Design research definition
Design research is a client friendly framework to reply questions such as:
- Who are our users?
- What difficulties do they face?
- How will they consume these goods?
With the help of qualitative and quantitative research, purpose is to feel enthusiasm for design basing on how your customers consume product or service.
Design and market research have general features but they differ from each other in volume, information and end consequent. Competently, market research is concentrated upon buying and selling a product/service, while design research studies how customers will consume it.
Why should you use design research?
Design research is an important, but frequently neglected, move in building an optimized user-written practice. It permits you to accept complicated personal character and convert it into effective ideas for improving your design concept.
Designers with great experience sometimes ignore the research stage, leaving behind the fact that they have accumulated many patterns of ready-made solutions in their heads. But it is a high proportion of chance — you can make a mistake and use the wrong pattern, or just don’t find what you need. It is even more difficult starter designers.
Research helps both, allowing you to formalize the design process, qualitatively (with deep immersion and at a high level) to develop analytic and creative concepts in the allotted time.
Why is it important to use research?
- The decision strongly depends on the designer’s life experience. The more designer knows about the world around him, the more likely he is to draw a good design. This is a limitation. Quality is determined by subjective parameters, but must be stable.
- It is impossible to plan work on time and result. If you rely only on inspiration, illumination and divine providence, then sometimes it happens that the result is obtained after three days. But if I did not guess, then the solution of the problem is stretched for three weeks.
What will design research give your project?
- It immerses the designer in context and the decisions become reasoned. The designer offers not just something cool, but builds logical connections.
- It allows you to more effectively build relationships with the customer. Research is communication. You study not only business, but also the customer and his client, and in the process you begin to better understand what the user needs, what the customer wants and how to implement it.
Types of design research
Primary research
The primary research is a method of collecting information through direct interaction: interviews, observation, conducting experiments, etc. They are divided into qualitative (in-depth interviews, observation of a person all day) and quantitative (statistics, surveys, site analytic).
Among the qualitative research there are:
- Ethnography — a method of studying the daily life of consumers. The name of the method is borrowed from historical science, when ethnographers, exploring unfamiliar tribes, describe the way of life in order to understand their motives and actions. Ethnography is used when information about the target audience is minimal. Observations make it possible to understand different scenarios of user behavior and “entry points” — in what situations a person may need to use the product.
- Reflection — watching yourself, analyzing your own experience, fixation and awareness of their feelings and experiences.
- Shadow method is a repetition of human actions. For example, you record the user’s behavior on the website and then copy, noting significant moments.
Secondary research
In web design, secondary research is more common. It helps to understand what to do in these conditions. This is not problem identification, but an immersion and knowledge expansion.
Secondary research is a thoughtful search for everything on the Internet, the press, books and any other open source of information. Everything on the topic will do: competitors, analogues, trends and content. It is necessary to pay attention to successful solutions and foreign practice in data and related fields.
Design is closely related to marketing. If the primary research is working with public and the situation is more suitable for innovation, then the secondary research is about how to sell: what to put on the main page, how to engage the user.
Secondary research is working with information that permits you to quickly immerse yourself in the client’s business and begin to get oriented in a topic which you still do not comprehend.
Evaluation research
Evaluation study addresses a definite issue to assess user-friendliness and intercommunion. The most prominent means of assessment study is your product/service usage by people and their skill out loud when they collaborate with it. There are two kinds of it: summing and formative. The summing highlights the result better than the procedure (depending on what final result is) and the formative is to intensify the checked concept.
How to choose correct research method? Everything is conditional on what you work out and try to discover. You usually begin with primary study and realize that after capturing provisional information, different questions arise. These new issues probably will help you find out what is your next step.
Design research advantages
Design researches require time, efforts, means and broad background, but final outcome is worth it. Main advantages:
- It permits you designing oriented on factual information, not hypothesis. It is not difficult to get trapped by brain work: “I knew all consumers, thus I should’t act anymore.” It is really, we all know well who our consumers are, but whether we understand their problem issues, what they search in product, and how they will consume it, is not something you can gain from a one-time interaction with electronic media.
- Assists in concentrating and prioritizing. When you fiddle with feature appeals, inverse relationship and a brief project schedule, customer data help you to concentrate on the most meaningful things.
- Creates more interaction with your customers. Customer contacts are reminded that they are real people with understanding and perception, not just numbers. Creating broader interaction with your clients helps you find solutions.
- Permits to get the desired result. By observing customer work with the design concept, you can track and correct common stuff, such as intricate navigation or an ambiguous bargain route that would contrarily lead to calls to support or frustrated customer reviews.
Design research with KATASIS
Independently of information you have collected in the past or how well you think you know your customers, there is constantly a lot to pick up. Design research is a great opportunity to do this.
Our designers, analysts and marketers will help you in conducting high-quality and professional design research. Which will tell you exactly who your target audience is, what problems it faces, what paths your product offers and how customers will be able to use it.
