This post discusses the importance of research in a design process and some of the research methodologies which can be used to create more efficient design.
The key to creating great design comes from doing your homework and firmly ground your work in research. It doesn’t matter how artistically- and technically proficient you are as a designer if the designs you create do not solve the problems of the brief, and is not liked and perfectly understood by the target audience. Hence; becoming a great designer begins with becoming a great researcher. In the following section common research methodologies are presented which designers can use to form better insights about their target audience.
Methods of design research
Below is presented some of the most common methodologies of research which designers can use to create better designs:
#Experimental research
Experimental research is an important method to understand how design influence feelings, decisions, and actions which is crucial within many creative fields to understand how to design products, websites, architecture, and marketing assets which are functional, well understood, and loved by the target audience.
#Longitudinal studies
Is the appreciation of design and art something you are born with, or is the perception of beauty something you learn by integrating with other members of your society and which also is affected by life experiences? To scientifically answer such questions, you need to perform a longitudinal study where you collect data of participants’ taste and values over many years.
#Cross-sectional studies
If you want to find out what a distinct target audience thinks about a design at this moment; the most accurate method, of course, would be to ask everyone in that group about their opinion. However; if the target audience comprises millions of people, asking everyone in that census, of course, in most cases would not be possible. A common research method in such cases, therefore, is only to ask a statistically significant portion of a total census (the population cross section) about their opinion.
#Case study
A case study is performed to understand a particular subject; such as if adverts with sales offers are more efficient if they have a red background, compared to blue?
#Action research
Action research can be described as “learning by doing.” A designer might identify a problem such as that people in an airport have difficulties to locate the toilets. By experimenting with different font-sizes on the toilet signs and measuring how the size of the font correlates to the number of questions the airport staff gets about where the toilets are located; the designer might be able to conclude a perfect font-size for airport toilet signs.
#Ethnography
In ethnographic research, the researcher interacts with the population in their natural setting over a prolonged period; observing and collecting data. If a designer, for example, wants to understand why Swedish people in June and July buy more beer from brands that sell their beer in blue cans; the researcher might have to live in Sweden for some time to understand this phenomenon.
(*Hint: https://youtu.be/0oQM6e_BHh0).
#Participative Enquiry
Participatory research is a method where members of a group actively cooperate in performing a study. If, for example, the staff in the airport example above as a group gets tired on getting constantly asked where the toilets are located, they might decide to take action into their own hands, testing different colors, sizes, and locations of the signs.
#Feminist Perspectives
Does gender inequalities to some extent stem from the fact that more men than women work as graphic designers, and that a majority of adverts published in media, consequently, is created by men? Feminist research is founded in the perspectives of feminist values and beliefs.
#Grounded theory
Grounded theory begins with data collection, coding, and analysis before a hypothesis is concluded and tries to answer the question “what really is going in on here, and how?”
Let’s say that staff at the airport discussed above complain to management that too many people ask were the toilets are located even though there are signs everywhere. The person who gets assigned to figure out why might then take a chair and in the hallways of the airport watch people with the intent to figure out why they have such a hard time to find their way to the toilets. After making notes of the observations, the person then also performs interviews to collect further information. By analyzing the collected data, the researcher might then conclude that the problem is due to the color of the toilet signs, which are very similar to the signs leading to the airport chapel.
Final words.
This post has discussed some of the most common models- and methodologies of research which designers can use to better understand how to most efficiently create designs that are loved and accurately understood by their target audiences. As there are no universal research methodology suitable for any design project, it is imperative that designers take time to build an understanding of the many different research methodologies they have at hand, including those presented in this post.