4 Creative Design Research Methods For Product & Service Designers

Sometimes, traditional research methods, such as surveys, focus groups, web analytics, diary studies, task analyses, etc. are not enough for product and service designers to understand the “Why’s” behind the users’ decisions and to get creative insights from the users to inform the design alternatives.

Frequently, traditional methods don’t uncover users’ motivations and problems fully. This might be attributed to the fact that the users themselves are not always fully aware of the reasons behind their behaviors, attitudes and opinions. Often, we, humans make choices, behave or react in certain ways because of past experiences and resulting prejudices embedded in our unconscious minds and not because of conscious reasoning that we can describe. Considering the fact that designers’ primary objective is understanding users’ real problems, this limitation of the traditional methods can frustrate them.

On the other hand, traditional research methods are not always well-optimized for generative studies. In other words, even if they help identify the users’ problems, they do not help get insights from the users about potential ways to address these problems. This is a pity as often users know what could help them but they don’t know if and how their idea could be brought to life.

Luckily, there are certain methods/tools that tap into the creativity of real-life users and can lead to extremely valuable insight for design research. Such methods are aimed at helping users express concepts or feelings that they might not be able to put into words otherwise. Four of these methods include experience drawing, collaging, free-form card sorting and velcro modeling. While the first three methods are useful for tapping into the unconscious of the users, the fourth one can be particularly valuable for getting ideas from them.

Below I describe these 4 tools and give some guidelines about using them in practice.

First, in order to make the most of all the mentioned methods, designers should take time to prepare the user research participants. They can do this by asking the participants to record their habits, feelings, or ongoing thoughts regarding the relevant topic/experience (e.g. waiting room experiences in a hospital; interaction with smart devices at home; morning exercising routines, etc.) for about a week.

Draw Your Experience

Using this method, at the end of the prep week, designers can organize one-on-one sessions with the participants, provide them with drawing tools and ask them to visualize their experiences and feelings in an unrestricted manner. The participants should be given minimal instructions and complete freedom of choice in respect to the medium of expression and the settings.

After the end of the drawing phase, designers should ask the participants to describe and explain their illustrations. Designers should listen carefully to the stories the participants tell as they describe their creations and make notes. This might be useful for revealing some of their thinking processes and latent attitudes towards relevant experiences.

Collage

Using this method, at the end of the preparatory week, designers can invite a small group of participants to build collages from provided materials — a mixture of images, stickers, shapes, ambiguous words, etc. This will allow the participants to project their own meanings.

Similar to the drawing method, with collaging too, it’s important to ask the participants to present and explain their collages. However, as opposed to drawing, this method is better done in groups to have an amalgam of diverse opinions. This can be helpful to get creative ideas from the users addressing some of their problems that are not yet fully defined and shaped.

Free-Form Card Sort

After preparing the participants with week-long experience recording as described at the beginning, designers can organize a workshop and give the participants a deck of cards with words and/or visuals relevant to their experience. Then, they can ask the participants to arrange the cards in a way that make sense to them. For instance, in case of healthcare service enhancements, if the designers are trying to understand and improve hospital patients’ waiting room experience, they can give visuals of vending machines, magazines, couches, etc., or they can give words, such as “crowd,” “time,” “boredom,” “hunger,” etc.

It’s important not to give the participants any particular criteria for sorting at the beginning as the goal of the activity is removing the logic factor and tapping into their unconscious minds. Also, it’s useful to make sure the participants implement the card sorting task individually so that participants do not influence each others’ prioritization processes at subconscious levels.

At the end of the workshop, designers should ask the participants to try to explain why they arranged the cards in the way they did. Then, they can try to find some patterns and do some clustering of different participants’ choices. This can help understand the severity of particular user problems, the relevance of existing alternatives and the possible reasons behind these.

Velcro Modeling

As opposed to experience drawing, collaging and card sorting, velcro modeling is more appropriate to use for generative studies with more well-defined problem spaces.

With this method, designers can assemble a toolkit of components common to the kind of solutions they hope to design and give it to users. For example, if they imagine designing a remote control, they can provide various shapes that might act as the body of the remote, and provide easy-to-adhere buttons in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. In case of services, designers can include legos and tools for role-play organization.

At the end of the preparatory week, designers should invite a small group of users to design their own product or service using those components.In this case as well, designers can ask the participants to explain why they think their solution could work. Sometimes, this can help redefine the problems.

To sum up, regardless of the field, all research methods and tools always have both advantages and disadvantages. Researchers should know that each method has its proper time and place and if chosen strategically can give valuable insights. While “unconventional” methods, such as the ones described above can’t and shouldn’t replace the traditional ones, they can as complements to more mainstream and well-tested methods to enrich the insights depending on the core objectives and type of the research. The trick is to act like a real designer — that is, boldly pick and choose tools from the arsenal while maintaining an experimental approach.