Reflection on " User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 5: Non-Scientific User Research isn’t a Bad Thing"

There are many ways to do research in order to obtain a good design. Such research can be either scientific or non-scientific, can be either qualitative or quantitative or both. The reason is that " experience is experience, not fact" , hence every single opinion from user is considered as invaluable to improve our design.

While quantitative research allows the users to identify the trend of the users, the qualitative research offers much more information about the user experience to the designer. As a result, qualitative research allows the designer to go in to the depth of the issues, go into details of what users want/ need/ don't want/ don't need/ expect, etc, as well as go into insight of the future work.

However, no matter what kind of research methodologies that the designer adopt, users are always the last ones to decide one particular design is good or not. In other word, it is users to validate the design, not the designer him/herself. Therefore, every single feedback from the user is considered very important in improving the final product. The active users with different comments from both sides ( positive and negative) will help the designer more than the passive users who accept everything provided by the designer.

Generally, doing research is very important. We can not say which kind of research methodology is better than the other. They are complementary to each other in the reality. Hence, if time allows, the ideal method that the designer should consider is the combination of both the qualitative and quantitative research method.