RIta Parada is a design researcher living in San Francisco, California. She was most recently working at Facebook where she helped shape the next generation of design tools. Before this, she led design research at Twitter and Nokia.
When we're thinking about quantitative work, usually it's about a specific population and normally it is used for. So you want to understand the magnitude of either the opportunity or the problem that people might be affected by.
Qualitative work is usually concerned with the why question. Why do people do certain things, how do they do it? And what did that do then? You're more aiming to get in those details, the nuances that you want to understand, opposed to the numbers. Although when you try to recruit representatives from a certain population that you're studying. It’s rare that you will be able to make generalizable claims to the whole of the population.
Ethnographers often spend a lot more time with people, with individuals, understanding the context, understanding their behavior in context. It's not enough just to spend an hour. Sometimes you have to visit the person several times or you actually have to visit them in their location or in their surroundings so that you can get a better, bigger picture from what you're studying.
The most memorable project is when I got to work in Saudi Arabia. According to the analytics, some of their behavior patterns were really interesting, strange for us in a sense that it was less similar to other markets that we might see. And we wanted to understand what these peculiarities are and why they are being applied by all our users.
A couple of things that I got to study when I was there, was very unusual study in a sense that usually in each study, you write up a more tight topic area that you were studying, focus on one smaller thing and you'd rather execute several studies on each of those areas that you're interested in, however, because of the difficulty of deciding the area, I had to create a study that we're addressing almost all problems at the same time. I would look at problems like there's a high level of reporting of online abuse or there were certain peculiarities of how they use direct messages or there were certain peculiarities of how we saw that they would use on our platform.
Another topic is language. In Saudi Arabia, where people type in Arabic, from right to left. It was another area where I discovered lots of things. For example, how they share their Twitter handles.
I'm not sure if you noticed that on Twitter and most online platforms, people can't really have their handles in their own alphabet, there's no handles that we provide in the Arabic alphabet. Everything has to be with Latin characters. We also realize that when people create their accounts they may not find something that they actually understand in English and oftentimes they end up with these computer-generated handles for them.
It's very difficult if you receive a different alphabet that you're mostly not familiar with. You may need to remember this in order to have people to find you. So on this one particular topic, I felt like there were so many insights just by being there and looking at how people are using it and trying to talk to them about what their difficulties are.
So there were lots of different insights that came in from that study. And it was wonderful to come back and talk to designers about figuring out how we can actually help people to overcome these challenges. One of the things was using QR codes where people can exchange their @ handles, which was really strange that we already had these implemented, but we only figured it out for one particular market, which was Japan. That was a very interesting market for us or for Twitter, but we never really thought about how other markets, other countries might be experiencing the same problem.
I think what's interesting about research is that it brings in things that almost feels like it's obvious, but you tend to overlook some of those things accidentally.
There could be several things that if I start thinking about a process of collaboration, I would say that as a researcher, I love it when designers involve me early in the process. I think that would be the first good start of a collaboration.
I will say that if you have a chance and opportunity, then team up with a researcher so that you can learn the nuances of how to execute counter-plan research from beginning to end. I would say that that's probably one of the best things.
By collaborating with others, you're learning how they actually do it. I would say that if you are not ready to go to school, for example, and spend years and years, then books are obviously the next best resources. And I have three recommendations for you. Each of them is slightly different.
One of them is that, if you're a freelancer or you're in a smart company or a small startup, and you feel like you have to wear many hats often, you have to be the researcher, and the content strategist as well as the designer.
The book is by Erika Hall and it's called “Just Enough Research”. It gives you a good base of what you can get away with if you don't have the budget of a corporation such as Twitter or Facebook. What can you do with what you have to execute without having a whole team.
Then another one is obviously when you're a researcher, oftentimes you have to interview people. While it seems like interviewing people is a simple thing, it's a little bit different than regular interviewing. There is a wonderful book by Steve Portigal, and it's called “Interviewing Users”. It will give you the basics that you need to understand when you're interviewing.
And the third one, That is not going to be one of those Indiana Jones types of work that you think they do in ethnography. There's this wonderful book, “The Field Study Handbook” by Jan Chipchase, Who I actually worked with while I was at Nokia. This is a really huge book, as you can tell, but it literally gives you almost everything that you need to know about conducting a field study, how to set it up and how to leave it.
