With this research you test that your solution is working as expected and is solving the problem you’ve identified.

Evaluative research – Usability testing is the most common form of evaluative research.

By this stage, you’ll have moved from “What’s a good problem to solve” to “What’s the best way to solve the problem I’ve identified?”

Descriptive and explanatory research – Descriptive research is about understanding the context of the problem that you’re looking to solve and how to best solve it.

This will in turn result in a problem statement or hypothesis to concentrate on. As Hall explains “this is the research you do before you even know what you’re doing.” Once you’ve gathered information, you then analyse your learnings and identify the most commonly voiced (or observed) unmet customer needs.

Generative or exploratory research – This is the research you do to identify the problem to solve and explore ideas.Instead, the focus is on exploring problem areas or new ideas, or simply testing how usable your product is. You might sometimes hear people ask users whether they like a particular product or feature that isn’t what customer research is about. However, customer researcher is NOT about asking about what people do or don’t like. Research is not asking people what they like! – I’m fully aware of how obvious this statement probably sounds.This is illustrated through a nice definition of design research by Jane Fulton Suri, partner at design consultancy IDEO (see Fig. The specific type of process depends on who you are and what you need to know.

Research is systematic inquiry you want to know more about a particular topic, so you go through a process to increase your knowledge. What is research? – Right off the bat, Hall makes the point that in order to innovate, it’s important for you to know about the current state of things and why they’re like that.

These are the main things that I learned from reading “Just Enough Research”: Reading “Just Enough Research” reminded me of reading “Rocket surgery made easy” by Steve Krug and “Undercover UX” by Cennydd Bowles, since all three books do a good job at both explaining and demystifying what it takes to do customer research. She outlines what makes research effective and provides practical tips on how to best conduct research. In this book, Hall explains why good customer research is so important. Back in 2013, Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design, wrote “Just Enough Research”.

A book apart just enough research