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Desk research is one of the first methods you would start with to gather information about your design challenge. You can collect existing information about customer desires, industry, organization, competitors, products and services. Desk research can include social media screening, news articles, external/internal reports (research papers, white papers). Desk research helps to set the scene and avoids reinventing the wheel, as the topic of the problem area has most likely already been explored by somebody else.
Desk research is one of the first methods you would start with to gather information about your design challenge. You can collect existing information about customer desires, industry, organization, competitors, products and services. Desk research can include social media screening, news articles, external/internal reports (research papers, white papers). Desk research helps to set the scene and avoids reinventing the wheel, as the topic of the problem area has most likely already been explored by somebody else.
Step-by step guide
Identify the aim of the desk research
Note down why you’re doing this research and what you’re hoping to achieve.
For example, if you’re trying to research how to improve the customer experience of paying a bill, there are several factors you may want to explore: Which companies make paying a bill easy and why? Is there any existing benchmarking available on the subject? Are there any similar experiences that we could take inspiration from, e.g. a checkout process? What are the best practices for paying a bill? What are our customers saying on social media about it?
Check with the internal team for existing research
Often someone else in your organisation may have started looking into these questions already, so it’s always worth checking internally first.
Identify reliable sources of information
Pull together a list of the key sources you want to use, either internal or external.
Evaluate the reliability of the original and decide how much time you want to spend on each.
Don’t limit research to just your industry but look for exemplar experiences across all industries
Conduct a preliminary search
Spend some time quickly scanning each of the sources pulling out the key points.
Decide which sources you’re going to want to spend more time investigating.
Dig deeper and summarise
Dig deeper into the sources that you’ve decided are more reliable.
Conclude by verifying the information and identifying any gaps in the research.
Create a quick summary of your research using the template.
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