Understanding your end-users allows you to develop a product or service that users generally like. And design research is one of the finest approaches to help you with that.
Actionable research should constantly be conducted. It enables you to understand complex human behaviour and transform that learning into useful ideas to enhance your design.
This isn’t simply about gathering data – what are the next steps related to this information? Are you creating a plan?
By doing design research early and frequently, you can put the user at the center of the design process, simplify your team’s efforts, and produce fresh ideas that lead to more research.
What Is Design Research?
Design research is a sort of research conducted to aid in the strategic design and development of goods. It is an essential component of user-centered design, which places the user at the center of the design process and bases every product design choice on user behavioral intention.
The final aim is to collect meaningful user insights (user requirements, wants, expectations, and challenges) and translate those insights into product design decisions. At the end of the day, the product team develops a solution that answers a specific problem for users.
There are three major answers that you’ll find on your plate with the help of design research:
- What do users mean & who are they?
- What do users actually expect?
- How can we satisfy their needs?
Clearing the Confusion Between Design Research and Market Research
Market research and design research are both centered on learning about people, but they pursue different objectives. Market research is primarily concerned with attracting new clients.
Design research is concerned with enhancing the user experience. As a result, market research seeks to identify the message that would resonate with the target audience and assist businesses in persuading individuals to try the product.
Overall, design research, on the side, examines human behaviour to identify areas where product teams may enhance the user experience.
Top Fruitful Results of Design Research
Of course, when it comes to design research, it does take a lot of time, but the results are absolutely worth the time is taken. Here are the major benefits of design research:
Facts Speak
It enables you to create based on facts rather than preconceptions. We all have a general concept of who our users are, but knowing their pain points, what they’re searching for in a product, and how they’d utilize your product are not things you can discover from single email contact.
Promotes Concentration and Prioritizing
When you’re balancing feature requests, stakeholder comments, and a tight project timeline, consumer data can help you prioritize. After all, if an issue arose during the research process that was not addressed before launch, you can be sure it will not go away on its own.
Increases Empathy
Facetime with customers reminds everyone that they are real individuals with ideas and feelings, not just numbers on a growth plan. Building stronger relationships with your consumers benefit your day-to-day business and choices.
Customer’s Happiness!
You may develop a user experience that delights rather than frustrates you by seeing your design in the field, with genuine users. You can solve minor issues like confusing navigation or an unclear route to purchase that might otherwise result in support calls or dissatisfied customer emails.
Saves Money
While a designer’s attention should constantly be drawn to their consumers’ experiences, commercial objectives are no less important. But there’s a catch: while UX has a great ROI on its own, upper management should be willing to invest in activities like design research to enable user experience professionals to achieve genuinely spectacular results.
When Should You Conduct Design Research?
You are now aware of the benefits of conducting design research. However, you might be wondering when to do design research. You will find the answer here:
Adding New Features
Accompanying a new product with extra features isn’t always as simple as it appears and might frequently need several person-hours of study.
Generally, the introduction of a new feature should be preceded by extensive market and user research to discover how your competitors choose to build equivalent features and how these solutions might be improved.
Rework & Redesign
Successful redesigns are intended to be data-driven. If you decide to redesign your website or product and thus invest a lot of money in it, you should have done significant research to fulfil the expectations of your users and customers.
Start Fresh
Developing a product from the ground up should always include thorough research. To begin with, it offers a clearer knowledge of which features should be prioritised and which product areas should be addressed.
Capture New Audience
If you want to grow your product into new areas or target audiences, research is a helpful tool. Businesses may use a variety of strategies to better understand how a new persona or market segment should be catered to, ranging from surveys and interviews to usability testing and even further.
Stages of Design Research
As we go through the stages of design research, it’s crucial to remember that this isn’t a single process. However, because these steps can flow from one to the next, you can use this procedure as a basic guide. But keep in mind that the ultimate goal is to find the stage and technique that work best for you.
1. Light on
Field research and user or stakeholder interviews are examples of discovery approaches. This area includes discovering what you know and what you don’t.
2. Exploring
Exploratory techniques require your team to employ methods such as competitive analysis, card sorting, and path mapping to minimize mistakes, reduce waste, and explore and evaluate the ideas you’ve discovered.
3. Testing
It is critical to test your ideas and solutions to ensure that they are logistically possible and that consumers respond in the desired manner. This often consists of qualitative usability testing, benchmark testing, and an accessibility assessment.
4. Listening with Ears & Eyes Open
You can assess how successful your designs are and change them as needed in the future by paying attention to your consumers’ feelings about the design. Some of the most popular listening strategies we encounter include search-log analysis, feedback reviews, and FAQ reviews.
Designers Must be Aware of These 3 Research Methods
The first step before beginning the design study is to determine important goals. Design research is unlikely to add value to the business unless clearly articulated goals are established.
There are an infinite number of ways to obtain information on your customers. Whatever approaches you employ, they typically fall into one of the following categories: attitudinal, qualitative, quantitative, behavioral, or context of usage.
Below are the three major research methods:
1. Primary Design Research
This is maybe the most significant approach in design research since it includes you or your team travelling straight to the source (your consumers) to ask questions and collect data.
Focus groups, usability sessions, questionnaires, and interviews are examples of primary research.
In primary research, you typically collect two sorts of information: exploratory (broad, open-ended research) and specific (The problems that are being identified during the research process).
2. Secondary Design Research
Secondary research is when you utilize previously collected information, such as books, articles, or the internet, to confirm or support a previous report.
Also, secondary research may help you make a better argument for your design decisions and give further insights into what you discovered during initial research.
3. Evaluative Design Research
Evaluative research examines a specific topic in order to assess its usability and interactivity. One of the most common methods of doing evaluative research is to have people use your product or service and think aloud about it as they engage with it.
Evaluative research is classified into two types: summative and formative. The summative evaluation focuses on the outcome rather than the process (if the desired impact is achieved), whereas formative evaluation is used to enhance the notion being evaluated.
There are several other approaches and strategies to do design research and they are:
User Interviews
User interviews are the simplest method to do design research. Setting up an interview with a potential consumer and knowing their needs is the the most obvious technique to empathise and attempt to grasp their perspective.
Interviews are especially effective in the early phases of the product design process when a team is exploring several product design options and requires more knowledge about user behavior. The insights gathered by a product team during this stage will serve as the foundation for future research.
Specify parameters for your target audience (demographics, behavioral patterns, etc.) and invite people who fulfill these criteria to the interview, where you ask them specific questions (related to your research aim) and get great information.
Digital Surveys
Surveys are best used as a supplement to current research and for goods that have already been released to the market.
The product team chooses a group of potential or present users and sends them a survey with a specific set of questions. Responses may be collected and evaluated automatically using technologies such as Google Forms.
Through Design Case Studies
This is research that concentrates on a relatively specific issue rather than diving into statistical analysis. Case studies are typically used to focus on a very particular aspect of a body of research and portray it as a single researchable issue.
Descriptive Design Research
This is a highly important quantitative research strategy for narrowing down certain phenomena and gathering information about them until they are well understood. This sort of research is often exceedingly precise and methodical. Their primary objective is to describe, observe, and draw conclusions from it.
Card Sorting Design Research
When it comes to identifying the ideal information architecture of a website or app, card sorting is a vital study tool. Typically, these sessions include potential users categorizing subjects into bigger categories in order to better understand how they see links between specific topics.
Contextual Inquiry
This research strategy is particularly effective during the discovery phase of the design process. It enables designers to better traverse the project by comprehending the requirements, features, personas, content strategy, and so on.
7 Rules of Design Research
Nowadays, there are mainly patterns that are divided when it comes to design research. Many of the same myths, misconceptions, and hedges were repeated. So, in the spirit of being helpful, let us share with you some important rules of design research:
1. First, question, and then prototype
A prototype is a tangible solution, even if it is only a drawing on paper. This is more comfortable than just asking for inquiries, even if it means lighting fire to a big sum of money.
The danger of prototyping too soon is that you waste resources answering a topic that no one asked while neglecting the opportunity cost. Testing a prototype can help you improve an existing good concept, but it cannot tell you whether you’re tackling the proper problem.
2. Being Uncomfortable is the Way
We’ve all been raised to favor answers and avoid inquiries. We were awarded in school for correct answers, and we are paid at work for creative ideas.
In the long run, a good inquiry is significantly more useful. And you can’t ask smart questions—that is, learn—unless you accept that you don’t know the answers.
3. What’s Your End Goal?
In their eagerness to embrace research, teams will frequently begin talking to clients without a clear, unified aim. Then they feel like they wasted valuable time with no clue how to utilize what they learned, so they have nothing to show for it.
4. Keep Time and Money Forever
When research is regarded as a type of work that is separate from design, it is simple to dismiss gathering evidence as something additional and find reasons not to undertake it.
You may learn something meaningful within whatever time and budget you have if you are open and candid about your goals and top priorities. You can find studies online. During lunch, go outdoors and study people. Usability tests another person’s product.
5. Be Messy in a Good Way
The demand for clean, comfortable activities that seem and feel like visible knowledge leads to the incorrect usage of focus groups, usability labs, eye-tracking, surveys, and glossy reports when something far less formal might be far more beneficial.
Incorporating data into design decisions is a learning process in and of itself. You will never find the correct solution and be finished. If the method is functioning, you will continue to make judgments with greater certainty.
6. The Question of Big Questions
The utility of the findings is determined by the quality of your inquiry. Asking the incorrect query is comparable to developing a solution to the incorrect problem.
Design research is frequently confused with user research. Speaking with representative users is one of several methods for solving high-priority research topics. You don’t need to learn everything about users.
7. Know your Bias
So you did the research and discovered some answers. You must now decide what they signify. Collaboration is especially important when it comes to analyzing study findings.
This has nothing to do with your knowledge or intelligence. Once you accept this, and as long as you work in a team that fosters psychological safety and mutual respect, identifying and calling out prejudices can be a fun game.
Time For Action: Implementation
Great design research does not end with insightful findings. The purpose of design research is to obtain insight into user behavior and then translate that understanding into practical product design decisions.
Here are a few pointers to get you started:
Design Research Report
It is critical to provide research findings in a meaningful manner—you must transform raw research data into relevant information and present this knowledge in the form of a report. Because reports may be utilized as project documentation, having a solid research report benefits both the researcher and the product team.
Give Priority Rightly To Your Designs
It is practically hard to address all of the results uncovered during the design study. Good news: not all outcomes are equally significant. As a result, you must categorize and prioritize your results depending on their effect on company goals. Prioritize the most pressing issues.
Teamwork Matters
Design research will be useless unless a team recognizes its significance, accepts it, and acts on it. It is critical to convey study findings to the team in order for this to happen. As soon as you have finished prioritizing results, you must offer your findings to the group/stakeholders in the form of a presentation.
Review
All of your results must be validated by your intended audience. Once you’ve decided how to improve the user experience, you must construct a solution to see if it works for your users. To confirm your hypothesis, you do not need to construct a complete working product.
Last Thoughts on Design Research
Design is a trade of value. Before releasing anything to the public, you must consider what people truly require and value, as well as the commercial value you anticipate receiving in return.
To summarise, when we talk about design research, we are actually talking about performing evidence-based design. The design process includes creation, critique, and investigation. Separating them leads to optimizing for the incorrect things due to fear, ignorance, or ego.
Be ethical in your approach, truthful about what you know, and dedicated to a desirable aim. Take the best designing company in India or any other country under your radar, and explore endless stuff from it. Cheers!