Comments on: Maybe Don’t Call Research “Research”

By: niblettes » Blog Archive » Where Does Research Belong? - Tasty Little Nuggets of Design and Innovation Goodness - from Vancouver BC

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:24:39 +0000

[...] few months back Victor posted about the difficulty of getting approval to do design research in a project. This reminded me of Don [...]

By: Rishi Desai

Rishi Desai — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 04:00:23 +0000

I completely agree!

Plus, the Hawthorne Effect is avoided by calling it “research” and we pave the way for more untouched results.

The methods of research should be dynamic and adaptive to the requirements of obtaining the most accurate and efficient results possible.

Whatever it takes.. without dishonesty, I am for. Innovation must feed itself into all facets of product development, whether it be pre-design foundation research, or iterative research.. you must be an innovator in all your approaches otherwise you will not succeed.

If you are not prepared to be wrong, you are not prepared to come up with anything original.

Rishi
Gump Design: http://gumpdesign.blogspot.com

By: Uzi Shmilovici

Uzi Shmilovici — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 14:49:07 +0000

Reminds me of a case in which we used “research” for the field study and the personas creation.

The CEO of the company then went and ordered a research from a marketing research team to compare the results. (Surveys, analysis a lot of other stuff).

He just couldn’t understand that our research was actually looking for insights and not looking for statistics.

By: Marco Serrano

Marco Serrano — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 16:49:21 +0000

I spent a whole semester in college, doing
‘research’, we called it….

VOC - Voice of the Customer Research
Focus Group Research
Observational Research

Not sure if any of this is helpful, do you mean research that is not specific to any particular project?

Also, I thought that especially in a corporate environment or design team, there would be a specific person with the position of Product Research..errr something?

By: David Carlson

David Carlson — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 11:14:15 +0000

What about just insights? How is it possible to do anything without insights…

By: Bryce Johnson

Bryce Johnson — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 02:01:40 +0000

Huh. I have been looking into how in our projects the work we do during:
- requirements gathering
- inception/elaboration
- investigation
- discovery

or whatever eles you would like to call it can be documented in a way so that it is useful to our customers organization in the future. So I’m trying to show how our project work could contribute to corporate R&D. I did 7 months at a large bank in 2005 and read many reports from all over the corporation that could help us in designing their new corporate portal. As a contractor I found them extremely useful but no one on the client team ever bothered to read them, quite a shame really.

By: Victor

Victor — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:45:55 +0000

Austin — you crack me up, but it’s true, by framing the activities using your audience’s language you gain respect, though you could suffer later if it results in a mismatch of expectations.

By: Austin Govella

Austin Govella — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 19:14:46 +0000

I use “requirements gathering”. Not only do you not get much push-back with that phrase, but it actually seems to create a little, inpenetrable force bubble around your research actvities.

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 15:53:50 +0000

I’d rather go for “insight gathering” than “information gathering” - but I’d still be very unhappy with the verb “gather. Gather is very passive; suggests (as so many would have you believe) that this stuff is out there waiting simply to be scooped up. It devalues the creativity and synthesis, IMHO.