Fieldwork Maturity
If you know us for some time you’ve probably noticed an important change in the way we work. In short, we migrated from a ‘participants recruitment-focused model’ to a more comprehensive and bolder ‘design research fieldwork partner’ approach.
Rigorous recruitment of participants remains the cornerstone of our field services. Competent and articulate respondents, rigorous filtering and precise segmentation are indispensable for accurate, engaging and unbiassed outputs. Leading client companies are increasingly using typing tools to integrate qualitative and quantitative studies, which makes participant recruitment critical for design research takeaways. But, as design research partners, we see a lot more of value to be added from a fieldwork perspective.
Back to the theme, we must explain about how we’ve done this change. To become more valuable within research journeys, we had to better understand, in a broad and at the same time granular way, how our clients - the best minds of the design and research agencies and studios we work with - approach and design the studies we will collaborate with. What are the expressed and underlying objectives for each project? Which are the conceptual and operational challenges? How can we anticipate field problems and best solutions? How to better fit into studies’ geographical range. How to add more color, relief and depth to deliverables?
One pillar of the recycling we’ve dove into was exploring IxDF - Interactive Design Foundation as a knowledge guideline. It’s way to organise and unfold contents helped us, metaphorically, stepping into our clients’ shoes and understanding their mental model. The consistent quality of its courses and masterclasses and its criteria of knowledge permanence informed us about both the fundamentals and the up-to-date techniques and approaches we should be prepared to. IxDF’s focus on fundamental sciences functioned as a base on which we organised the puzzle posed by the the multifaceted universe of UXD, UXR, UCD, MR x UR, Design Thinking and the related concepts that keep emerging (and somehow competing) every day.
Of course we already had our own wide base of specific and multidisciplinary knowledge and experiences in our biographies, which were essential to assimilate and sharpen our professional skills to the challenged depth and speed. It is also clear that our information sources are not restricted to IxDF, but we are sure that the platform’s approach to UX has given us an epistemological north.
Eitan Rosenthal
