discipline of verification.
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting, and relevant.
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.

Reading this list of elements, I was inspired to substitute design research for journalism, and reflect on our practice:

1. Design research’s first obligation is to the truth. It is actually quite easy to design a study to confirm our expectations and prove how right we are. It is much more difficult to conduct a study that challenges our preconceptions, brings us new insights, and sometimes proves us absolutely, completely wrong. That said, it is energizing, and differentiating, when we find new truths.

2. Its first loyalty is to the citizens. In conducting design research, our first loyalty must be to our participants. Research participants often times entrust us with their candor, their hopes, their dreams and their fears. Everyone is short-changed when we let project and client pressures minimize the importance of our research findings.

3. Its essence is discipline of verification. In the current practice of design research, I see data analysis and synthesis as often times under-scoped and misunderstood. Data analysis is more than just a report of what happened during data collection. It is an important step in ensuring that our research findings are accurate and representative responses to the pertinent research questions.

4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover. When you conduct design research, you commonly become a sort of user advocate. However, if you become a user advocate to the extent that you can no longer accept trade-offs and prioritization as a part of bringing a design to fruition, it might be time for a career change.

5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power. Accurately representing the power relationships between the organization and the people they serve can put you in the position of sometimes being the bearer of bad news. However, research findings, such as experience maps, are valuable in decision-making specifically because they represent a voice or story of life that may not be acknowledged or sanctioned by the business. In these cases, it is also important that you are protecting the confidentiality of your participants, who may be participating in unsanctioned activities, such as copyright violation.

6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise. Your research may be the first study ever conducted by your client, but that doesn’t mean that you know everything. There are people in almost every organization that have some direct and on-going contact with their customers. When a customer service representative inside the organization doesn’t agree with your findings, pay attention and figure it out.

7. It must strive to make the significant interesting, and relevant. Telling an effective qualitative data story is about finding the right methods and representations that map to both the research findings (developed through analysis, synthesis) and the audience that needs to use these stories to move their project forward.  How can your findings be shared with the designers, developers, clients, and other stakeholders in ways that interest them, inspire them and support their everyday work?

8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional. Does the research deliverable match research findings? Are you making personas because you found personas in your data or because that was the determined data format before you even know what you would find? Are you finding a balanced way to communicate both the common people stories and the exceptional people stories in your findings?

9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience. When we do research that we don’t believe in, regardless of the reason, we hurt our relationship with our client and also our relationships with our research participants. It is harder to engage, listen, and be open to another’s experiences when we don’t believe these experiences are relevant to our work.

As design’s fourth estate, design research can effectively provide our clients with the information they need to be thoughtful, responsive and entrepreneurial for the people they seek to serve. Our findings can support organizations in making people-centered, experience-oriented decision, be those decisions regarding  possible features, product requirements, design criteria, product roadmaps, innovation direction, or new opportunities.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Design Research, User Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.