Design research needs better standards

iab · January 12, 2006, 9:05pm

Cordy Swope:

This is preceisely an argument FOR doing qualitative research on the front end of product development, which is incidentally 99% of the sort of work that I do. As was descirbed in a subsequent post, the need for doing some qualitative research at the beginning of product development arose from the fact that in the 80’s, there were a lot of products that were design skin jobs, which were impossible to use (e.g. the pet-outrage of the time was the unprogrammable VCR).

Some design consultancies began to offer up “usability” in a rather direct answer to this issue. Others began to find that a “definition” phase often was beneficial in ensuring that the right features were included in the design. This in turn became widened in the 90’s when some products (e.g. the Reebok Pump, various P&G offerings) succeeded as a result of a process of qualitative research combined with design and engineering. And now that the business press has gotten hold of these stories, practically every design firm who wants to be considered seriously is adopting qualitative research methods into the front end of their processes - a lot of them are doing so at the urging of their clients.

While the advent of 3-D printing and other types of rapid prototyping have sped up certain aspects of the product development process, the addition of more tools and techniques on the front end have made some firms expensive. But the price of NOT doing some sort of consumer understanding piece at the beginning is often and increased chance of failure in the market, which I would think most shareholders care about. The field of design research has grown out of - and benefitted from -shareholder frustration with stagnant growth.

My bad. I meant to write quantitative instead of qualitative. Would that be a Freudian slip or just plain stupidity?

As for qualitative research, I canâ€™t remember the last time a client didnâ€™t want any.

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Design research needs better standards

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