A product design research methods compendium
The idea underlying `Learn' is that hard data, measurements, statements of the facts as they may be known. Observations and data gathered from empirical settings, treating the world as a kind of living lab. This sort of data tends to be treated as more objective, scientific, and provides the material for more statistical and quantitative analyses. It offers the potential for revealing unexpected patterns and insights that demand the use of other methods to understand further. `Learn' methods help us build the data and evidence addressing focused research questions, to follow up hunches and ideas that may be tested or evidenced by measurement data (rather than data mining as such).
The `Look' category implies that people going about their lives and happenings in the world are our best teachers. These are methods for gathering insights from interpretive observations, shadowing and participating in `the wild' [Buxton, 2007]. These methods emphasise the value of the empirical world in the language and terms of its use by its participants. The data gathered depict social realities, actual happenings and incidents; evidence of real people with biographies coping in actual settings, surrounded and constituted in the (seemingly) ephemeral and trivial real-world of people. `Look methods' enable generalised undirected problem identification, the broad assessment of an area before narrowing down on a specific concern.
`Ask' methods seek people's direct participation in constructing research data. People aren't `social dopes', they understand their own conditions. People have points of view and knowledge that they will readily share if you enable them. While this kind of knowledge may be idiosyncratic and bounded the more of it you can gather the more universal may be our understanding overall. `Ask' methods are useful when you have identified a research goal, an application, and a context. They are ways of revealing insider knowledge and practical contingencies that your project will encounter and leverage.
`Try' methods are all kinds of action research, some in-vitro (experimental setting) and some in-vivo (in the wild). These are methods that test how your project may work, how it may change behaviour and understanding, how useful and applicable it is. `Try' methods are active designed interventions and thus quite experimental in character. They encompass controlled simulations, experimental scenarios, to living labs in `the wild'. The focus of these methods is testing. They test feasibility, practicality, understandability. They seek people's active involvement and feedback on the design and application of the project.
- Learn: Analyze the information you've collected to identify patterns and insights.
- Activity Analysis
- Affinity Diagrams
- Anthropometric Analysis
- Character Profiles
- Cognitive Task Analysis
- Competitive Product Survey
- Cross-Cultural Comparisons
- Error Analysis
- Flow Analysis
- Historical Analysis
- Long-Range Forecasts
- Secondary Research
- Look: Observe people to discover what they do rather than what they say they do.
- A Day in the Life
- Behavioral Archaeology
- Behavioral Mapping
- Fly on the Wall
- Guided Tours
- Personal Inventory
- Rapid Ethnography
- Shadowing
- Social Network Mapping
- Still-Photo Survey
- Time-Lapse Video
- Ask: Enlist people's participation to elicit information relevant to your project.
- Camera Journal
- Card Sort
- Cognitive Maps
- Collage
- Conceptual Landscape
- Cultural Probes
- Draw the Experience
- Extreme User Interviews
- Five Whys?
- Foreign Correspondents
- Narration
- Surveys & Questionnaires
- Unfocus Group
- Word-Concept Association
- Try: Create simulations to help empathize with people and to evaluate proposed designs.
(source: the IDEO Method Cards booklet [IDEO, pp. 2-3, 2003])
References
Buxton, B. (2007). Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco.IDEO (2003). IDEO Method Cards: 51 Ways to Inspire Design. William Stout, Palo Alto, CA.
