In most places I’ve worked, design research is conducted primarily or exclusively by people playing a researcher role. The researcher’s job is to learn all about the users of a system a team is preparing to design, to document what they have learned and then to teach the design team what they need to know to design for these users. Often the information/experience architect(s) on the project will conduct the research then shift from the researcher role to a designer role. Often content and visual designers will (optionally) observe some of the sessions as well. But it is understood that in the end, it will be the research findings and the testimony of the researcher that will inform the design in its various dimensions (IA, visual, content, etc.).

It is time to question this view of research. When a design feels dead-on perfect and there’s something about it that is deeply satisfying or even moving, isn’t it normally the case that we find that rightness defiant of description? Don’t we end up saying “You just have to see it for yourself.” And when we want to introduce two friends, we might try to convey to them who the other person is by telling stories, giving background facts or making analogies, but in the end we want our friends to meet and interact and know for themselves. Something about design and people — and I would argue, the best part — is lost in descriptions.

My view is that allowing researchers and research documentation to intercede between users and designers serves as a filter. Only that which lends itself to language (and to the degree we try to be “objective”, to the kind of unexpressive and explicit language least suited to conveying the je ne sais quoi qualities that feed design rightness) can make it through this filter. In other words, design documentation, besides being half the cost of reseach not only provides little value, it subtracts value from the research.

What is needed is direct contact between designers and users, and this requires a shift in the role of researcher and in research documentation. The role of researcher would become much more of a facilitator role. The researcher’s job now is to 1) determine who the users are, 2) to ensure that research participants are representative users, which means their screening responsibilities are increased, 3) to create situations where designers can learn about users directly from the users themselves, not only explicitly but also tacitly, not only observationally but interactively, 4) to help the designers interpret what they have learned and to apply it appropriately to their designs.

In this approach, design documentation does not go away, but it does become less of the primary output of research, and more of a progress report about the research. The primary tangible output of the research should be design prototypes to test with users, to validate both the explicit and tacit understandings developed by the design team. But the real result of research is the understanding itself, which will enable the team to produce artifacts that will be indescribably right, seeing that this rightness has been conveyed directly to the team, not forced through the inadequate medium of description.