Smoke and Mirrors

After reading User Research Smoke and Mirror, I understand that research-based design
is definitely not THE one and only way to designing good products. Although usability
testings like card sorting, interviews, ethnographic studies and contextual studies
can let us understand our users better, over-emphasis on these research methods might
hinder designers from using their instincts and experience to design products.

Research as a Design Tool

Research can give us useful information that can undoubtedly help us in our design
process. However, these results need to be interpreted CORRECTLY first. The author
gives the example of eyetracking being unable to identify the reason that people
overlook a company's logo:

1) It could be that the logo is well identified by people so they spend less time looking

2) Else it could be that the logo sucks and it need to be changed

In the end, we still need experienced designers to interprete the research data
correctly and these designers would probably have anticipated these results before the
researches were conducted.

Research as a Political Tool

The author has re-interated that good designers can predict the outcome of researches
with just their design instinct and common sense. However, he highlighted that the
importance of researches can come in the form of convincing stakeholders and bosses
that a particular design is good (since many people do not have good design sense and
sometimes let other agendas like money making cloud their senses). Research becomes a
political tool to justify good designs and becomes part of the marketing strategy.

Research as Bullshit

Designers are the foundation of the design process, not researches. This line
summarises this chapter perfectly... :)

Finally, the author gives some credit to researches as being helpful in design as long
as the results are not classified as definitive but rather as qualitative and
subjective. Again it's a matter of how we interprete the data and not jumping to
certain conclusions which might be totally wrong. He also highlighted that research
can motivate designers and aid in the process of discovering new creative ideas.