It’s time to start celebrating the research that prevents bad ideas from reaching users. This talk will cover how to prep your research so it’s air tight, how to deliver bad news to your team, and how to deal with the guilt of being the „bad guy.“
We live and design in a culture of make, make, make! It’s the corporate world, so what else would we expect? More products = more money, right? But by exclusively celebrating output (sometimes regardless of the quality or need), we fail to honor a vital function of design research: prevention. Stopping a ship before it hits an iceberg would be applauded, so why are „failed“ projects viewed in a shameful manner? I don’t know about you, but if I saved my company millions of dollars in development, I’d brag about it. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ll talk about preventative design and how we might shift our celebrations toward purpose-driven outputs rather than output for the sake of output.