“What I’d like to argue today is the goal should be good design, not more user data. It’s always possible to collect very interesting user data. But if the goal is to create a great product, is collecting user data always the best way to go about it? Do great product ideas in fact come from interesting user data?… People who invented [Google websearch] had a great idea, and they focused on this idea and they improved it by… very targeted usability testing… Should we have told those early search engineers, “You know what, you should go just study librarians for a couple of years. You would really learn a lot about how people do search and you really need to understand that space deeper”? My answer to that question is probably no. They were doing something great. They had lots of ideas on how to do how it well. They had good tools for improving their product the way it was. Doing the broader user research may have been interesting, but given their limited resources, it probably should not have been a priority.”

by Steve Portigal.

Read the original posts at interactions.acm.org:
Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?