Design Research 2019

Method selection is considered one of the most critical skills a researcher can develop over the course of their career. Numerous books, online articles, and conference talks have offered frameworks to help researchers make the right choice of method in accordance with the research question at hand. And while the wealth of established methods at our disposal—from formative to summative, qualitative to quantitative, attitudinal to behavioural—collectively cover vast grounds, it’s not uncommon for a researcher to find themselves, now and again, facing a question that none of the traditional methods can quite address.

This can happen for a variety of reasons: when a problem domain requires a higher degree of ecological validity than traditional user testing affords; when the subject matter at hand is too hypothetical to interview participants about directly; when a user journey is too complex or dynamic to be explored as a static entity, just to name a few. And yet, devising entirely new methods is a non-trivial endeavour: the very validity of the research insights we produce is highly contingent on the rigour of the methods we use to arrive at them. So how can we ease the tension between taking a creative approach to user research when needed, while still respecting
the exactitude and traditions of the discipline?

During this talk, we’ll examine this question through the lens of three cases from Shopify’s UX
research team:

• One where we had to invoke real purchase intent to fully understand the impact of a shopping experience
• One where we had to design a role-playing game for a co-design workshop that helped participants come up with maths-based rules for a discounting system
• And one where we distilled the research findings of dozens of studies, spanning several years, into an online interactive ‘choose your own adventure’ story