Open, Collaborative
Design Research
Stuart Church & Dave Ellender
Bristol Usability Group 06 May 2009

Dave Ellender

Exploratree

Stuart Church
• User research &
evaluation
• Prototyping
• UX Strategy
• Training

Academics v practitioners
Academic Practitioners
Speed of reporting Slow (years!) Fast (weeks/months)
Research quality Mostly high Very variable
Greater focus on conceptual /
Research subject Practical design issues
blue skies
Results reported openly Yes, but may be limited access Not usually
Collaboration Little Little

Bridging the divide
http://journalofia.org/

The Opportunity
Academic Practitioners Opportunity
Speed of reporting Slow (years!) Fast (weeks/months) Fast
Research quality Mostly high Very variable (hopefully) High
Greater focus on Bias towards practical
Research subject Practical design issues
conceptual / blue skies design issues
Results reported Yes, but may be limited
Not usually Yes
openly access
Collaboration Little Little Lots

Crowdsourcing (sort of)

Example: Drupal 7 UX Project

Research & Collaboration
Research Process Collaborative activities
Make observations and formulate
Contribute and vote on proposed ideas
hypotheses
Plan research approach Feedback / comment on approach
Distributed data collection and results
Collect data
submission
Feedback / comment on data interpretation
Analyse data
and statistical methods
Write up Collaborative online document

(How) Can we make
this work?

opendesignresearch.org
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Issues?
• Why would people (you?) get involved?
• What sorts of design research questions would be best
suited to this approach?
• Intellectual property (Creative commons? GPL - like?)
• Mis-use of voting system
• Maintaining quality of research
• Getting client buy-in (if piggy-backing on commercial
projects)
• Funding?

Next steps
• Register for an account at
opendesignresearch.org
• Contribute research questions and comment
at opendesign.uservoice.com
• Informal feedback to Dave
(daveellender@googlemail.com) or Stu
(stuartc@pureusability.co.uk)