The Art of Balance in Design Research
I have a sticker on my water bottle that says, “This is yoga.” A bit hoaky, but I stuck it there as a reminder of balance. To me, yoga and life share the principle of reconciling two opposing forces or ideas. Yoga reconciles the balance of breath and postures; effort and ease.¹ Life is about the balance of thought and action; stillness and movement; life and work; effort and ease.
Design research is also about the art of balance. Here’s how acknowledging some of those opposing forces can make you a better researcher (and maybe a yogi too 🙃).
#1 The balance of want and need
🧘 Yoga connection: Yoga class often begins with setting an intention for the practice, asking oneself, “Why did I come to my mat today, and what do I hope to get out of this time?”
When setting out to do research, it’s a careful balance of navigating which initiatives are necessary and which are performative. This is a great time to ask yourself, your team, and your stakeholders, “What’s the intention for this particular research effort?” If there aren’t decisions to make or assumptions to test — it’s not the right time or place for research.
And if there is an intention? Great! Write it down, and share it with the team so everyone is aligned and has the opportunity to refine the intention. Here, it’s important to focus intentions on a particular initiative rather than broader goals for the project. Constraints like business needs, timeline, and budget help the team drive meaningful action to fulfill needs of the now and next versus wants for the future. Something we do at Craft, the digital design agency where I work, is state our initiative-specific research objectives and key questions for the project team to reference. Research objectives typically max out at three and the same goes for key questions. Setting a limit helps the research stay focused, and if it’s difficult to cut objectives or questions, that indicates the need for more research at a later time.
🔎 Key learning: Establish an intention for your research, by asking yourself, “Why am I conducting this research, and what do I aim to learn from it?”
#2 The balance of discovery and evaluation
🧘 Yoga connection: After an intention has been set, a natural question is: “Where do I want to take this practice?” The response might be a desire to focus on the foundation of each posture or be intentional about transitions between poses.
Once a team aligns on the intention for the research, the approach comes into play. Some studies call for a more generative approach, also known as discovery research, in which the aim is to generate new information such as user behaviors, attitudes, motivations, or needs. Other studies call for a more evaluative approach to test early ideas, work-in-progress concepts, or existing digital experiences and understand what’s working and what could be improved.
It’s important to balance these two approaches across research efforts. If all the focus is on generating new information, then the team risks that the designs are not user friendly or the execution falls short of the vision. On the flipside, if the focus is placed on evaluating designs, the team might be too close to one version of the solution and miss other opportunities to bring value to end users. With a balance of discovery and evaluation, we can uncover unexpected opportunities, test ideas, and evolve those ideas based on feedback.
🔎 Key learning: Once you know your intention, ask yourself if you need to gather information about people, the product, or both. A generative approach will help you learn about people, the intended user. An evaluative approach will help you learn about the product and how to make it better. There’s also hybrid approaches that enable you to learn about people and the product in one study to help the team gain a more holistic understanding within project constraints (i.e., timeline, budget, etc.).
#3 The balance of information and impact
🧘 Yoga connection: Some moments in a yoga practice can get overwhelming. One instructor gave this advice in one such moment, “Get still. Nothing extra. When is action necessary and when can you be still?”
Researchers tend to be biased toward, covet even, the user’s perception of an experience. This bias may show up as wordy reports diving into nuances of the data. The risk of an onslaught of information is reduced impact. Research can only be truly impactful when it’s delivered concisely. What’s the point? Get that out there first. Make sure stakeholders hear and see what’s most crucial.
When it comes to reporting research, it can be hard to cut content. I’m talking to myself here. All those beautiful nuggets. It all seems valuable, right? Sad to say, it’s not. Make sure the big takeaways come across, support those takeaways, and leave time for conversation. Believe it or not, you and your team have the information in your brain to call upon if stakeholders want to know more.
🔎 Key learning: Balance the robust information coming from data collection with impactful reporting.
#4 The balance of research and design
🧘 Yoga connection: It’s no surprise that savasana is a popular pose. Recovering in the calm of supine position. An instructor asked a class once, “How can you bring the sense of calm and certainty at the end of yoga practice into the rest of your day?“
A feeling similar to the one at the end of a yoga practice can be felt at the end of a research effort, a sense of calm and certainty that the insights are a map and the team knows where to go next. But when reality comes knocking, recommendations may get skewed or cast aside and uncertainty creeps in. When this happens, it’s advantageous to bring the team together and determine how research findings will integrate into the designs. This collaboration can take many forms depending on the type of engagement, the size of the team, and the relationship between the designers, researchers, and key stakeholders.
The balance of research and design is paramount to a successful and productive design team. If we spent all our time in research land, we would know a lot, but we’d have nothing useful to show for it. If we lived in design world, we would have a lot but not the confidence in our direction. Ideally, there are several mini-handoffs between research and design that enable research findings to seep into designs and designs to make it out into the world where they bring value to people’s lives.
🔎 Key learning: Afford the time and space to collectively align on what the research means. This will help your team maintain a sense of calm and certainty when translating research findings into designed experiences.
#5 The balance of effort and ease
🧘 Yoga connection: Yoga practice can be effort. But when can gravity work in your favor and when can you strategically leverage your strength to push against it?
There’s no denying that design research is work. It takes effort to balance everything above: ensuring the research is needed at that moment, determining an appropriate approach to inform decision making, sharing robust yet distilled findings, and working with designers to build something meaningful together. It can feel like fighting gravity. It can feel like effort.
But where can you bring in the ease? Where can gravity work in your favor? Look for opportunities to follow your intuition and see the humanity in the work. If the research feels invested in the wrong place or at the wrong time, don’t create more work for the team. Suggest a solution that invites ease into the process with research that makes sense for the decisions to be made.
As for humanity, design research is all about people. Depending on your personality, talking and learning from another person can be energizing. Ask a research participant how their day is going or play a game together. At the end of the day, design research is about human connection to learn from people and design products that bring value to their lives.
🔎 Key learning: Let it be easy. If research consistently feels like fighting gravity, consider the circumstances of the research and see what can adjust to invite some ease.
Just as everyone’s yoga practice is different, everyone’s research practice is different. But there’s a reason we practice together — to learn from one another and walk away with a new perspective. Adopt it, modify it, or make it your own.
[1] I am not a professional yoga practitioner. This is my personal understanding of and experience with yoga and may not accurately reflect all yoga beliefs and teachings.