I’m trying to use this blog more, and really on twitter less as an outboard brain. So over the next week or so, I’ll experiment with blogging stuff I’d typically tweet, then link to it.
I came across a nice mapping between two people I find interested and the mental models they present for thinking about user research. The first is Will Myddleton, and the second is Sam Ladner, who I found out about through a Jools, who I met through the Researchops Workshops in May.
Myddleton’s three kinds of user research
I really recommend reading the whole post, but these early paras give a good summary background:
Over the last two years I’ve stumbled into a useful model for talking about this relationship with researchers and their teams. The model helps them understand what to expect from each other, recognise and support each others’ strengths, and work together to make better products.
The model? There are three types of user research product teams should care about:
- Testing things the team have built
- Working out what the team should build next
- Understanding potential users and their lives
Not revolutionary. Not innovative. Just helpful in doing the trickier parts of my job.
Sam Ladner’s take
Sam has a nice model that says similar things:
Too often, researchers take their cue from the scientific method. While this method undoubtedly changed the world and our knowledge of it, it is antithetical to the creative needs of a well-rounded researcher. It is especially problematic for design research, which requires creative solutions to existing problems.
Design researchers should embrace less structure and more openness at the early stages of product design, and rigor and structure in the mature stages of product sales. As sales drop off and the product loses its natural match to the culture, design researchers should once again embrace openness in their research approaches.
Bonus association – Emma Boulton’s research funnel
This isn’t a million miles away from the research funnel that Emma Boulton put forward a while back. I couldn’t find a snappy quote but her post gives a good example of using the activites from the difference phases together.
