Do Research for This, not for That.

In the job market, most companies establish separate design and research departments, hiring professionals with different educational backgrounds. UX research positions often require expertise in social sciences such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and human-computer interaction. On the other hand, industrial designers typically don’t conduct UX research in the early stages of a project. We are more likely to engage in user testing later in the process, after creating design prototypes.

However, before entering the workforce, we are required to complete many academic projects. In these situations, we don’t have a dedicated research team or a team member with a social science background to help us conduct professional UX research. We have to choose research methods, develop a research plan, execute it ourselves, analyze the data, translate it into insights, and then visualize and communicate those insights to clients or stakeholders—or at the very least, convince our professors. Gosh, why is there so much to do!

Ideally, this kind of training, which covers the entire project process, should help us master various research methods, derive meaningful insights, and create impactful design solutions. However, in practice, this is often not the case. Many designers simply memorize and follow research methods without fully understanding why they are required to do research.

From my experience, I’ve noticed two common fallacies designers tend to fall into when conducting user research. I’ll share my thoughts on how to avoid them to ensure research serves its true purpose in design.

Many talented designers have such strong intuition that they will suddenly get a spark of inspiration and come up with some interesting solutions. Subsequently, they fall in love with these ideas and can't help but add bias when writing the research guideline. So often in research questionnaires, I see questions in this format: do you think OOOO would help you? Would you buy OOOO if it were available now?

As long as OOOO doesn't sound too outrageous, such questions tend to get positive responses. So designers will happily say: let's go with this design advancement then! And then they will show a series of nice figures and user feedback in the presentation document. Look how reasonable and popular my design is!

This approach does not always lead to failure, as these sparks of inspiration may come from long-term observation and understanding, but always adopting these sparks is hardly likely to lead to a truly innovative solution. As I said, filling out a research questionnaire is an interaction between the designer and the user, and in a conversation with a stranger, most people will tend to say nice things to avoid upsetting the other person - i.e. the question would be less likely to get negative feedback (unless your idea is really, really unreasonable).

Proposing a solution too early can lead to a limited view of the research process and miss out on more promising design opportunities (I'll honestly admit that I made this mistake quite a few times a few years ago) In this case, the research becomes a pro forma task, with designers handing out questionnaires just to collect some nice-looking numbers for the client (or the professor) without really exploring it in depth. It's a sorry story.

In general, I would recommend designers to focus on the WHY rather than the HOW when conducting user research, and not to mention or imply in any way any solution you have in mind to the respondents during the research phase. The real meaning of user research is to know and understand the behavior, thoughts, and situation of the respondents without prejudice, not to make the respondents justify your design by inducing and implying. If you do your research well enough and get reliable and unique insights, good design solutions will come to you naturally.

After reading the first suggestion, some of you may wonder: if I can’t present my solution to respondents, can I just ask them what kind of solution they want? In fact, many designers attempt this approach in surveys or interviews. I often see open-ended questions like: What other features would you like to see in OOOO?”

I don’t recommend including this type of question in a questionnaire. As I mentioned in my previous post, ensuring a positive experience for participants is crucial. Open-ended questions require extra effort and time to think through and input responses, which can frustrate respondents and reduce response quality. In most cases, these questions fail to gather meaningful insights. Besides, if a solution were already obvious to users, would they even need a designer?

A more important reason to avoid this approach is that user research is not just about gathering opinions; it’s a blend of experimental design and interpersonal communication skills. Many designers, especially those from artistic backgrounds, lack formal training in experimental design. Designers are required to solve problems, but before that, the ability to ask the right questions and form well-reasoned hypotheses is just as critical. If we don't find out what matters, we can spend a lot of resources creating something useless. (To be honest, this kind of thing happens not infrequently.) That's why the industrial design terminal degree requires us to conduct research scientifically and rigorously before creating a design, and to complete a high-quality dissertation that has a well-developed structure and reflects logical thinking.

Primary research often comes after secondary research, which means that we already have a general understanding of the context of the project with the help of other people's research data before we create the primary research plan. At this point, we should make some reasonable guesses, choose the corresponding research methods and create a follow-up research plan.

For example, in a team project I worked on, our secondary research revealed that some restaurants used chalkboards to display their daily special menus. This led me to hypothesize that the way a menu is presented could influence consumer choices. To test this, I collected 16 menus in different formats and recruited participants to observe them, selecting the restaurant they were most likely to visit. The results confirmed that chalkboard-style menus significantly increased restaurant popularity, and consumers were more inclined to try dishes listed on a chalkboard.

In subsequent one-on-one interviews, I learned that consumers made this choice because they associated chalkboard menus with freshness and limited availability. They assumed that dishes written on a chalkboard were based on the restaurant’s current inventory and updated daily, with items being erased once ingredients ran out. This perception made customers more eager to try the chalkboard specials, as they felt they were getting fresh, exclusive offerings.

In this project, instead of directly asking consumers what kind of menu design they want (directly demanding an answer) or whether they would like a menu in OOOO format (proving the design), I proved that the way a menu is presented affects consumer choices through clever research methods, and found their deep motivation and thinking logics, which in turn suggests design opportunities and strategies. This is the true value of user research for designers—we validate informed conjectures to guide impactful design decisions, instead of blindly looking for solutions and relying on inspiration sparks.

Of course, my conjecture was not always correct, but even if it was wrong, I at least knew that the direction was not a good design opportunity. This guess-and-verify approach to research avoids aimless research that consumes a lot of resources on inconsequential issues.

You can make multiple guesses in a project based on secondary research, and tailor your questionnaire or interview outline to check the validity of each guess, and in turn derive design opportunities. It's worth noting that this approach requires avoiding bait-and-switch language during research to avoid obtaining false data.

As a designer, learning research skills may not be necessary, but having excellent research skills can go a long way in improving the soundness of your designs, broadening the field of design, and helping you convince stakeholders. I hope my writings can help some young designers better understand the meaning of research and make more reasonable choices and judgments in the process of selecting research methods and actual implementation. Let's explore the world with curiosity and enjoy the process of making conjectures and checking the results without making research a formal task.

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