Investigating design research deliverables as communication tools between designer and design researcher

Abstract

In recent years, digitalization has created new professions which become essential to build digital products and services. As two of these professions, User Experience Designers (UXD) and User Experience Researchers (UXR) are the ones who engage with the users the most. The place of research in design processes is always important in order to understand for whom and for what purpose the design will be made. As in an industrial design process, a user-centered design approach is adopted in user experience design. User Experience Researchers conduct user research, collect data and derive insights to guide design. User Experience Designers, on the other hand, take these insights as an input into their design processes and create digital products for them by keeping the user perspective in focus. There is an "insight transfer process" that occurs as a result of research processes between these two professions. This process can be carried out using different research deliverables. In today's companies, this deliverable mostly proceeds through a uniform and predetermined format. However, the current needs of each project, designer, researcher and even company may be different. Therefore, it is thought that transferring each research to designers in a uniform format may negatively affect their new idea generation processes. In this regard, the main purpose of this study is to examine from a user-centered design perspective how designers interact with different research deliverables and how these formats affect the processes of generating new ideas. By examining research deliverables from different aspects such as language, content, visualization and narration, it focuses on how changes on these aspects affect designers. The study consists of two stages. While the first stage is positioned as a preliminary study, the second stage is the main study. Within the scope of the preliminary study, semi-structured interviews were conducted and qualitative data that would provide background for the subject was obtained. The second stage is divided into two phases and was conducted using three research methods together. First, digital probe kits were created using the "cultural probes" method and shared with the participants. At this stage, data such as how designers generally interact with different research output formats, what information they find important and which format they prefer to generate ideas through are collected. While the cultural probes method was carried out through a digital environment, the moments when users interacted with the kits were also observed with the observation method. Finally, one-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten people who participated in the cultural probes process, aiming to understand the subject in depth. All qualitative data obtained at the end of this process were analyzed by qualitative content analysis. In the light of this entire research process, which features of different research deliverables were found more effective by designers and how they affected the idea generation processes were examined through three categories. These categories are defined as "insight transferring process", "design and research processes" and "working dynamics of designer". The findings of the analysis were interpreted under three subjects. These subjects are conveyed as "findings related to research deliverables", "findings related to the working dynamics between the designer and researcher" and "conceptual categorization of the findings ". As a result, it has been seen that the research deliverables examined in the study evoke different meanings on designers and the usage areas of each deliverable may vary depending on the needs of the project being worked on. At the same time, it has been observed that research deliverables play an important role in the insight transfer process and that more user-oriented products can be created when the correct deliverable is used according to the usage areas. User experience research can be conducted with exploratory and evaluative approaches, and it has been seen that research deliverables can be categorized under these two approaches. At the same time, the positive and negative aspects of each deliverable were examined according to the designers and new suggestions was presented to improve them. Thus, this study aims to increase the understandability of the process of analyzing the data collected from users and sharing them with designers as insights in research deliverables. It is thought that the findings of this study can help researchers to choose the right deliverable to transfer insights according to their project needs and be able to create user-oriented products by improving designer-researcher dynamics. Finally, suggestions were made for future studies. These studies can be handled by examining different research deliverables, examining the new proposal by comparing it with different deliverables, or expanding it with a different group of designers.