You Can’t Do Enough
Catch Color Tools by Nathalie. (CC BY 2.0)
Ever since the first edition of Just Enough Research came out, I’ve seen an ever-increasing number of job descriptions that explicitly state "You know how to do just enough research" as a requirement. I am flattered. I am concerned.
To be clear, doing just enough research is neither an individual skill, nor a crafty hack. It's an essential organizational capability. Based on my observations, this is a very scarce organizational capability.
The phrase means, as I intend it: asking and answering the right questions in order to make confident, well-informed decisions within existing constraints. Without a clear, collaborative evidence-based approach to making decisions, it is impossible to ever do enough research. The responsibility for creating the conditions for success should not reside on the shoulders of any one practitioner, because it’s always up to those who determine how decisions are made.
Given a sufficiently ethical process (another leadership responsibility), the standard of quality for any research activity is the extent to which asking and answering questions in a systematic manner improves decision-making—in other words, whether the organization learns what it needs to know to reduce risk and increase the chance of success. It doesn't matter how rigorous your approach, or how thorough your report, if the findings fail to influence decisions. Applying an academic standard to the work is often wildly counterproductive. You want to make sure your insights reflect reality, but unless the goal is publication in a peer-reviewed journal, the goal isn’t publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
The implications of the decisions at hand and the size of your knowledge gaps determine what "enough" means. It's just like planning a vacation. Enough research for a last-minute solo weekend getaway to a nearby town is different from enough research for a 100-person week-long family reunion in an unfamiliar location. And the type of research you need to do depends on your questions. Most people understand this in practice. Many people forget this when anxious to defend their expertise. And thus we end up with quant-minded people putting designers on the defensive about talking to “only” 12 people, which is the most boring territory battle fought in a shallow pond of red herrings.
How to Get What You Need
So, to summarize, doing just enough research requires:
Clear, prioritized organizational goals
A culture of collaboration so that these are truly shared goals (otherwise you’ll just end up in another battle of personal opinions)
Thinking of design as a series of decisions, rather than artifacts
An explicit process for making decisions informed by the evidence
You’re better off not gathering any new information until you have your goals and roles in order and have taken some time to figure out—and agree on—what you already think you know.
Order of Operations
No matter what your process or approach to delivery is, proceed in this order, without skipping a step:
State your goals
Identify the decisions you (the collective you) need to make and the timeline for making them
Determine whether and where the decision-making process lacks sufficient knowledge/insight to make those decisions
Identify and prioritize the questions that represent your knowledge gaps
Select the questions that rise to the level of a research project
Determine what "enough" means (the type and amount of data you can realistically gather that will answer the question sufficiently to enable a confident decision)
Plan the data gathering activities and timing so that you have answers to your questions in time to make the decisions
Do the activities, collaboratively
Do the analysis, collaboratively
Apply the insights to the decisions
That looks like a long list, but in a functional organization, you can accomplish 1–6 in an hour or two, and the rest in short order, depending on the scope of your questions.
In a dysfunctional, anti-collaborative organization that prioritizes the performance of urgency and efficiency, good luck.
And, Lastly
It is essential to:
Clarify goals before doing anything
Know how and when you're going to use the insights BEFORE planning the research
Articulate your research question BEFORE choosing activities/methods. (e.g. a lot of orgs try to answer qualitative questions with analytics, don’t do that)
Take the idea of certainty right off the table, because no amount of design research is going to prove anything
Design moves at the speed of decision-making. Research moves at the speed of clarity. You can learn a lot very quickly if you know what you need to know and why.
