Creative Research in Graphic Design

Introduction to Creative Research

• Research methods and their practical application to graphic design is crucial
• It influences the design approach
• Starting is difficult, but provides tools to plan, and manage work

What is Research-Driven Design?

• Redefines the designer/client relationship
• Multiplies the creative and financial dividends for both
• Helps define an audience, support a concept, advocate for an aesthetic, or measure effectiveness
• Tools like market research, ethnographic study, and data analytics communicate better with a target audience

Person-First Design

• Involves empathy for the audience, focusing on understanding the client and end-user needs
• Research findings and participant feedback allow for deeper comprehension
• Yields more tailored solutions
• Creative teams and clients can establish project success metrics together
• Audience participation and iterative processes raise questions, provoke solutions, and identify new opportunities
• Better understanding of context including environmental factors influencing use before starting design
• Validation and testing of concepts happens during prototyping, avoiding costly assumptions
• Linked with customer satisfaction, increased time to market, and greater ROI

User-Centered Design

• Integrates research throughout the creative process
• Provides insight into the needs, behaviors, and expectations of the target audience
• Focuses on increasing the end-user's satisfaction
• Applicable to any design system, from interactive to print, to broad campaigns
• Targets a specific audience and seeks to develop a project that serves
• Human-Centered Design attempts to address needs of every individual, regardless of ability, age, education or background
• Aims to avoid audience segmentation
• Focus on creating design artifacts and systems that serve everyone
• Terms "design for all” and “universal design" used interchangeably

Design is About Understanding

• Designers must have empathy for whom and what they are designing
• Research needed to understand a client, the people they wish to communicate with, and the reasons for communication

Historical Perspectives

• Practitioners have incorporated research methods into their design processes

Bauhaus Beginnings

• László Moholy-Nagy described tactile design problems given to Bauhaus students
• Students assembled tactile values or "tones" to create meaning
• Showcase the relationship between swatches

Pioneering Marketing Research

• Arthur C. Nielsen Sr. pioneered marketing research in the late 1920s
• Developed innovative tools that provided clients with objective marketing effects
• Used random sampling techniques quantify market share, a key indicator of performance
• Company expanded operations to the U.K. in 1939, followed by western Europe

Design Strategy

• This integration allows for agile response to fast-moving markets, emerging issues, and opinions
• Strategists help companies find new ways to conduct business and serve their constituents
• They integrate design and outreach into a company's culture

Design Creates Value

• Many clients understand design as a 'point of differentiation'
• Unfamiliar with the creative process, or unclear on the difference between audience appropriateness and personal taste
• Design represents risk to that outsider
• Clients want assurance of projected successes and ROI

The Design Staircase

• Stage One: No Design plays no significant role in product/service development, or company culture
• Stage Two: Design as Styling is used decoratively
• Stage Three: Design as Process to develop new products or services
• Stage Four: Design as Strategy is integrated into company culture and aligned with objectives

Research Types

• Research-driven approach helps define problems and illustrate value
• Quantitative Research measures sets of variables, built around numbers, logic, and objective data
• Qualitative Research deals with subjective material, striving to understand the qualities of a field of inquiry
• Primary Research is original research conducted by an organization
• Secondary involves reviewing data previously published for an alternative use
• Formative/Exploratory Research gains insight to define a question, aiding in problem identification and solving
• Summative/Conclusive Research frames the outcome, confirming or refuting the initial hypothesis
• Basic Research gains new knowledge without commercial intent
• Applied Research is commissioned for projects with commercial or public use, developing new products/services

Triangulation

• Combines research methods to illuminate an area of study, examining the same thing using several tools
• Confirms findings by focusing on where information overlaps
• Concept applies to using multiple methods, observations, or comparing notes from multiple investigators

Literature Review

• Comprehensive investigation of documents, publications, articles, websites, and books
• Gains insight into corporate culture, competitor analysis, and market trends
• Academic essay synthesizing and evaluating relevant scholarship on a topic
• Defines the topic, groups articles into thematic clusters, and summarizes themes identifying areas of controversy

Communication Audit

• Reviews marketing materials and assesses communication channels
• Understands what a company says, to whom, and how

How to do a Communications Audit

• Determine key areas to be audited
• Choose research methods
• Collect and evaluate past communications
• Look outward: Query customers and community
• Look inward: Query staff and volunteers
• Analyze media coverage
• Conduct a SWOT analysis
• Think like a communications consultant
• Put together a plan for future communications

Competitor Profiling

• Evaluates an organization's competition, using open-source intelligence to determine competitive advantages

The facts

• Stats, and observations gathered are assembled into reports to determine the following industry peers:What does Competitor A say about itself, to whom and how
• What do external audiences (customers and strategic partners) say about Competitor A
• What are Competitor A's discernible strengths and weaknesses

Ethnographic Research

• Helps understand what it's like to be a member of a project's target audience
• Insight on how a design piece needs to perform
• Uncovers new design opportunities
• Focuses on the link between human behaviors and culture
• This research strategy subjective due to varying researcher experience
• Never exactly replicated because it involves humans in a specific context, time and place
• Impossible to separate personal worldview

Contextual Inquiry

• Unstructured interviews in a location related to how a person will use a design piece
• Documents what the subject actually does, not what they claim

Observational Research

• Systematically views and records human behavior and cultural phenomena without questioning
• Observing rather than interviewing provides useful information

Photo Ethnography

• Subjects record their daily experiences with cameras
• Captures behaviors, motivations, and attitudes documenting with images over time
• Similar to visual anthropology, both use visual media for interpreting cultural behavior
• Different by placing the camera in the hand of the researcher rather than the subject

Self-Ethnography

• Investigator documents own experience, acting as both researcher and participant
• Engages in activities specific to the intended audience to better understand their experience

Unstructured Interviews

• Information gathering tactic where the researcher allows the participant to guide the direction of the interview
• Allows the researcher to see through the eyes of the respondent, uncovering relevant information
• Craft a plan to determine the information you want to collect, and draft questions
• Ask open-ended questions so the participants answer in their own words
• Be persistent, if a participant doesn't provide adequate facts, come back to it from another direction later in the session
• Use human nature to your advantage
• Bring a friend to take field notes while conducting the interview

Visual Anthropology

• Uses visual media to aid interpretations of cultural behavior
• Differs from photo ethnography by placing camera in trained hands of the researcher rather than the untrained hands of a subject

Marketing Research

• Form of sociology understanding marketplace behavior
• Multilateral strategy describing research practices that surround consumer preferences

Market Analysis

• Quantitative looks at the growth and composition of markets or business sectors
• Considers elements like interest rates, stock performance and other measurable statistics that define the financial climate

Demographics

• Statistical data describing a group of people or a market segment
• Includes cultural, economic, and social characteristics

Psychographics

• Quantitative measures of subjective beliefs, opinions, and interests
• Measures opinions, religious beliefs, music tastes, personality traits, and lifestyles