The Secret Cost of Research

Why do people in charge resist?

"How do I get my boss to pay for research?" If I have one FAQ, this is it. Every time I talk with designers and researchers, someone asks this question. Managers and clients are willing to pay for design and technology, sometimes adequately — but, the story goes, they balk at yielding even a fraction of their budget to gather the information needed to design and build the right things in the right way. 

Mystifying, isn’t it?

Not so much when you think about it.

Research is simply asking questions about how the world works. And asking questions about how the world works threatens established authority.

Galileo didn’t get thrown in prison for being wrong.

Allowing a designer to do research means opening assumptions up to scrutiny. It means admitting you don’t have all the answers. To someone in charge, the true cost of research is the risk of losing control. (Quantitative methods often get a pass because they don't cut to the "why" while supporting a desire to seem rational and data-driven. )

First, know why it’s necessary.

Clients need to know why research is essential to their project. And in order to convince them, you need to know. Even people who think research is an important part of a balanced design project often think it’s important for not entirely the right reasons. While learning new stuff is great, the most important function of research is not necessarily to learn new stuff. Academic research is successful when it uncovers new knowledge, but we’re not talking about academic research. Our goal is getting good work into the world.

If you focus on research as a means to learn new things, you will be defenseless when anyone says “We already know enough to do this project.” Maybe they do. Maybe they are in possession of a report titled All The Things We Need To Know. That still isn’t enough.

The reason design projects that neglect research fail isn’t because of a lack of knowledge. It’s because of a lack of shared knowledge. Creating something of any complexity generally requires several different people with different backgrounds and different priorities to collaborate on a goal. If you don’t go through an initial research process with your team, if you just get down to designing without examining your assumptions, you may think your individual views line up much more than they do. Poorly distributed knowledge is barely more useful than no knowledge at all.

A design project is simply a series of decisions. When you’re working with competent people, the limiting factor on how quickly you can finish a project is the speed of decision-making. (Decision-speed does vary with project complexity, but it might vary with organization size even more.)

The difference in individual perspectives will rear up to wreak havoc on your project plan whenever you need to make a decision. Arguments will break out. Not the good kind of arguments. The really annoying kind about priorities, requirements, constraints, or user needs. These are the arguments that indicate you lack a shared basis for decision-making.

Research is necessary for a successful design project because it gives you a shared basis for decision-making, grounded in evidence rather than in sheer authority or tenacity. And this saves time and money.

Sheer authority can be a very efficient basis for making decisions, but it does nothing to ensure the quality of those decisions. Authority may decree the sun travels around the earth, but that doesn’t make it so.

Research is not optional to a design process because working collaboratively and making good decisions are not optional. So, for starters, accept this and agree to hold your ground.

Knowledge isn’t power. Power is power.

I was on a research panel in a grad school UX design class, probably the only person without a PhD at the table. The instructor opened by asking the panel, “Which is better: research generalists or specialists?” I raised my hand for generalists. The woman sitting next to me was enthusiastically opposed. I’ll call her Elaine.

Elaine was all about using her credentials and drive to climb the research ladder at large corporations. Initially I found her approach repellant, but as the discussion went on I realized that she was perfectly delightful as a person, and quite smart. But her career priorities could not be further from my own. And that’s cool. Big organizations need smart people too.

Except the organizations often aren’t smart enough to use the people.

She told a story about working with a VP at her company who was recommending a particular product direction. Elaine knew he was dead wrong in his assumptions and she had the data to back it up. In preparation for the meeting to make her case, Elaine spent 5 days, including the weekend, getting her presentation together. She combed back through all of her findings looking for flaws and weaknesses. All was in order.

Brimming with confidence, she strode into work on Monday morning — to find that the VP had cancelled the meeting.

She never got another meeting. And the product was designed according to the wishes of the VP.

The lesson here is never to underestimate the perceived threat that research presents. It doesn’t matter how right you are. It doesn’t matter how good your credentials are. It matters how scared and insecure the person in charge is. Facts don’t change minds that are made up based on feelings.There is a tremendous amount of research to back this up.

And it is a sad irony that researchers who are otherwise experts at human behavior get blindsided by this.

Bad research is good theater.

A while back I had a good long chat with someone who does market research. She was lamenting the fact that she so often gets brought in to a research project after the goals and the methods have been set. Often, she has the opportunity to run a real study. Sometimes, her job is to run a focus group. And too frequently, the true goal of the focus group is to generate some video clips for the annual meeting to show that the leadership are listening to their customers.

Focus groups look like how people imagine research looks. In a special room, controlled. But just because you have a 2-way mirror doesn’t make it anything more than a tea party. Actual ethnographic research happens where the people you’re studying do the thing you want to learn about. It’s often unsatisfyingly messy and low tech.

Fake research makes people money, and it makes people in charge feel good, but it’s useless and potentially dangerous to a design project.

So, if facts don’t change minds, what will?

There is hope!

Managers and clients may be people with the power to allocate resources, but they are after all just people. And if you want to help them make better decisions, they are people whose behavior you are trying to change.

So, in the language of user experience design, they are simply users, and you are designing a design project experience for them. You want to change their behavior by design in the same way you might design an interface to get a prospective customer to covert.

Start by studying managers (or engineers or "genius" designers) who are resistant to research just as people. Learn about their habits and attitudes and motivations and values. This sort of research should be part of any designer’s sales process. And all design is sales.

Then overcome their objections by framing your proposal according to their priorities, in a way that validates their ego, and without triggering their anxieties. Don’t worry about getting them to understand research on its own terms. Describe gathering information in the language of their priorities and based on their goals. In general, everyone wants the projects they are responsible for to succeed and to make them look good, unless they are truly perverse.

Here is a simple way to start with that has proven both true and useful,

“Research actually saves time and money by allowing us to collaborate effectively, and make decisions much more quickly. By working together to validate the key assumptions, we will increase the chances of overall success.”

Modify your pitch according to the project needs, and never ever back down. You know the business will pay for it regardless — either up front in proper research, or piecemeal and multiplied by misunderstandings and delays, and worst of all, by creating products and services that fail to serve the business or the customer.

Take the workshop: Research Together will help you and your team overcome organizational barriers to evidence-based design.

This piece originally appeared in Dear Design Student and has been slightly edited for content.