Ben McAllister recently contributed a piece in The Atlantic about the fallacy of science in good design.

Ah, yes. “The research.” That most magical of phrases. Extinguisher of debate. Oracle. Provider of easy answers to the most complex questions. As an undergraduate physics major, I had grown to understand scientific research as a slow process that took place over years or even decades. Research, as I understood it then, was an attempt to deliberately advance knowledge by eliminating false theories. It was a difficult undertaking bolstered by rigorous debate.

This way of thinking may help designers gain acceptance in the short term, but it ultimately cheapens the most important dimension of their work: the human dimension. In the business world, I later learned, “the research” is quite a different phenomenon. As my interview so nicely illustrated, “the research” is not debatable. Apparently it’s capable of predicting people’s reactions to decisions that haven’t even been made yet. In fact, “the research,” seems to be capable of making decisions all on its own.

McAllister’s rhetoric reminds me of Don Draper’s early interaction with Dr. Faye Miller in Mad Men. Throughout his entire career, Don has relied on intuition to create great advertising pitches. That spark is buried somewhere deep within him. Suddenly, his creative process is threatened by the scientific wiles of Faye’s research consultancy.

“These questions have been designed to get at what subjects really want instead of what they say they do. What are the real feelings that exist below the surface?”

Don walks out of Faye’s presentation.

Later, at a Christmas party, Faye confronts Don.

“It’s just you didn’t take the test, and I know you’re the creative shaman around here, but you walked out of my presentation.”

“I’m disappointed. I thought you came in to flirt, but you came in to fight.”

“You have to know, I found out all I could about you. Your work is very interesting and I guess I was hoping you thought mine was.”

“It’s not personal. I just don’t think you can learn much about people that way.”

“I learned a lot about you, you’re the kind of man who doesn’t want to take the test.”

“I’m sorry, I just don’t see how knowing about my childhood is going to help sell floor wax.”

This scene is striking. Faye symbolizes all-knowing science, while Don represents unpredictable creativity. “I thought you came in to flirt, but you came in to fight.” Don sees her intrusion as an attack. It’s a rocky start, but the two eventually develop a beneficial working relationship.

Mad Men is fiction, but its portrait of attitudes toward research in the 1960s is not.

Design is about solving problems, and solving problems is easy. Understanding a problem is what’s hard, and research is an essential tool to understanding.

McAllister is concerned with the application of psychological theory to design problems. He is right to be worried. Theory evolves rapidly and today’s dominant thinking may be extinct tomorrow. Weighing design decisions solely on literature is almost always a mistake. But it’s a misplaced fear — I don’t know anyone who does this.

McAllister also objects to the injection of research in every stage of design. Again, he’s right that the extreme can have a chilling effect on creativity. Research is not a magic bullet —  it cannot replace inspiration. But, very few problems require innovative solutions. Design patterns give us a baseline of expectations to build upon.

How I combine research and design

Discover the problem

Symptoms often obscure the disease, making diagnosis difficult. Users are bad at identifying underlying causation, so we have to use indirect methods from multiple angles to triangulate. For example, imagine an under-performing university admissions site with a success metric of requesting a brochure. Usability testing may suggest that the request button isn’t big enough, that the form has too many fields, or that the labeling to get to the form was weak. While all those things may help, the real problem could simply be that today’s students don’t want brochures.

When looking at an existing product or service, I like to run usability tests with an additional interview component to tease out that deeper layer. When developing something new, like SoapBox, focus groups help me zero in on what’s important.

Inform the design process

Market research give us insights into how people think about and conceptualize our products/services. If I am designing a university’s homepage, it’s useful to know that users care more about a list of faculty phone numbers and emails than a campus photo slideshow.

Usability testing on my site or a competitor’s site can also tell me what design patterns are working or not working.

I’m big on paper prototyping even though most of my design sketches are crap. That crap is still useful in getting feedback.

Evaluate design outcomes

Once I have arrived at a design outcome (like a prototype), research can tell if it’s working as intended. An A/B experiment is a useful way to quantitatively evaluate a design**.

Formal usability testing can also give me a baseline for comparison, helping justify investment.

** A word of caution. An innovative solution may take time for users to understand. For example, infinite scrolling on Twitter and Facebook breaks the convention of pagination. This can be frustrating for users until they decide that they prefer it.