Research Questions Are Not Interview Questions
The most significant source of confusion in design research is the difference between research questions and interview questions. This confusion costs time and money and leads to a lot of managers saying that they tried doing research that one time and nothing useful emerged.
A good research question is specific, actionable, and practical. This means:
It is possible to answer the question using the techniques and methods available to you It’s possible (but not guaranteed) that you can arrive at an answer with a sufficient degree of confidence to base decisions on what you’ve learned
Only after you have identified your research questions can you select the best way to answer the question.
Resist the urge to narrow your research focus too quickly or you will miss opportunities to learn what you didn’t think to ask.
Organizations are the social context in which design and product decision-making happens. If you don’t understand how people make decisions in your organization, you will never be able to influence them.
Who makes product decisions, what incentives influence them, and what sources of information do they trust?
When you consider what you need to know to solve the whole design or business problem, it probably includes far more than user behavior. You don’t need that much more time, but you will need a lot of courage.
Quantitative vs Qualitative
There are only two kinds of data: descriptions and measurements. If your question is about what happens or why something happens, you are asking a qualitative question and need a qualitative method. If you want to know how much something happens, or how many of something there are, you need a quantitative method.
Once you have identified a good research question and decided that interviewing people is the best way to answer it, you need to figure out what to ask the people you are interviewing
Research Question Example
YES: How do families with school-age children decide how to spend money on vacations?
Interview Question Example
YES: “Walk me through your last vacation from planning it until when you arrived back home.”
You cannot ask people to predict anything or to remember something that was too far in the past. No one can tell you how likely they are to do anything in the future. And humans are way better at making up answers than remembering things accurately.
Posted on September 24, 2019