Research Driven Web Design

23 Jul, 2012

Like any other work, research is essential for every successful web design project too. A designer’s visual research combined with professional research can result in some useful ideas and insights.

This article will tell you how we conduct valuable research for our projects so that you may learn a thing or two too!

Asking a lot of Questions

Questions are the basic step for any research because they help you understand the business behind the product or website for which you are providing a service. For us, the sources for finding out this information are by reading strategic documents and whitepapers or interviewing key stakeholders. We try to find out who the client is; whether it is a single person or a big team of people.

Being interviewed

You can call these informal interviews discussions or chats. This is where we build trust and rapport with a new client. It is a great way to gain some valuable insight.

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”

Market Research

By definition, market research is ‘the collecting, analyzing, and reporting of data or information that affect customers, products or services.’ Don’t worry it can be as simple as using Google and conducting your research like we do for starters. However at times the information gathered might not be accurate or representative. Hence there are a lot of other techniques and methodologies that enable the research professionals to provide us with accurate research. Here are some of them that we employ; it’s good to understand these terms, so here you go:

Qualitative Research: Gives a lot of insights. Type of research conducted to determine the audience’s beliefs, feelings, motivations and triggers.
Quantitative Research: This type of research is about the numbers. Requires analysis to identify trends.
Primary Research: New information.
Secondary Research: Performed on old data.
Segmentation: The groups, or segments, that represent a part of the customer group or audience. Usually grouped by demographics (sex, age, ethnicity, income, occupation etc.)
Focus Groups: Moderated group discussions where participants are selected to represent the audience or customer.
Task-Based Usability Testing: Here the users of a website are asked to complete a task whilst being observed.
Visual Research: The gathering of visual information useful in solving the problem.
Sketchbooks: Places where you can keep your doodles and ideas. It is a vital tool for us designers where there are doodles and drawings as well as notes. Remember to treat them as tools not diaries!
Virtual Sketchbooks: Applications such as iPhoto or Flickr come in handy for people who use the web all day. They can start building a virtual sketchbook by grab something they like and popping it into Flickr, or iPhoto. It works for us!
Moodboards: Created especially for a project to present a visual language on one sheet of paper. We use them to establish the overall feel of the visuals and impression of the proposed visual language for the new website.

Insights

After the research process, we may have the entire material ready, but what will we do with it? Yes, take out insights. Insights are the aim of the research. We start by using lightweight analysis such as the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats). This includes analyzing the strengths of the current product or service, where it falls down, how we can make it better, and things that could weaken its success.

Now that our research is done and we’ve also taken out some basic insights, this work of ours will pave the way for some awesome ideas! You seem impressed by our work process; why don’t you hire 4M Designers and see how good research leads to successful projects!

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