UX Research Playbook | Review — Table of Contents
Chapter 6. Designing research methods
? 1) Selection methods
2) Research types
3) Beyond the book: various methodologies
A week? Ten days? ago... I gave a presentation at a UX-research book study run by the Prompt Designer community. It was about the chapter on designing research methods, so I organized the material into a post for possible future use at work.
First, Chapter 6 on designing research methods guides you on when to choose which research method during actual work. The method introduced in this book is based on proposals from Christian Rohrer at the Nielsen Norman Group.
In reality, running user research is not easy — not just at many small companies, but even in side projects done by people who share the same interests. Many struggle just to include user research inside the project at all. So for most of us, user research tends to come only through books and posts, which is exactly why it helps to have the background knowledge ready in advance — so you can actually use it the moment you feel you need to.
By the time a situation hits you, trying to argue for it is usually too late. If I don’t know it myself, who am I going to convince? Of course, once you pass three people to persuade within a team, no matter how well you know it, it does not help... which is why in-house studies matter. When background knowledge is too uneven, individual will alone is not enough. The only thing I can change is myself. At least let me keep sharpening.
I think user research — UX research — should be as familiar as breathing to anyone doing service planning or UX design. Especially for service designers. Personally, whenever a new book on this comes out, I buy it and read it... well, I buy it first. ^^;; A couple of years ago I even ran a study on the book User Research.
The user research matrix I learned at that time listed concrete methods per situation, which I remember being very helpful. There was a downside though — the scenarios proposed in that book were so granular that when you actually tried to apply them inside your company, they rarely matched your company’s situation precisely, so picking a research method was not always easy.
For reference, near the end of that study I built and shared a simple static site that let you filter the characteristics of each methodology the book introduced.
Back to the main point. The author says every method has pros and cons, so selecting a method requires strategic design based on project goals and research questions. Business forms differ slightly across companies, but most of our work, as the author says, roughly proceeds in the order early stage → development stage → release stage.
If your organization is currently in the early/strategy-setting process — for example, in the idea stage or concept evaluation stage — qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviews and ethnography are most often useful.
If you are in the prototyping, development, or launch stages while building and shipping a product, methods like concept evaluation, usability testing, and A/B testing fit each of those stages.
For reference, Christian Rohrer proposes more concrete suggestions on his company’s site.
The earlier User Research study I ran went a different route from Christian Rohrer at Nielsen — it guided method choices in the order of new-concept development → information-architecture improvement → product-improvement development. One thing that sets it apart from UX Research Playbook is that it not only helps you pick a method per situation but also lays out an overall roadmap of research work per situation. It also emphasizes running the selected method repeatedly throughout the process, Lean-startup style, rather than only once at a given time.
And,
For the methods proposed at each stage, the book then sub-categorizes them one more time — not by development stage, but by data-collection method and the nature of the data. One of the things I personally found curious, or hard to understand, was exactly this classification axis — it was not explained further, which was a bit frustrating.
For example — research types can be split by data-collection method and data nature — that part had no explanation for why, so I went looking. Because the topic is quite cross-disciplinary, it was not easy to find a good explanation as a non-major.
It is not crystal-clear, but I found something in a past research book that let me roughly — and very subjectively — guess at it. Since this is very subjective, there is a high chance of being wrong.
The book is A Guide to a More Solid Qualitative Research. It says the keyword qualitative research does not have a single definition — each field interprets and uses it with different criteria. Even within qualitative research itself, people hold extremely different positions on critical issues such as what the purpose of research is, how the research question is designed, and which elements of the social world are worth observing. That is why, just to scope research properly, the author says drawing clear distinctions and definitions for collection methods in advance is crucial.
As for how the research types are actually divided — to avoid a wall of text, I will continue in the next post (Research types).
