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Marketing and User Research
design, usability
April 16, 2004, 11:01 PM
I've been thinking recently about the relationship between market research and user research.
Market research is conducted by marketing departments, who are mainly concerned with figuring out what sorts of products people are willing to buy and what sorts of people are willing to buy them. I am very ignorant of marketing research techniques, but my current understanding is that they tend to involve conducting surveys and possibly focus groups with the intent of nailing down a market demographic that the company can sell some new product to. Marketing may also collect information on what features and attributes of this product are important to swaying this demographics' buying decisions.
User research is conducted by user-centered designers, who are mainly concerned with producing the interface and interaction design of the new product. As Beyer and Holtzblatt point out in Contextual Design, the kind of data necessary to drive product design is different from the kind of data collected by marketing; market research alone cannot drive research-informed product designs. UCDs require more detailed information about what the people behind the statistics are like, what their goals are, how they are currently performing their tasks, etc. B&H have already made this argument eloquently so I won't bother rehashing it here.
All this isn't to say that marketing's data is useless to UCDs, however. In fact, a reasonably thorough market analysis is absolutely necessary to have ready before design research begins. If marketing hasn't narrowed down the target user population, design won't know where to start looking to collect their data. They may wind up taking a scattershot approach and (at best) waste time talking to the wrong types of people or (at worst) design a product from data on the wrong users.
Just as marketing's data can't substitute for design data, design shouldn't be expected to collect market data. Because design research involves more detail-oriented studies, these studies cannot uncover a broad picture of the market needs on a large scale. A mistake I've seen among novice design researchers is to spend time sending out surveys to uncover a market for the product when this information was basically provided to them by the marketing team. This is a waste of time, not to mention an inappropriate application of skill sets. Design should be focused on how the real people behind the demographic numbers marketing generated are working, communicating, and feeling, for this is the information they need to create great products.