Market research or user research? (part I)

Happy 2009! I am back in Sydney after a couple of weeks off, ready to start blogging once again. For this post I will step away from the subject of economics, and instead I will share some personal thoughts about market research.

When I first joined the MBA program at Loyola University Chicago my objective was to specialize in Marketing. Back then I figured that a combined education in Marketing and User-centered design would give me the ability to leverage both the breadth of market research and the depth of user research in my professional development.

I had a great Marketing professor at Loyola, and I quite enjoyed taking my introduction to "Marketing Management" course. However, soon thereafter I felt that market research and user research were mutually exclusive practices in nature. My MBA experience with market research is reminiscent of a conversation I had with a friend of my sister back in 1999.

I talked to my sister's friend about an article which highlighted the fact that a large percentage of elderly people in America did not have enough money in their savings accounts to support themselves during retirement. He pointed out that the article failed to mention that many elderly people have their money invested in real estate, stocks, bonds, and retirement funds which may explain why they do not keep much cash in their savings accounts. This is a simple example of a familiar flaw: statistical data is open to interpretation by the person(s) analyzing it, and often it is used to fit the agenda of the analyst or the client.

Over my years as a corporate employee I had to change my perspective on market research. I have come to accept market research as necessary to create a case for change. Business people are taught to accept research only if it talks about thousands of people being surveyed and billions of dollars in revenue opportunities. However, the methods for the collection and analysis of this type of data are inadequate when it comes to innovation. This is the design space, where a deep understanding of the world of a few users is more meaningful. Today I believe that market research and user-centered research are complimentary, the former to be used to wet the appetite of investors and executives, and the latter to understand users and develop products and services that truly fit their needs.

In the next posting I will illustrate the symbiosis between market research and user research with more specific examples from an article that I read recently.

Ideologies and Design

I can thank the History Channel for about 90% of my knowledge in World History. I make this disclaimer with the only intention of letting the reader know that I am by no means a History expert. With this cleared out, I want to dedicate this posting to the subject of Sociology. I will dedicate the next posting to Developmentalism, an ideology that flourished in the 20th century.

The subject of Sociology came up during a work discussion about the skepticism we encounter with some clients in the business world who are not familiar with the approach to research that user-centered designers take. When comparing the user-centered research methods against market research, we face such questions as "Is your research statistically valid?" or "Do you expect me to make a product decision based on your interviews with a few people?"

I guess we can thank Sociology for paving the way to this type of thinking in the Western World. To get myself acquainted with the subject, I bought a short book called "Introducing Sociology" by Richard Osborne and Borin Van Loon. The book is part of the "Introducing... " series, which takes a graphic approach to explaining some complicated subjects, such as Philosophy and Cultural studies. This series is definitely a good reference for people who, like me, are trying to get their toes wet without jumping into the pool.

Anyway, the term Sociology was coined by August Comte. He wrote a book in 1822 named "Plan of the Scientific Works Necessary for the Re-organization of Society." This was the first step to explaining human social behavior as a science. However, almost 200 years after the publication of Comte's works, Sociology has been unable to produce anything that scientifically resembles a natural law, and opposers claim that it is impossible to 'observe, verify and deduce general laws about human interaction.' According to the book I am reading, Sociology has been reduced to six types of generalizations, one of which is the claim to express generalities about human behavior. Again, these generalizations do not add up to any acceptable scientific, valid universal law.

So, going back to the types of questions that business people and market researchers ask user-centered designers, my answers would be: No, the user-centered approach is not statistically valid, and neither does it intend - or claim - to be, but that does not disproof its value... And, yes, insights from customers and users of products and services will give a client enough confidence to come up with a great idea on how to improve their experience. These insights bear much more value than statistics, tables and pie charts because they come from human beings, and not from somebody's very abstract interpretation of data that other people collected via surveys or focus groups.

If you are a user-centered designer or a market researcher, I kindly invite you to leave your comments.