First, this is the offending article:
Up-front User Research is a form of Product Procrastination. It’s busy-work, it’s a way to avoid making hard decisions. It delays the need to make something tangible.
User Research is Overrated
https://medium.muz.li/user-research-is-overrated-6b0fe101d41
Let’s get this out of the way, the title didn’t help my opinion of this piece. Neither did the fact that the title was written on purpose to elicit such response. But I want to articulate what I don’t agree with without devolving into an angry rant. I’ll do my best.
The author advocates for jumping to high fidelity prototyping without doing user research. Any user research. Build something out of the speculation of the people who happen to be involved in the project. Now, it’s true that for a lot of projects in the past, research had been listening to what the client told us about what they knew about their users and various other sources. So it was more like “client research”. Still, I think familiarizing yourself with the subject matter before proposing solutions is vital. For example, I can’t design garden tools if I have never done gardening in my life. You need a stage of exploration. Now, these people do user research, really, they just call it something else. I imagine they collect what they know, make assumptions and build a prototype to test. THAT IS USER RESEARCH, they just call it something else.
I know this person just wanted to publish a provocative article but I think this kind of thinking does actual damage. It is still hard to get clients to pay for user research, any user research. Even the one that is done with a fancy prototype. This just muddies the waters by generalizing about the usefulness of research. It doesn’t even specify what types of projects are good for the approach they take. If you don’t know the problem, you research it, that’s all there is to it. If you want to use a prototype as a tool, then do, but it is still research. The prototype is your hypothesis and you go on to ask the questions you need to ask to validate/refute that hypothesis.
“Expensive waste of time”? The whole point of research is that it is way cheaper than developing a product without ever asking the target audience if they want your product at all.
Another problem is that not doing any research up-front means that you are taking what the client is telling you at face value. They tell you: “I know this product is going to work and I know this is how it needs to work”. I know some projects don’t need ample research, but many, many do. And doing research means you are reaching conclusions and proposing solutions that are more informed. Specially in critical systems. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Jared Spools Twitter response to this: https://twitter.com/jmspool/status/833877693787754498
“If all you ever do is crappy research, you’re gonna think research adds no value. Maybe you should clean up your act before trashing it?”
Amanda Cuello S 