A product design research methods compendium
These methods are organised into four families representing the emphasis in how each method may be applied. However, there is no reason why you shouldn't consider a method applicable to one of the other categories. These methods simply represent ways to inspire us to consider different ``ways to empathize with people'' to seek insights, understand behaviour, perceptions, needs, goals [IDEO, 2003]. All these methods and categories emphasise the empirical world as the source of ideas and inspirations. The empirical world encompassing social and material structure, attending empirical moments and events as nexuses of action, historical and scientific context, the happening of things of both great and small significance (global and local).
The idea underlying `Learn' is that hard data, measurements, statements of the facts as they may be known. Observations and data gathered from empirical settings, treating the world as a kind of living lab. This sort of data tends to be treated as more objective, scientific, and provides the material for more statistical and quantitative analyses. It offers the potential for revealing unexpected patterns and insights that demand the use of other methods to understand further. `Learn' methods help us build the data and evidence addressing focused research questions, to follow up hunches and ideas that may be tested or evidenced by measurement data (rather than data mining as such).
The `Look' category implies that people going about their lives and happenings in the world are our best teachers. These are methods for gathering insights from interpretive observations, shadowing and participating in `the wild' [Buxton, 2007]. These methods emphasise the value of the empirical world in the language and terms of its use by its participants. The data gathered depict social realities, actual happenings and incidents; evidence of real people with biographies coping in actual settings, surrounded and constituted in the (seemingly) ephemeral and trivial real-world of people. `Look methods' enable generalised undirected problem identification, the broad assessment of an area before narrowing down on a specific concern.
`Ask' methods seek people's direct participation in constructing research data. People aren't `social dopes', they understand their own conditions. People have points of view and knowledge that they will readily share if you enable them. While this kind of knowledge may be idiosyncratic and bounded the more of it you can gather the more universal may be our understanding overall. `Ask' methods are useful when you have identified a research goal, an application, and a context. They are ways of revealing insider knowledge and practical contingencies that your project will encounter and leverage.
`Try' methods are all kinds of action research, some in-vitro (experimental setting) and some in-vivo (in the wild). These are methods that test how your project may work, how it may change behaviour and understanding, how useful and applicable it is. `Try' methods are active designed interventions and thus quite experimental in character. They encompass controlled simulations, experimental scenarios, to living labs in `the wild'. The focus of these methods is testing. They test feasibility, practicality, understandability. They seek people's active involvement and feedback on the design and application of the project.
- Learn: Analyze the information you've collected to identify patterns and insights.
- Look: Observe people to discover what they do rather than what they say they do.
- Ask: Enlist people's participation to elicit information relevant to your project.
- Try: Create simulations to help empathize with people and to evaluate proposed designs.
(source: the IDEO Method Cards booklet [IDEO, pp. 2-3, 2003])
References
Buxton, B. (2007). Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco.
IDEO (2003). IDEO Method Cards: 51 Ways to Inspire Design. William Stout, Palo Alto, CA.
