February 2025
Service Design
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“Once you start getting answers, you’ll keep asking more questions. And that skeptical mindset is more valuable than any specific methodology.”
Before transitioning into design, I had every intention of delving deeper into academia and going down the “pure research” pipeline. Upon discovering UX research (design research), everything changed including my own attitudes toward what I view as credible (“legitimate”) research. I was accustomed to primarily reading peer-reviewed journal articles, taking notes on them, and then being tested over my own breadth and depth of the information at hand.
It was a shock and a relief to see that not all research needs to be as experimental and complicated as this. Erika Hall speaks on the dynamics of different types of researchers throughout the book but much of it can be effectively summed up by simply saying: Everyone can/should do research!
Erika Hall defines research as ‘systematic inquiry’ and defines the 4 types mentioned in the book (personal, pure, applied and design); in some ways, design research is an amalgamation of all 4 types but most often centers around “understanding the people for whom we’re designing.” Further into the book, she articulates what many researchers will inevitably face:
“In many organizations, there are still those who consider research somewhere between a threat and a nuisance.”
The goal of user research is to learn about user behavior and goals; in previous years, many thought that they needed to hire an external researcher (a pure or applied researcher) to have this kind of work completed but nowadays, an internal staff designer is just as likely to complete much of the work (alongside others while analyzing results and looking for patterns). This new way of doing things and making the research process more accessible has been called “the democratization of research.” In other words: anyone and everyone should be interacting with the research process in one way or another.
Before starting research or identifying what kind needs to take place, there must be alignment on the purpose of said research. Hall sums this up as “everyone having a shared understanding of how the work will proceed.” Often times, this doesn’t happen cross-functionally:
“Organizations that don’t put in the effort to clarify goals, socialize understanding, and resolve conflicts will continue to make critical decisions based on the personal preferences of the most influential person in the room—no matter how “good” the research is.”
Hall articulates many of the objections that we, as designers, will often hear (confirmed!) including: “We don’t have time,” “We don’t have the expertise,” or “We can find out everything in beta.” I think she articulates extremely well these reasons are often secondary to internal politics: something that we have to sift out. One of the most effective and empowering ways of doing this is to include others who may not have been otherwise included in the process:
“Inquiry is flattery. Inviting people to participate empowers them.”
Processing data (analyzing and finding patterns) should be done collaboratively anyway to reduce bias so why not invite people to participate in other parts of the process?
1) Informed Consent: inform and ensure users consent to any kind of experimentation; “There is a fine line between A/B testing and showing different information to different audiences in order to study their reactions to manipulated or discriminatory material.”
2) Safety: ensure that any kind of testing is being completed in an atmosphere where the user is not at risk; never talk to somebody on the phone while they might be driving. Hang up immediately.
3) Judgment: in order to connect with participants, it is every researcher’s job to be aware of their own experiences and to recognize when participants might be experiencing negative emotions
4) Recruiting: should ideally be an ongoing process and is ideally best if completed internally
5) Usability labs: skew results by removing everyday interruptions and routine; we want unpredictability
6) Control: never let anyone take control of the interview from you; simply try to wind down the sessions and dismiss them (that participant should probably have been screened out)
7) Facilitation: the best interviewers know when to not talk; “Conducting a good interview is actually about shutting up.”
8) Surveys: they are extremely difficult to write and often provide exaggerated data; Hall comedically tries to convince us to never ever conduct surveys. “Surveys are the most difficult research method of all”
Outstanding and hilarious. I appreciate Erika Hall’s dry sense of humor that permeates throughout the book. She obviously has a lot of experience navigating some of the touchy parts of the research process which made me trust her advice about surveys at the end of the book. Although this book aims to give designers the tools they need to do research in their roles, I also feel that it does a stellar job at socializing designers to encounter problems and dig deep into why that problem exists. For example, she talks about the underlying reasons behind why objections will surface to conducting research in the first place; she provides ‘actual reasons’ including: “I don’t want to be bothered,” “I’m uncomfortable talking to people,” and my favorite “I’m afraid of being wrong.” This last reason has been one that I’ve encountered a few times already and has been a legitimate source of objection.
I also think Hall does a great job at describing different methods that are available to learn about users and ways to identify when data might be less than high-quality. She discusses biases including design bias, sampling bias, interviewer bias, sponsor bias, social desirability bias, the Hawthorne effect, and the curse of knowledge. I found these to be a great refresher, especially her writing about social desirability bias and how users will silence issues they’re having with systems in order to be liked by facilitators.
Hall shares some great sources of information throughout the book (articles, references, further reading, etc.) but my favorite is the Pew Research Center; I originally found out about this a few years but but was so glad to be reminded of it! Lastly, Hall defined and articulated the importance of paying attention to mental models when conducting ethnographic research. Specifically, she defined the term “intuitive” which gets tossed around a lot by people I’m around; she defines it as “match[ing] the user’s mental model.” After reading this particular section, I picked up a copy of Indi Young’s “Mental Models” for my next read!
Overall, this was a stellar read and I wish I had read it far sooner. Hall humbles herself by saying that this book is just an introduction but I think it’s the most cohesive book around basic user research that I’ve read! She leaves off with this:
“Questions are more powerful than answers. And asking often takes more courage than sticking with comfortable assumptions.”
