The Importance of Research in Product Design
When you need to perform research for product design and product development, how do you go about it? What are things like ethnographic research, and what does it all mean?
What that fundamentally means is putting yourself in the shoes of somebody else. So, I think many of us often are inspired by our own experience and what we’ve learned from our product design education, but we can also be inspired by other people’s experiences.
This is true even when we watch a movie. Why do we watch movies? We watch movies because they tell stories about other people’s experiences or other characters’ lives, right? So, imagine trying to put yourself in the shoes of somebody else. And we do that through talking to people, through interviews, through surveys, and through designing experiments.
Let’s say you give somebody six different cards with six different words on them, and you ask them to prioritize, or you ask them to put them in order of what they think is important. Then that helps you understand what that person thinks is important.
It’s really important for us to understand not just our own experiences but the experiences of others. Ethnographic research and other research methods that look into users’ needs can help us do that. What we learn about in online product design education can help us understand how to use those types of research to create products people need and want to use.
Because it’s important, again, to design not just for ourselves, but to design for other people.
