More information about research methods?
Review 'designing with people', an archive of user research and design methods hosted by
designingwithpeople.org at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art.
As a researcher/analyst our job is to observe others in the field, gather traces/evidence, learn from or have our subjects teach us, inquire, prototype, test ideas etc. The various research attitudes (look, ask, learn, try) are simply categories for organising our methods, nor are they necessarily applied in fixed/specific order sequences.