User Research Smoke & Mirrors - Reflection

This series of articles focuses on the concept of research-based design. The author of the article seems to be strongly against research-based design believing that good design is simply a product of good designers.

I think that research can go a long way in terms of designing a good experience, however I feel that a lot of the techniques being used did not add a lot of value. As the author mentions, they were nice to have, but not necessary. When it comes down to research, the best methods I think are straight forward. Simply having a user test your product and offer feedback is a good way to understand the effectiveness of your product. For example, the Persona Rooms allowed designers to submerge themselves into their user’s “feet”. However, I think that a creative designer could have been able to do this without having to build an expensive environment. Also, I think that going to the actual environments of their users would have been effective and much cheaper.

In my opinion, I do feel that a lot of good user design is about having skillful designers who inherently have a good understanding of users. Even with all of the research results, conclusions must be drawn and if a designer does not interpret the results correctly, the design will not be good. The big reason why so many things offer poor user experiences is because the people that design them have tastes that don’t agree with the general user. So even if they do research, their underlying understanding of the user will still be skewed and they will not get much out of the results.

User design is an iterative process and it takes a lot of feedback to land on a good final result. A lot of the learning is done through the testing of the designs and understanding what works and what doesn’t. You can do all of the scientific research you want, but at the end of the day you need to listen to what the user says as that is the most accurate research you can do!

link to article:
http://www.graphpaper.com/2006/07-10_user-research-smoke-mirrors-part-1-design-vs-science