How Socjomania can improve a design research process thanks to design thinking methods and mindset?
This report is prepared as a research activity for Hyper Island Digital Management course, Design Thinking module. This is the second part about practical reflection on Design Thinking. The previous part is about critical reflection about the methodology (read it here).
Socjomania — Profile Of The Organization
Socjomania is a polish digital media consulting and training company. Our mission is to educate, help and implement digitalization of services. Currently, we have got three main services: conducting digital marketing training, preparing digital strategies and consulting clients in the field of digital marketing.
How Research Already Looks In Socjomania?
I took the topic of design research inspired by the lecture by Sam Miller, a design researcher at IDEO. After this, I realized that we, Socjomania, have a chance to improve our research tasks by implementing design thinking methodology. I would like to describe how this process looks like briefly. Research is the first part of digital marketing strategy. The primary goal is to gather necessary information about this company, their competitors, and all other industries. Generally, during research we are using the following tools or techniques:
After several preparing digital strategies, we recognized the need to go deeper with our research, interview the target group, empathize with their problem, ask more question beginning from ‘why’.
Thanks to this report, I would like to suggest some new tools or techniques which will improve the research phase at Socjomania and will also be useful and efficient to implement. My reflection is based on research from existing academic and professional literature and on interviews with Socjomania’s employees.
How Should We Do A Design Research?
Research is a systematic study to establish facts (Goodwin, 2009). Term design research has the strong correlation with design thinking — it is examining tools and process of design thinking and making within the design project bringing theory and building knowledge to enhance design practices (Burdick, 2003). Thanks to methods from design research toolkit, we can understand customers, market and our challenges better.
Be Prepared: Assume A Beginner’s Mindset and Be Ready To Kill Your Darlings
Before the start of every design research project, we should remember two basic rules. Firstly, you should adopt an attitude of beginner user. Do not let the curse of knowledge beat you — it means to take every observation without prejudice, forget about your current experience and opinions (Dam and Siang, 2017d). It allows seeing new possibilities, solutions and comments. Do not judge, just be curious and listen carefully to target. Question everything to look for patterns and new insights (The Bootcamp Bootleg, n.d.). Instead of being a scientist, just be a detective (Ralph, 2013).
Secondly, we should be ready to kill your darlings (Porter and Brewer 2010). It means to be objective and honest with created ideas. Do not get attached to them, iteratively approach changes.
We are researching because it can answer the critical questions and also can show us another truth we know.
The Guidelines
Market research gives data about the market size and demographics, information on what people buy and what message will be appealing to our customers. But design research answers to questions like — what makes people buy? What makes people loyal customers? What to build and how it should behave? (Goodwin, 2009). The researcher is responsible not only for gathering data (it can be done by computers) but mainly to interpret them and being responsible for them. I suggest a short three-point list with rules for our company according to outcomes from Design Thinking And Research Ethics section:
Limitation of Design Research
We are researching because it can answer the critical questions and also can show us another truth we know. But sometimes designers ask too much question, “they constantly look to the next biggest context to understand the problem we’re solving” (Budd, 2017b); but like in Budds’ example — for the client who is expecting to design a chair, talking about town planning can be frustrating for him. We should identify which client is ready for our design thinking approach and who needs it. Do not expect that every customer who comes to us for a marketing strategy will want a complex service based on design thinking. The process is flexible like I noticed in a section There Is No One Process, we should selectively choose tools and approaches which fit problems and try to resolve them. Research might a never-ending process, so we should fix its boundaries and first focus on the central research questions.
Iteration
Design research is also an iterative process. We are still learning how to be better researchers. The most essential is gathering feedback from the previous projects, discuss how to improve it. Very important might be to prepare a checklist with a research question on what we want to investigate (Ambrosse and Harris, 2010) and re-frame it before each project. A lot of interviewed researchers in Socjomania claimed that they need one coherent structure for gathering insights. Currently, we are working on the cohesion of the whole process with the main Digital Strategist in our company.
Collecting And Downloading Data
Every design thinker should be a researcher. It confirms Hall (2014) — “the best solution is to engage everyone who is on the design team in the research”. As a result of this, each member of the team will understand their customers and provide a better solution for them, not only based on a report from researchers but from their investigation.
“The best solution is to engage everyone who is on the design team in the research”
By studying the research process in our company, I noticed one crucial problem which happens to be the way results were reported. Sometimes this is only limited the case of putting outcomes with generated insights into slides at the end of the day. In some projects, we slowly are introducing short meetings at the beginning of each project-day where researchers talk about their observations, share their insights with others, and think about how they can improve the process. Downloading method described by IDEO (2015), a short 30-minutes session to share observations and insights with the whole design team might be beneficial. Another solution might be a user research wall described by Mastelarz (2014). We can do this by putting observations and insights on one of the walls in the project room, and remember to discuss everything and trying to create patterns regularly.
Design Research Toolkit
Some methods from design thinking toolbox can help us to step back from issue and have a broader look (Norman, 2010) — like well-conducted interviews, carefully prepared customer journey or deep desk research. But all depends on the project, customers and industry. Sometimes too much information and data become an inhibitor to progress (Budd, 2017b), frustrating situation for both design team and customer as well.
Below I would like to briefly describe some of the most exciting techniques from a standpoint digital company design research methods.
Desk research
There are a lot of different tools which can help to do the right research. The most popular is desk research, it is an ordinary investigation of existing data such as articles, books, and post on the forum. A fundamental mistake in our company is that desk research is often the only type of research that we take. During interviews, Socjomania’s employers identified desk research as a good point to start research. It shows the direction of observation in them. It confirms Cooper-Wright (2015) “Good desk research help shape the questions you will ask in interviews, so the sooner you start it, the better.” What I consider to be a disadvantage of desk research is gathering only declarative data without any deep observation and real contact with the target group.
Interviewing
Each examined coworker said that interviews could change design research at Socjomania and indicated it as the most effective in gaining insights. From direct conversations with customers (user interview, expert panel, extreme interview) to models using empathy skills (empathy experience, customer journey), we can gain more observations from them than other methods. Interviews are complicated, time and budget-consuming methods, but by using some helpful techniques, we can start to learn how to provide interviews with a small amount of work.
Card-sorting, which I used in conducting this research, has proven to be an effective and stimulating technique to gain users opinions and monitor their behaviors. My coworkers have rated it as a quick and effective method which they will want to use in the future.
Role-playing can be used even on our team, just to liberate empathic thinking. According to Martin and Hanington (2012), acting like users can highlight new project challenges. After several attempts to implement this method in my design research, I find this ideal for reframing challenges and generating new research questions quickly.
Immersion
“The best route to gaining that understanding is to talk to them in person, where they live, work, and lead their lives” (IDEO, 2015). It means that we can discover a lot of things walking away from the desk and meet the challenge in the real world. All interviewed coworkers confirmed that our research processes are not investigating the problem in their environment. For careful and detailed observations, we should use immersion methods. We can go to the shop and observe people choosing products from our customers or do shadowing experiments by tracking someone in his or her role to collect insights about touchpoints, problems, emotions (Martin and Hanington, 2012).
Design Workshops
This is “a form of participatory design consolidating creative co-design methods into organized sessions for several participants to work with design team members” (Martin and Hanington, 2012). Several times, we have managed to do this type of workshop with the client, but we did not use many tools for the facilitation and diversification of the meetings, so they became a regular business meeting. In the future, we should plan in the research process to invite clients for design workshops.
Triangulation
When we have decided which method in design research we want to conduct, triangulation might be successful in verifying and validating gathered observations by incorporating different ways (Yeasmin and Ferdousour-Rahman, 2012). With the combination of several methods of research, we can conduct more reliable insights. That is why it is important for a company to know many research techniques and triangulate the outcomes every time.
Conclusion
According to my research, I prepared a short guidepost with the fundamental principles every researcher in Socjomania should follow:
- Think about both the client well and his target audience. You create solutions for people, not for (client’s) money only.
- Create simple, clear and understandable solutions. Do not complicate.
- Build, do not ask. Prototype your solution to get new insights and opinions.
- Keep in mind the process. Remember about iteration — try, fail and improve your tasks.
- Do not take anything for granted. Check each information. Talk with people, search for information to get confirmation.
- You are a team. Help and ask for help. “All of us are smarter than any of us” (Brown 2011).
The next step to implement design thinking in Socjomania should transfer the knowledge to the team and build awareness of fundamental principles. The design must find a way to create the dialogue with every company function (Porcini, 2009). Then there is a chance that we will become a design-driven company with design thinking methodology inside.
If you like to learn more, in the previous article I presented critical review of design thinking methodology.
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