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It's very funny (to me anyway) that I came out of college decrying research, it "ruined design," and a few years later my love for research informed design pushed me back into college to learn more about it. It's also funny (probably still just to me) that I continue to run into these two seemingly opposed design camps all the time, the pro and anti research designers. I'm among friends in one, and inevitably find myself defending the dreaded F**cus Gr**p in the other. It's like a bad word in a lot of circles, f**cus gr**p, and as I always end up explaining, "it's because people don't run the dreaded f**cus gr**p right." They don't ask the participants the right questions. They use it to answer the wrong kind of research questions. They blindly follow the majority opinion as if it was handed down on stone tablets. Bottom line, they fuck it up. Worse yet, this is the only research method a lot of designers, including fresh out of design school me, know. At the very least the only one they think of when someone says "research."

Research isn't a bad word for designers (even f**cus gr**p)

This is the basic argument I find myself making when in the company of the anti-research designers. I'm a designer, not a researcher. I have a heavy-weight, framed piece of paper that says just that, and in December I'll have two. (This is the only "trust me, I'm a doctor" style statement you're going to get from me, I promise.) As a designer, research is just another tool in my toolbox for solving design problems. It's just like photoshop, or illustrator or my sketchbook. Research does NOT dictate design decisions, it informs them. This is something I usually have to repeat, so I will in an obnoxious type treatment to make it stand out

RESEARCH DOES NOT DICTATE DESIGN DECISIONS, IT INFORMS THEM.

(Sorry, I it wouldn't let me make it blink too.) If you're a designer and you think back to your design classes, you'll likely remember doing some kind of asking around or looking at what other people had already done in that space for every project you did. That's research. AND it isn't a f**cus gr**p. (It's likely a competitive analysis or an unstructured individual interview, for the researchers in the audience keeping track.) Your research didn't totally take away all your choices as a designer, and you probably didn't completely change your initial gut feelings based on it. It didn't dictate your design. But it did inform you, and you might have modified some of your initial assumptions, and you may have abandoned bad ideas if they proved to be bad, or already done, or whatever you found. It may have even given you an idea because you saw something new and it sparked something awesome in your crazy designer brain. This is why good research, used correctly is magical.

Let's talk about the damn f**cus gr**p for a minute

(Warning: this is a rant, you have been warned.)

Most people (especially in advertising) ruin focus groups. This is not an "ivory tower" opinion. This is my on the ground, in the trenches throwing grenades, practitioner's opinion. They're not looking for additional information to inform the design, they're looking for truth. Worse yet, they're not just looking for a truth, they're looking for "The Truth," a totally generalizable (ecologically valid for you researches still keeping track) truth. One that describes everyone like their group everywhere. A group that is usually structured to represent everyone on the planet. Sorry, a f**cus gr**p is the wrong test for finding "The Truth." It's a qualitative test that is at best going to give you an idea of your specific group's opinions, if and only if you recruit the right group and ignore the idea of group think and follow the leader mentality in groups like this, and dont' have one guy who does 80% of the talking for the whole group. At best you're going to be able to say "we showed it to 10 people and 2 of them told us all these things." F**cus gr**ps are not generalizable, period! The are not "The Truth," and to use them as such is foolish, and you should feel sorry for those people because they're likely going to lose a lot of money.

If you're going to hate the f**cus gr**p , hate it for these reasons. Don't hate it because "research kills creativity." it doesn't, it focuses creativity, and gives you new jumping off points if it's done well.

Design is not art, deal with it.

This is the other argument that is used to try and defend the anti-research designer position, "Design is art." This is a horse that's been beaten to death, and I'm usually one of the people holding a bat. Design is not art. It can be objectively evaluated because the whole goal of design is problem solving. The goal of Art is expressing the ideas, emotion and opinions of the artist. You can't do that wrong. That's what makes it art. You can't look at art and realistically say, "The artist totally failed to capture the way she was feeling in this piece." You can look at design reasonably say, "this piece fails to capture the attributes of our brand," or "this product is hard to use and it's even harder to look at," or even "why would you design a shirt with no neck hole, no one can wear this!" Design can be wrong. The confusing part is that there are usually many solutions to the same design problem, and all of them are right, but the wrong ones are still wrong.

There is absolutely an art to design, and great design often does the things art does too, but design is not art. It's design. Even when it conveys emotion. Even when it conveys opinion. Design is concerned with solving a problem that most likely has multiple solutions, and this is why research is such a great tool. It can help you sift through those worse solutions, that are still technically right, to find the great ones. Why wouldn't you want something to help you sift through an endless pile of hay to find the five needles you're looking for?

So what...?

Research is your friend, dear fellow designers. It can lead you to new ideas, better ideas, by pointing to the right path in the tangled map of options we have; and if it's done well that's all it will do. Research can't ever substitute the thoughtful work of a good designer, because good research isn't creative. To quote Dr. David Evans of Psycster research (one of my graduate school instructors):

A research study by it’s very nature is a cheap, fast proxy to reality.

It's a peak out the window. A designer takes all the information she has about a problem, combines it with everything else she knows and turns it into a solution. Well done research is just one more thing the designer gets to know and use. If you want to be an anti-research designer, why not be an anti-bad-research designer?

Ok, not nobody. I love research. You might. Your boss probably doesn't. Her boss almost certainly doesn't. Yes yes, this is only the case most of the time, not all of the time. But why is that?

Research is Expensive

It costs money to do any kind of research. Even if you're just looking things up on the internet, that time costs someone money. If you're actually doing research with research subjects you usually have to pay them. You usually have to buy materials to conduct your research, if you don't have them already. Some times you have to travel. Bottom line, it hurts the bottom line. (ok not really, but we're not there yet)

Research Takes Time

You have to design a study. Find people to participate. Run the study. Analyze all the data you collected. Make sense of all your analysis. Even a "quick little survey" isn't really that quick most of the time. And "time is money." (See above pun about the bottom line.)

Henry Ford Ruined Research

Or at least he did in the minds of people who are too busy to understand an often quoted Henry Ford snippet:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. — Henry Ford

I've heard this "famous quote" more times in the last six months than any other, often to justify to me why we can't do research. First, I can't actually find the source of this quote. I haven't spent hours and hours searching, but an hour on Google, GoogleScholar, wikiQuotes and wikipedia have left me with no source for it. The point is, he may have never said it. He did not invent the automobile, he just was the first to mass produce it cheaply. But it doesn't matter, because he's getting credit for saying it. And because he's a great name in American business, it carries weight. The problem is, it misses the point entirely.

There are no silver bullets, and Henry Ford probably knew this, even if you (or your boss) don't

This has been beaten to death I'm sure, but "asking people what they wanted" is simply asking the wrong question. Yes, if you ask someone directly "what can I make you?" they're going to define it in terms they already know. Like "faster horses." You're not looking for THE answer with research, your looking for clues to AN answer.

Assuming the Ford quote is true, then yes had he asked people what they wanted they likely would have told him something about horses. They were the primary means of travel at the time. Followed by walking if you couldn't afford a horse. He also might have gotten lucky, if he'd asked enough people, and gotten a couple cars and an airplane. Those would have been the "crazy outliers." But, if he had asked them "What is it about travel now that you dislike the most?" he likely would have learned things like: horses have to rest every few hours while pulling a wagon, it's not easy to take care of a horse, it's expensive to take care of a horse, dogs and other animals can spook a horse and that's very dangerous, etc. He would have found problems to make solutions for. Problems that the mass production of the automobile would eventually solve.

This is what the people who swear that research is a waste of time fail to see, because they expect it to be a silver bullet and it's not. It never is. It's more about finding out what the problems really are, if you're making your thing for the right people, or if your solution is correct but not defined in terms the right people understand. These are the qualities that make the great things you love. I guarantee it. You can't make something great on purpose without knowing the answers to these kinds of questions, and it's very expensive to try and stumble into greatness all the time.

In the end...

The Ford quote is often used to defend the stance of the "lone genius" even if sometimes that "lone genius" is a team at a company. That's simply not the way to make great things. Awesome doesn't happen in a vacuum, or a silo or sitting at your desk with the blinders on for 18 hours. It happens when you ask the right people the right questions to figure out what that "awesome" is, before you start searching. Had Ford "asked people" (and I don't know if he or anyone else did for him) he may have found out that things like "with electric lights, people can more safely drive in the dark." And maybe he did. The point is, Model-T aside, the only way you can know if you're solving a problem is to ask the people you think have it. Not to ask them what the answer to your design problem is, because they won't know. But to ask them what their problem is, so you can design a solution to it. It's these well researched, well designed solutions that make the research effort pay for itself many times over. They're the solutions that become the next big thing, which is actually good for the bottom line (see, I got there). Those well researched solutions are the only kind that will consistently lead to a great experience for the user, even if Henry Ford supposedly said otherwise.

Ohhhhh you said the F worrrrddd!!!

Why nobody likes research

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