JooYoung Oh – Design Research Interview

Design Droplets contributor Anna Lorenzetto recently conducted an interview with US based design researcher JooYoung Oh. JooYoung has extensive experience conducting design research for companies such as Dell, Whirlpool and Samsung.

In the following two part interview and soon to be accompanying case study JooYoung speaks about the various aspects of Design Research including a definition, it’s benefits and the utilisation of stimuli in the research process. Other discussion points include co-designing, involving stakeholders in the research process and JooYoung speaking about her design practice. I hope you enjoy this interview and please take the time to share your thoughts on it in the comments. ~ Raph Goldsworthy, Editor.

Part One (Now reading) | Part Two | Part 3 – How to do Design Research

Jooyoung Oh, welcome to Design Droplets and thank you for speaking with us today. You are a design researcher who has experience conducting research for companies such as Dell, Whirlpool and Samsung to name a few. I am sure most people involved in design today, have heard the term design research, but, pretend that we haven’t and tell us what design research is about, and the benefits that can come from undertaking the process.

Well, if you view Wikipedia, you won’t find the precise meaning of the term; in fact you won’t find a complete definition anywhere because this is an area that has evolved in the last 30 years, and is still evolving. Basically, it is about getting to the core of people’s dreams and desires in order to acquire an informed view point for product development. Market researchers have been doing this for a while, but design research is differentiated from market research, because we focus on people and their experiences rather than the business side of it – I don’t like using the term users – people [is a better term]. At its core, this is really what design research is all about. Treating people as individuals that exist and experience through their lives, whether they use your product or not.

In design research, numbers and ranking are not as important as meaning behind those numbers. Numbers and rankings can’t tell you why people say what they say, or why people do the things they do. Because numbers can’t give you the insight into what people really desire, we use different methodologies to understand what [a person’s] core experience is and how it can inspire design. People are not always honest. They will tell you what they think you want to hear.

To be able to understand their underlying motivations and their desires, you need the qualitative information. We often do a combination of quantitative and qualitative research. We do qualitative observations and verify [these] through quantitative information. As a design researcher you have to be able to help designers understand what exactly needs to be done.

What are some of the benefits of design research? I guess the ultimate benefit is about the bottom line; what are some of the other benefits?

To be honest, I am a big fan of not relying on making purchases from corporations for various reasons, yet it is pretty much impossible to live a life in today’s world without purchasing a product from corporations. If people have to continue to buy things every day, then it is better for companies to respond with products that are appropriate to our life; there are ways that we can make this whole system work better for all.

So, for example, if we look at moms and diapers, a lot of environmentally conscious moms are reluctant to purchase diapers as a lot of it goes directly to landfill. If companies understand this and come up with diapers that are more appropriate and better for the environment, the company will increase profits [and] the consumer will be happy purchasing their products as well.

This is all good, but, if you stop at the point of mere improvement, you won’t stand out in the world of millions of products. Instead of merely providing better products, design research provides the power of imagining what has never been thought of. This is called the ideal experience. Instead of telling designers what to design we study why the design attributes have to be a certain way. We study underlying desires and how it translates into design attributes. It’s not just about coming up with amazing insights, but also, how to make these insights useful to multiple stakeholders.

Elizabeth Sanders discusses the evolution of product design as having gone from being a features based to a needs based process. Tell us about this.

It’s natural for companies to shift from a functional to an aspirational focus. Differentiating with features and functions doesn’t help you stand out in the market anymore. You cannot invent another mouse trap and expect to succeed. You have to differentiate yourself by creating emotional connections with your target audience. For example, MP3 players all play music and you can endlessly add functions yet the most successful MP3 players are not the ones that have the most features; they all work equally well. Products that are able to steal our hearts are going to stay and people will come back to you over and over.

This then becomes distilling the aspirational into business strategy. Does this mean that research teams will include people from the client company?

Absolutely. Sometimes I would take employees from the client company and I would train them in the steps we were going to take in the research process. If people don’t understand the process or see the value of the insights we discover, they will not act on the research findings. Chances are that you are going to produce reports that nobody cares about.

I witnessed that a lot of my clients who were involved from the very beginning until the end, including methodology development, field interviews and data analysis, were more likely to carry the insights through the whole product development process.

In your description of your design research practice you say that the focus is upon the ‘translation of ideal experience into attributes and ideal solutions (insight translation). Could you explain what you mean by this?

Whatever methodology you use, you want to be able to deliver the insights to the people coming up with the product in a ‘feelable’ form. Sometimes all this amazing data gets lost because it’s in a wordy report format. Insights should be delivered in an experiential form through which people can experience how their target audience feel and think.

The representation of insights and information is extremely important. It should be easy to digest and multisensory. To be able to achieve this, I start designing the research tools [to be] multisensory and experiential. When we provide participants tools that are already experiential and multisensory you have less work to do to represent insights in such a format.

Would you call your practice method a co-designing approach to design research? What are the major differences between user-centered and co-designing approaches to design research?

People mix the two terms all the time. When I use the term co-creation, designers often misinterpret it and think, “Oh, you think regular people can do our job”.

In the co-creation process, designers are still the [design] experts, yet we acknowledge that people are experts of their own experience. One cannot exist without the other. We do encourage non-designers to be creative and express their ideal experience and solutions during the interview process but we never use this information as it is. We turn the information into design cues and principals to feed the design process later.

Do you think that a user-centered approach (where the user is observed by an expert) is vulnerable to a less objective analysis and synthesis of the data compared with data from a participatory approach? How does co-designing avoid this?

You can’t just do co-creation exercises without observation or contextual research. For example, when we were conducting mobile phone research in Latin America, the co-creation exercise was always combined with contextual understanding coming from being there in the participants’ own environment.

A lot of valuable information comes from inserting yourself into the participant’s life. One should always follow Do-Say-Make. Observe what people DO, listen to what they SAY and give them tools to MAKE things that represent their ideal experiences and solutions. Depending on your subject matter, you may plan your approaches. For example, if you are trying to help a company create a new surgical tool, you may want to start with days of observation followed by a co-creation exercise in order to gain knowledge around the particular situation that you are unfamiliar with.

If you enjoyed this interview, please take the time to share your thoughts and feedback in the comments. Next week, Part 2 of this interview with Jooyoung Oh