Using Objectives to define methods for users research

Students often ask which methods are best for redesigning a product or service. As an experience design research, this is an unanswerable question without knowing a few additional details.

The questions I ask sound something like this:

What is your objective?
Who is your target audience and what do you want to learn from them?

What stage you in the product development lifecycle?
What resources do you have?

… and with this information and maybe a bit of explanation as to why each of these questions is important, we can start talking about methodology.

To help students out with this conversation, I made a quick and dirty guide. Although this guide doesn’t cover all methods and certainly not every tool in our researcher tool kit, I hope this can give some guidance to those looking to determine which methods are right for their research.