The consulting firm IDEO helped pioneer "design thinking" as a way to create products that better solve customer wants and needs, creating fans. Over 30 years later, the interplay between design and research has never been more important.

Will Notini joins to dig into that interplay—how research is at the heart of design and vice versa. In particular, he thinks the best companies are using design research principles to explore new opportunities, both what they create and how those experiences function.

Will also shares a framework for researching "fast and slow," the importance of participant recruitment, and how building trust with colleagues creates more impactful, lasting user insights.

Highlights

04:11 Uncovering Unbiased Insights Through Exploratory Design
12:20 Finding Participants Who Truly Care and Invest
19:43 Building Trust for Collaborative Design Discussions
24:54 Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Expertise-Sharing at IDEO
30:37 Simulated Research: Addressing Urgency and Resource Challenges
34:10 Iterative Learning: Updating Assumptions and Approaches

About Will
Will Notini is a Senior Design Research Lead at IDEO, where he is a generalist —drawing on his training in social science research to execute design and innovation work for clients in a range of industries. In his role, he manages multi-disciplinary teams and leads the research.

His background is in anthropology and did mixed methods market research in the restaurant industry before transitioning to design research and has been at IDEO since. He has also recently picked up an MBA and a potentially unhealthy (unrelated) obsession with tennis.

Resources

Episode 219: 3 Ways Not to Lose Everything

What the Hack?

Using Bank Apps and Dashboards for Monitoring

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