The Power of Triangulation in Design Research
By Claudia Bruen and Laura Valis
As designers, we understand the importance of building a rich, varied picture of a problem space during the discovery phase. At this stage, the priority is on investigating what people are trying to do and how and why they’re trying to do it. When approaching any problem, you benefit from multiple perspectives, and where possible, we try to combine different research methods to learn from different viewpoints.
For this project, we were tasked with understanding how people experience garden maintenance. Given the broad topic area, we decided that only using one method, such as conducting in-depth interviews, wouldn’t give us deep enough insight, so rather than asking people to tell us about how they maintain their gardens, we asked them to show us.
To best understand participants’ gardening practices, we decided to combine three methods: a diary study, home interviews and a survey. This process of using a series of methods in combination is known as triangulation- a research strategy used to gain different perspectives on a topic of discovery, using each method to build a bigger, more comprehensive picture of what we’re studying.
We used dscout for our diary study, and started off with a week-long pilot to refine our approach; the main study lasted three weeks, followed by a week of home interviews. We asked participants to upload videos and photos of any work done in their garden, followed by a few questions. The first two weeks were focused on the work conducted, while the third week was focused on participants’ emotional states before, during and after carrying out the work.
After we finished the diary study, we visited our most active and engaged participants in their own homes to conduct a face-to-face interview. We used this as an opportunity to validate some of our findings from the diary study and to probe deeper into the all important ‘why’.
When we were in people’s homes, we were able to much better understand their situations and experience what they experience. We already felt like we knew our participants through watching their videos and by chatting to them through dscout. However, we found that our awareness of pain points and delighters was heightened because we were in the midst of it — we could easily tell what people loved and hated through their enthusiasm and body language while they were physically showing us around their garden.
Visiting these homes also turned out to be a sensory experience.Through one participant’s diary entries, we learned that her biggest pain point was the volume of apples that fell in her garden throughout the year. We knew that there were too many for her to clear away on a daily basis. However, when we stepped into her garden and were struck by a rotten smell and the sight of crushed apples staining the ground beneath them we were able to understand the full extent of this frustration.
The visits also uncovered information that none of our other methods would have allowed. Because participants were in their own homes, they were completely comfortable, and they were surrounded by things that triggered stories. Had we not used this approach, we wouldn’t have learned about feuds between neighbours over building extensions or unconventional gardening hacks passed down from generations — they likely wouldn’t have thought to share those through our structured diary study.In this sense, we used one method to make up for the limitations of another, which is one of the main benefits of triangulation.
Through this research, we wanted to be able to define different types of gardeners. For this, we needed to gain a deep understanding of our participants: their personalities, behaviours and lives. The home interviews helped immensely with this, as knowing more about the owner and their home added context to the garden. By watching video entries, we wouldn’t have picked up on extremes of participants — a self-confessed hoarder versus a minimalist, for example. We were able to pick up on these nuances by enjoying a cup of tea in their living rooms.
Lastly, we sent out a short survey. This served as a final validation to our insights but was also a way of asking one-off questions arising from both the diary study and interviews. It’s often best practice to do a survey last, when there is the least room for nuance.
We gathered an enormous amount of data, and byusing three methods in combination, we built an extremely rich understanding of our topic area. Better still, as a longitudinal study made up of different methods, it allowed us to build insights cumulatively so that we were leveraging new learnings throughout. This meant that we could continuously refine and reframe what we knew — or what we thought we knew.
Finally, the study gave us an opportunity to use all of our senses as researchers. We built a relationship with our participants over time during the diary study, but the home visits really helped us empathise on a different level. By affinity mapping all of our data, we were able to distill tensions and mindsets, while better shaping customer problems for each type of person.
