Let me begin by admitting that I've unfairly avoided reading the Harvard Business Review (HBR). I had an inaccurate perception that it was too academic - that is both too technical and too removed from real-world applications to be useful. But I've recently actually read several articles as background research for an article that I was writing and I was impressed by the readability and the applicability of the content to design research.
The HBR has recently received exposure in the design world with Tim Brown's article on Design Thinking:
"In the past, design has most often occurred fairly far downstream in the development process and has focused on making new products aesthetically attractive or enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising. Today, as innovation's terrain expands to encompass human-centered processes and services as well as products, companies are asking designers to create ideas rather than to simply dress them up. Brown, the CEO and president of the innovation and design firm IDEO, is a leading proponent of design thinking - a method of meeting people's needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable way."
But Brown's article was just one of a number of recent HBR articles that directly discuss design strategy and research. And rather than going through years of back issues, you can purchase packaged sets of related articles [Caveat: some articles appear in multiple sets]. For example the Customer-Driven Innovation set contains three articles that cover topics including:
- Creating a job map "to discover what the customer is trying to get done at different at different points in executing a job and what must happen at each juncture in order fo the job to be carried out successfully."
- Methods for translating and prioritizing customer input into quantifiable opportunities
Another set, Make Sure All of your Products are Profitable includes an article on Defeating Feature Fatigue. The authors discuss the balance between the number of features and usability in consumer decision making. Recommendations include giving consumers decision aids, designing products that do one thing very well, and conducting prototype testing and product in-use research. My favorite quote from the article - "You made your remote-control-adjustable, dual-firmness mattress, convertible bunk and trundle bet - now lie in it".
So what's the value of such articles to professional designers and design researchers? On the one hand, some recommendations, like usability testing, are old-hat, but there are several examples of innovative tools and methods. For example, the article Turn Customer Input Into Innovation provides an algorithm for prioritizing opportunities based on the gap between customer ratings of feature importance and current satisfaction.
More generally, the Harvard Business Review can provide support and credibility to research decisions and results to a business-focused audience, It can also help design researchers stay focused on the outcomes of their results to business opportunities and profitability.
Lastly, consider the range of HBR articles, that while not written specific to research methods, can strengthen your professional capabilities. Case in point, a recent interview with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris on Making Sense of Ambiguous Evidence:
"There is one objective reality, period." Getting to it requires keeping your mind open to all kinds of evidence- not just the parts that fit with your first impressions or developing opinions-and, often, far more investigation than one would think.
