The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
Desk Research: squeeze some research into your day 🍊
Dear Reader,
Q: How do I make time for research?
A: Try to squeeze a bit of desk research in here and there. 🍊
Desk research, also known as secondary research, is an excellent way to build continuous learning into your design practice.
It's called desk research because it's research you can do by yourself at the desk.
Primary research is custom-created for each project, but who has time for that?
Secondary research has already been conducted, and only needs to be discovered or revisited by busy designers.
Desk research is a perfect discovery method because it allows you to do a quick check of what's out there.
Checking the front page of Google or doing a quick search on your internal wiki tool is an excellent example of this.
If you want to get fancy, you could even try looking at scientific papers or other non-obvious sources.
There are three primary sources of desk research where you should be looking: Internal Knowledge, External Research, and Existing Products
1. Internal Knowledge
You can find internal knowledge in local places:
- Company wiki - Confluence, Notion, etc.
- Product documentation - Google Docs, Jira, etc.
- Cloud storage - Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.
- Data analytics - Google analytics, Dovetail
- Messaging platforms - Gmail, Slack, etc.
For example: Internal knowledge could be a comment on a user flow in a Google doc
I recommend searching past interviews transcripts, NPS reviews, and research presentations to find internal knowledge.
2. External Research
External Research is secondary research that was once conducted by someone outside of your company as primary research. Sources for external research are academic papers, research reports, and scientific studies.
Here are some places to start your external secondary research:
- https://scholar.google.com/ - find scholarly articles
- https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/ - find internet usage studies
- https://www.researchgate.net/ - find research papers
- https://www.academia.edu/ - find research papers
- https://www.statista.com/ - find industry insights
- libraries & bookstores - find inspiration in analog
3. Existing Products
With all of the software out there in the world, someone has already solved your problem. Don't reinvent the wheel!
For example: If you're adding a messaging functionality to your product, take inspiration from existing messaging products.
Avoid hypothetical products that you might find on Dribbble or Behance. If it isn't live, it's likely that the approach still has lots of usability kinks to be worked out.
Here are some excellent places to find existing products that are live:
- https://www.trustpilot.com/ - look for 2-4 star reviews of competitors
- https://www.producthunt.com/ - see if someone already solved it
- https://goodui.org/ - learn about A/B tests that companies are running
- https://uigarage.net/ - a searchable database of screenshots of products
Desk research is pretty simple, but once you do it for a bit, you'll start to find your own special sources.
Until next week, squeeze a few sessions of desk research into your day!
Jeff Humble
Designer & Co-Founder
The Fountain Institute
P.S. It's finnnnnnnally done...😅
I've been working on this mini course on UX research for weeks, and it's packed with so many nuggets to help you level up in UX research.
Get the free 7-day UX Research Short Course
I hope you like it 🥹
The Fountain Institute
The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
Ready Beats Perfect (+ four habits from Hatch Conference) By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, Last week I had the pleasure of hosting the Dome Stage at Hatch, a design-leadership conference bringing product and UX folks together to share what’s working (and what isn’t). Q&A with Iris Latour, co-founder of THEFT Studio. Photos from Hatch Conference Photographers Rebecca ruetten, Indigo Lewisohn, Not because I’m fearless, but because I’d done two simple things: I prepped my intros for each speaker,...
10 Design Diagrams To Study Instead of Staring Into the Void by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, It's that time of the year. Another boring Q3 earnings call, and all you want is to go back to the beach. You look at yourself in Zoom, and all you see is a bottomless void. Hey. Stop that. Instead, check out some of the best Jeffing diagrams on the internet. At least you will look like you are kind of working... 1. Diverging and converging in action by Nicholas Frota Designers talk a lot about diverging...
Level-up your critiques in 3 questions By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, You know the critique that starts with “quick feedback” and ends 45 minutes later with five conflicting opinions and no next step? Or the one where a senior voice speaks first and the room quietly aligns, even when the data points elsewhere. Here’s a simple pattern, adapted from Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), that pulls critiques out of taste debates and into clearer decisions. What VTS is (in 60 seconds) VTS is a...