A few months back Victor posted about the difficulty of getting approval to do design research in a project. This reminded me of Don Norman’s post last year about realizing that research actually does not belong in design.

Vic is right–Its hard to convince managers to okay research. His commenters though are wrong. Euphemisms are not a solution. Whether you call it “research” or “split pea soup”, management still won’t pay for a fishing trip–they want a solution.

Norman knows research does not belong in design. Management knows this. Designers don’t.

Gasp! What am I saying?!

Reflecting on my own work I realized that I have always separated research and design, problem modeling from problem solving, diagnoses from treatment. Often this means separate research and design projects, with separate proposals, plans and bills.

Coupling the two is dangerous because they are so very different from each other.

Since management holds the purse-strings design has to stop navel-gazing long enough to understand management’s perspective reconcile design and research needs for management (after all we are supposed to be professional problem solvers, not professional whiners).

Here are three simple suggestions:

• Have a small ongoing user experience research effort that is funded outside of any particular project. Every project can then pull from and contributes to this body of knowledge, which is immediately available, always growing, and never needs to be rediscovered.
• Treat research and design as their own projects with their own goals, budgets, resources, deliverables and schedules.
• If there is no time or money to do research then document the nature and magnitude of the risks, and then just do what you can with what you’ve got. Be sure to conduct a project post-mortem to see how these risks and their consequences have manifested themselves.