Planning and Conducting Design Research: A Primer

Sam Ladner has a pair of brief, but effective articles on her design research blog -

Design research, step by step, published last year, discusses the basics of planning a design research project.  Ladner's critical point is that even in broad, exploratory research, it is essential to define a set of reearch questions to guide your approach, and to let you know when you've found answers.  This sounds obvious, but is often assumed, overlooked, or realized with overly-vague research questions (e.g. how are people using our product?  what are new product opportunities?), rather than with more specific questions that lead to actionable findings.

Getting meaningful insights from qualitative research is this year's follow-up post focusing on they key activities for analyzing data.  I particularly agree with Ladner's recommendations to "summarize frequently":

"After each interview, take 20 minutes to write out a brief summary of what you remember being the most important points of the interview (note that this is not a substitute to taking notes during the interview). These notes are the first step toward analysis. You are reducing “clutter” and irrelevant information. You are also exploring connections with previous interviews."

and to "visualize the results":

"Many qualitative researchers make use of summary tables and diagrams to further summarize results. My favourite visualization method is the mental model, which can convey a huge amount of information in a synthetic way, quickly. Other tools include mind maps and even the simple bulleted list."

Both of these activites are important for efficient and proactive research analysis and communication.