Design Research

My friend Michael recently launched Konigi, a site for researching websites. It’s perfect for those times when you’re designing a feature and you want to review all the prior art. There’s screenshots and screencasts and a bunch of community features, but Michael has a lot more interesting things planned, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Years ago I told my friend Mary about a desirability testing technique developed at Microsoft using product reaction cards, and tonight she showed me a neat twist she put on it. After testing the design of an online social networking tool, she listed the words chosen by test participants alongside the words used to describe…

It feels unnecessary to link to any particular Ted Talk since so many of them are so good, but I will point out one or two of the many I’ve been watching lately while I fight off a cold from my sofa. Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of the man who invented the spaghetti sauce…

I like just about everything Marc Rettig writes a whole lot, so I need to bookmark this new mailing list posting where he compares market research to design research… Market research typically attempts to answer questions of general trends, differences across a large group, general attitudes and preferences. Design research typically attempts to reveal latent,…

Looking back through the classic management texts I realize the call to listen to customers isn’t new. Here’s a few that counsel an emphasis on customers: Innovation in Marketing (1962) In Search of Excellence (1982) Moments of Truth (1987) Relationship Marketing (1991) The Experience Economy (1999) The repetition of this message isn’t surprising as it’s…

Frontline is doing the Frontline treatment on brand strategy and the latest marketing. There’s a few refreshingly honest people, and the rest are either critical of the methods or vary from slightly to very silly… A market researcher probes a participant, “Would you say you feel lonely when you eat white bread? Anxious? Trusting?” Read…

I had just read What New CEOs Need to Know (here’s a free, shorter version) and was contemplating the CEO’s experience (expressing a strategic vision, trying not to send the wrong signals, not in power but reporting to the board, not in touch with operations, balancing obligations inside and outside the company…) when I came…

Brett Lider on Building Sales Intelligence with Passive Customer Profiling: “There are a number of strategies for gathering maximum user profile information while effectively reducing the amount of user input. Outlined are four techniques for creating and building lasting and lucrative customer relationships.“

What is Massive Change? It’s Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries trying to wrap their arms around the whole thing. Engineered as an international discursive project, Massive Change: The Future of Design Culture, will map the new capacity, power and promise of design. We will explore paradigm-shifting events, ideas, and people, investigating the…

Nathan Shedroff’s New Methods for Designing Effective Experiences looks relatively new (October 2003?) and is a current overview of methods that is strongly resonating with me. In particular, he nails some shortcomings of traditional personas. IAs take note, he’s using the term taxonomy in the widest sense, not only in the LIS sense.

Kath Straub at Human Factors Int’l releases a great list of Key Research Findings from 2002-3. It is one of the most useful design references I’ve seen recently. There’s a singular lack of research in this field – as opposed to trial-and-error – a problem compounded by the difficulty of finding and applying it. I…

Not content with measuring the ‘satisfaction‘ or ‘initial quality‘ of automobiles, Strategic Vision seeks to measure ‘Total Quality‘ including the customer’s perception of delight. Dr. Edwards developed a consumer-friendly scale that allowed them to register their response to the vehicle in highly discriminating ways. Called the Strategic Vision Delight Scale™, it allows a series of…