Data+Design Integrated Insights: The power of multi-method research

“Good research is asking the right questions, and designing a way to answer them.” — Martha Cotton

Research is foundational to design. It guides key decisions throughout the design process in terms of who you design for, the moments you design around, and how you decide what really matters.

What is Design Research Today?

The beauty of Design Research is that it is objective led — and its’ service to design and innovation allows researchers to evolve and adapt our methods to ensure we are learning what we need when we need it in order to design better products and services to support the humans we design for.

Traditionally, much of Design Research has relied on qualitative methods, with a strong emphasis on ethnographic approaches. This provides an important conduit for empathy and a glimpse into context of use and value. Done well, this research is both valid and valuable because design teams want a deep understanding of others and their experiences in the world around them — to also imagine what they could be.

The qual/quant cage match

This debate has raged for decades: Design Research tends to eschew quantitative approaches because they lack the ability to reveal context — the all important “why” behind peoples’ behavior that is so important to design. This frequently leaves teams needing to justify the validity of the approach if there is a lack of understanding of qualitative sampling. To those less familiar with qual, it is very hard to avoid looking at it through the lens of quant. But would you expect an orange to taste like a lemon? No of course not. Biting into a lemon and expecting it to taste like an orange is a recipe for disappointment and confusion. And you will have the same result if you look at qual through the lens of quant. Just like a lemon and orange, they are different, and used for different reasons.

We get into trouble when we ask qualitative research to do the work of quantitative, and vice versa. Both methods have validity and impact when done for the right reasons and used to answer the appropriate questions.

But, while the cage match debate rages on, it is worth asking why design firms tend to rely mostly on qualitative approaches, when there is a world of new and growing data about peoples’ behavior that is quantitative in nature and shouldn’t be ignored.

A new approach for new kinds of data

At Fjord we are done with the cage match, and believe what is missing is a truly integrated approach between qual, quant, and digital footprint data to inspire designers.

Current design firm research may offer to contextualize design solutions, but it is also facing key challenges, which limits the potential impact of the work. A new, more flexible and relevant approach is needed to deliver on the promises made by the service design community. It’s not enough anymore to offer contextual rationale for design solutions — especially when we have the ability to offer more dynamic, data-driven rationale, as well.

What could design research be?

“Data is the oxygen living services breathe to live.” — Nandini Nayak

Here at Fjord, we understand the connected, digital nature of today’s world — and we believe that design research has a responsibility to leverage data to enrich existing knowledge. We call this digital footprint research, which uses the digital data that people leave behind to inform and supplement traditional methods of qualitative and quantitative design research.

Digital footprint research is a quantitative research approach in the era of digital data. It does not replace traditional quantitative or qualitative research but brings an additional toolkit to uncover additional perspectives. Databases and the digital footprints that people leave in them make the foundation for this research. By looking through transactional logs, for example, we can understand exactly when activities have taken place and what percent of our sample population acted in a similar manner. Both traditional qualitative and quantitative approaches may focus on this same behavior according to the participants themselves, but digital footprint research relies on the data created by participants’ actions which can be captured by digital means.

In addition to fairly simple activities, like a credit card being charged, digital footprint research can also employ advanced analytical techniques to draw insights from complex digital data, such as image, video, sound, and text. Fjord leverage techniques — such as machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, statistical approaches, natural language processing, computer vision — to draw insights from complex digital data.

Integrated Insights: Using design research as a foundation for Living Services

Fjord has developed a flexible, adaptable, and relevant research method, which connects qualitative, quantitative, and digital footprint research into one agnostic approach: Integrated Insights. In this way, by iteratively developing, testing, and expanding on (or throwing out) our hypotheses, we can land on insights that are rooted in the findings of our qualitative research, representative in the field as demonstrated by our quantitative research, and validated by our digital footprint research.

The Integrated Insights approach also entails designing for data and building instrumentation into experiences. This creates the opportunity to continually collect quantitative responses, which enables a dynamic solution that can adapt based on a changing digital footprint over time.

At Fjord, our design teams practice the Integrated Insights approach to research. Not only can we integrate traditional qualitative and quantitative research methods, but we purposefully build multi-disciplinary teams which have the skills to access digital footprints stored in databases and plan instrumentation strategies, whether digital or physical.

Integrated Insights offers a solution to the typical issues that many design teams face, but more importantly, it allows us to truly serve the innovation needs of our clients. When we design a minimum love-able service or product, we are confident that it touches the users in a meaningful way — because we’ve heard the customer’s voices, we’ve seen (and are seeing) their actions, and we are continually validating the extent of their ubiquity.

Integrated Insights in action

Fjord recently used the Integrated Insights approach at a large tech company. Answering the call to design a better employee experience at a call center, our Fjord team began with a Discover phase, setting up interviews, sending out surveys, and getting access to transactional databases. The interview guides and survey questions that were created were informed by the insights found in the digital footprints in databases. After the interviews were conducted, the surveys collected, and the data blended, a robust synthesis ensued. The end result was a Describe phase that not only had deep personal anecdotes that humanized a large corporate system, but also had a statistical relevance to the whole population. Interestingly, the feedback from the ethnographic interviews held a greater weight with decision-makers because they were confident that the consequences of some policy changes could be validated in the digital footprints of the employees.

One could also imagine using Integrated Insights to design a better health experience that encourages healthy living. In a traditional approach, participants of the study would be asked to journal their experiences in detail every day and would respond to surveys and interviews periodically. In an Integrated Insights study, additional data collection could be added with appropriate permissions. Connections to wearables could be added to understand physical activities, internet browser extensions could be added to understand online shopping and search habits, etc. In this way, Living Services would bring together digital footprints with traditional qualitative and quantitative research to provide a much richer view into the participants’ lives. Of course, it is important to note that this comes with a responsibility to protect the privacy of the participants and to ensure they understand the data that is being collected on them.

Thank you to Martha Cotton for co-authoring this with me, and to Nandini Nayak, and Krista Schnell for their contributions, debates, and ideas.