Research

Quantitative research

Quantitative research is concerned with facts and numbers. It's a very objective style of research that assumes a fixed reality that can be measured. If you look through quantitative studies, you'll notice that a lot of the data findings are reported in statistical terms. P values, confidence intervals, hypotheses, things of that nature. The US census is a great example of large-scale quantitative research in action.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research gathers information that isn't in numerical form. It's descriptive and it takes more time to analyze. Qualitative research assumes a dynamic and negotiable reality. Data are collected through participant observations and interviews along with open-ended questionnaires. Generally qualitative data are reported as quotes, such as in user experience research, that comes from people being observed.

Research design for teams

The iterative response is conducive to integrating ongoing research, but doing so successfully can be a real challenge. Building solid research practice will ensure that your teams make informed decisions and aid team cohesion. We share best ways to seamlessly integrate research. An overview of the agile approach, logistics for teams and tips to alter traditional research to best fit an agile environment.

Primary research

Primary research uses a number of research tools to collect information. Typically, it follows secondary research, after you have a better understanding of what you're looking for. The value of this research is that it enables you to collect information you couldn't learn through secondary research. It is context-specific. It collects data from your target audience in a specific environment.

Secondary research

Secondary research sources can be books, magazine, articles, academic journals, case studies, market reports, basically any credible source that has been published. Secondary research is a great method to begin your research process with. The information you learn from this will help you to define your approach to the problem. Secondary research can also help you understand what you don't know.

Market research

Market research studies human behavior towards a market-based economy. In essence, it's research aimed at understanding how human connect to goods, services and experiences. E.g. what colors, textures and styles are we drawn to? Will this drug or technology work? Market research talks about people in the context of being a consumer and its primary goal is to connect consumers to products, services or experiences.

Generative research

Generative research is conducted in the early stages of a project. It includes both primary and secondary research, and can be quantitative and qualitative. It helps to understand the problem, and to form a potential hypothesis on how it can be solved. It's broad in the beginning, using secondary research. As the problem becomes clearer, and the research objectives are established, using more primary research tools.

Evaluative research

Evaluative research is conducted in the later portion of a project, and it validates earlier research by testing potential solutions. For instance, we concluded through our generative research that our solution needs to be visual, with few words, and use universal symbols to communicate. As part of our evaluative research, we craft possible solutions, and we test them with users to understand if we were correct.

Ethnography research

Ethnography is used to understand the connection between human behavior and culture, such as "how do people behave in a given environment." Let's consider people and environment for a moment. What we're talking about here is context: a particular group of people connected together by a shared social, cultural, or environmental experience. Empathy and it's the key benefit of conducting ethnographic research.

Ethnography research

"What people say, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things." To understand this better let's consider a broad example by looking at a basic piece of quantitative research.

45% of people are unhappy with their current employment. So, what do we know? A lot of people don't like their jobs. But we don't have any idea why? And ethnography, like all qualitative research, is great at uncovering "why."

So let's start out by doing some interviews with people who claim to be unhappy at their job. And these are some of the things we find out: "I don't think I get paid enough for what I do", "This job is boring, wish the time will go faster". Now this information is great, but I think we can get even deeper into the problem with ethnography.

Now let's see what happens when we use ethnographic observations of the work environment. And this is what I observed: there are no windows or natural light inside of the office, there seem to be too many useless meetings, workers often appeared bored and frustrated, low-level employees had several managers to answer to, and there was little teamwork or collaboration.

So by using ethnography, we were able to discover more about what it's like to be a worker at this organization, we gained empathy for the workers, and having this empathy sheds new light on why they're unhappy.