The Economist and Jan Chipchase.

Tagged: Research tools

Nursing Times has published an article which looks are using ‘patient stories’ to help identify processes of hospital care which require quality or clinical redesign.  The paper commented that patients and their families should be included in the ‘co-design’ of care.

Tagged: Ethnography

The importance of design research is explored in this article in the New York Times.  LG’s Vice President for Product Strategy and Marketing, Ehtisham Rabbani, makes the point that the people we design products and services for are often nothing like ourselves.

Tagged: user research

A quote by Donald Rumsfeld, taken out of context, which is relevant for user researchers:

“As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

It’s in the last area, the unknown unknowns, where the greatest challenges lie and after conducting initial research this category of ‘challenge/opportunity’ often appears.

Tagged: user research

Story telling in all its different forms is an important tool which researchers use to bring to life data gathered in the field, it’s particularly for people who didn’t take part in the field research.

There’s an interesting article on BBC News on how traditional story telling is under threat in Morocco, where this ‘oral tradition’ of sharing past experiences is particularly important as 40% of Moroccans are illiterate.

Tagged: Research Method and user research