Design Research for Innovators

When you have an existing product or service then research techniques and methodologies already exist to gather and analyze information about it, to start planning the next version and future improvements. Building up a data collection and then analyzing existing users and systems through market research tools and surveys, as well as focus groups will yield a lot of great data to wade through to help incrementally improve existing designs.

However, if you are starting a new product or service that no one has ever seen before or had the opportunity to use, what methods can you use in this situation? There is not always something to test against and people cannot have accurate opinions about something they have never seen or used. Jane Fulton Suri chief creative officer at IDEO, suggests in her article about design research, that innovation requires a new approach to tackle the unknowns. Design research techniques can help in future thinking of new products and service insights. She explains that innovation is mostly open ended in its requirements and can be very subjective in nature. She suggest that what is required is what she calls "design research" opposed to more traditional research techniques, that still uses the analysis of objective evidence as before, but the research is enhanced with extra exploration due to the lack of applicable data. These include:

Synthesizing of evidence,

Exploration of analogies and extreme cases,

Recognition of emergent patterns,

Empathetic connection to people's motivations and behavior,

Intuitive interpretation of information with impressions from multiple sources.

These considerations are used to expose patterns with peoples behaviors and experiences, as well as, explore reactions and responses. The purpose of this research is to extend our knowledge and understanding. These allow the researcher direct efforts to probe and prototype against, which will more likely give key insight on unknowns through hypothesis and experimentation.

Design research's value is in inspiring our imaginations and inform our intuitions. Successful design research as Jane suggests requires both a cultural transformation in organizations and perpetuation of those transformations to allow innovation to survive and grow. Design research requires the individual to get out of the office and be where the customer is and see what they see. It is important to get first hand experience out in the field. Design research can be rich and delivers not only facts, but insights into those facts and reasons behind them. She goes onto emphaize that people have needs, motivations, habits and perceptions that all need to be taken into account in new product and service design thinking. Good research should uncover these nuances and allow the experimenter to gauge their ideas against this knowledge.

She summarizes with three different approaches to design research that can address open questions with regards to innovation and how they can be performed and implemented.

Generative Design Research

This is an empathetic exercise, it is descriptive and factual but also speculative and interpretive. We are looking for emergent patterns, challenges and opportunities that can be address with innovation and design thinking. It can be performed by shadowing specific people and observing their behaviors. Having people keep diaries of moods and significant events. It is interactive and contextual and not based on self report or opinions. There is also room for more traditional market research, and trend information searching. The aim is to create a framework for thinking about the domain for innovation.

Evaluative/Formative

Learning feedback loops are useful here, with user input and consumer insight gained from using sketches, telling stories. Producing videos and prototypes can be very valuable here to help demonstrate the issues and try potential solutions. The aim is to tangibly represent an idea, probing and asking questions. It gives a chance to address questions and uncertainty as it occurs. It allows you to check peoples reactions and refine assumptions. Collaborative discovery and creation works well in this research method. Using prototyping techniques such as theater(bodystorming) and paper prototyping.

Predictive

How confidently can we predict success? Looking ahead to estimate the potential of an idea and the future opportunities that maybe be available. This requires more of a business mindset, and is a good skill to acquire, especially for designers. Looking for potential markets and determining viability of ideas. Running live experiments and having labs that run experiments online is good practice.

Design Thinking

Design thinking is an alternative way of thinking about problem solving and idea generation. It could well be one of the most important new ways of structuring new business teams and creating environments for future workers that has been put forward in recent years. The concept is not really anything new, and certainly many historical figures like Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Tesla, would be in my mind classed as design thinkers. Really the newest step forward is the more formal acceptance of the process of design thinking as promoted by companies such as IDEO that produces reproducible successful results. Most people in the realm of invention and idea creation really have been practicing design thinking for centuries.

Design thinking is a really a process in approaching a problem. The basic four steps of design thinking are: 

Define the problem

Create and consider possibilities

Refine and dissect results

Repeat(optional)

Execute most successful outcome

Within each of these steps are tools and methods that help get the most out of the process. 

Defining the problem, involves a discovery phase with analysis of the problem space. At this point in the process it is critical to immerse oneself in the problem, existing solutions (if any), and the all the available resources and literature. It may also require observation of people and processes already in place. Only after a full discovery would it be worth moving onto a creation phase. At this point in the process it is worth considering tools like brainstorming on smaller parts of the problem, grouping and ideating ideas together to be evaluated as worth pursuing. Which leads nicely into to a complimentary part of the phase of creating prototypes of various levels of fidelity. To test out concepts and encourage team engagement at the early production stage. This is when things begin to really stand out as feasible and worthwhile solutions or not. Then, comes the refine and dissection of those ideas that seem most worthy. Further prototyping, and maybe some usability tests can help refine the results. repeating earlier stages may also prove advantageous. After things seem to funneling into a particular result it then becomes time to execute the most successful outcome into the final product or service.

That in a nutshell is design thinking. Again nothing completely new but really people's acceptance and corporate push for innovation has brought these now more well defined steps into new consideration. They are effective and powerful ways to generate ideas and produce prototypes that lead to more successful end products and services, when done correctly.

Other breakdowns of the steps include.

Discover, Analysis, Ideation, Prototype and Evaluate.

Define, Research, Ideate, Prototype, Choose, Implement, Learn.

In each instance you can see the common form of four basic steps.

I have some further reading here for design thinking.

You can read some more of my thoughts on prototyping here.

And some ideas on idea generation here.