MYP Design Primary Research Methods Notes

Primary Research Is Data Nobody Has Touched Yet

1. Primary research is anything you collect yourself by asking, watching, measuring or testing.
2. Nobody has summarised, averaged or spun it before it reaches you, which is why it carries the most weight in a design folder.
3. It is also the only research that is about your client rather than about people in general.
4. The second strand of criterion A asks you to identify and prioritize primary and secondary research needed to develop the solution, so a folder with only one kind is already short.
5. Prioritizing means listing the questions you must answer, ranking them, and starting at the top, because you have about two weeks rather than two years.

Interviews Get Reasons, Questionnaires Get Numbers

1. An interview is one conversation with one person, usually the client, and it is where you learn why things ended up this way.
2. A questionnaire goes to many people at once and turns scattered opinions into counts you can chart.
3. Run the interview first, because it tells you which questions are worth printing thirty copies of.
4. Interviews hand you quotes, and one sentence in the client's own words does more work than a paragraph of your summary.
5. Questionnaires hand you proportions, and proportions are what make a need look real to a moderator who was never in the room.
6. Do the interview face to face where you can, since half the value is seeing what the client points at while they talk.

Write Questions That Cannot Be Answered With a Shrug

1. Closed questions offer fixed options and produce countable answers, while open questions invite explanation and produce quotes.
2. Put closed questions in questionnaires and open ones in interviews, and swap only when you have a reason.
3. Ask about behaviour rather than opinion, so "how many times last week did you carry a wet painting across the room" beats "do you think this is a problem".
4. Ask one thing per question, because "is the rack strong and easy to clean" cannot be answered with a single no.
5. Use a scale with a fixed number of points such as 1 to 5, and label both ends so everyone means the same thing by a 4.
6. Hold a questionnaire to ten questions or fewer, since answer quality drops sharply once people get bored.
7. Pilot it on two people and watch where they pause, because a pause marks a question that needs rewriting.

Observation Catches What People Forget to Tell You

1. Observation means watching the task happen and recording what you see without joining in or prompting.
2. People leave the dull parts out when they describe a routine, and the dull parts are exactly where designs fail.
3. Decide what you are counting before you start, then use a tally chart so you are not reconstructing it from memory afterwards.
4. Time things with a stopwatch: how long the queue lasts, how many trips across the room, how often the lid gets opened.
5. Photograph the setting from the user's eye height, because that is the view your product has to work in.
6. Observe twice on different days, since one wet Tuesday is not a pattern.

Measure It Before You Redesign It

1. Measurement counts as primary research, and it is the method students skip most often.
2. Take a tape measure and a set of digital callipers to the site and record the real dimensions rather than the ones on a plan.
3. Measure the gap it must fit, the load it must carry, the reach of the person using it and the doorway it has to pass through.
4. Write every figure with its unit and where you took it, in millimetres for anything you plan to make.
5. Weigh things on a kitchen scale when weight matters, because "quite heavy" is impossible to design against.

User Trials Turn Guesses Into Observations

1. A user trial is handing a real user a real task with an existing product and watching what happens.
2. Borrow or find three products that already solve something close to your problem, and do the actual task with each one yourself.
3. Write down every moment of friction: the edge that pinched, the catch that needed two hands, the label you could not read at arm's length.
4. Then give it to a member of the target audience and stay silent, because the urge to explain will destroy the data.
5. Score all three products against the same short list of headings so they can be compared rather than just described.
6. Structured frameworks for pulling an existing product apart come later in this unit, and a trial is what gives them something to chew on.

Sample Size and Records That Survive Six Weeks

1. For a questionnaire, aim for at least 20 replies from people who are genuinely in your target audience.
2. Twenty responses from the right group are worth more than 200 from the wrong one.
3. Report the sample size beside every result, because "15 of 22" is honest where a bare "68 per cent" hides how thin the evidence is.
4. Head every sheet with the date, the method, the number of people and the exact wording of the question.
5. Scan the raw sheets straight into your design folder, since a summary with no raw data behind it reads as invented.
6. Deciding which of these findings earns its place and which gets cut is handled later in this unit, so gather generously now and prune once.