Disruptive Research

Your company wants to innovate, disrupt, grab market share, and leap past competitors rather than play catch-up, but the methods you tried had little or no success. Despite trying to be Agile, Lean, efficient, fast, and possibly even customer-centric, common design practices struggle in creating successful outcomes for businesses and ecosystems.

Disruptive Research delves into how knowledge-oriented research and design can uncover truly exceptional insights and create disruptive innovations. If your company is curious about or already likes Jobs To Be Done or discovery-focused methods, Disruptive Research will show how to achieve greater success by following its proven process.

This book explores topics including:

• Learning users' tasks and unmet needs through observational research.
• Translating these into ripe opportunities for your company.
• Task analysis and optimization.
• User knowledge profiles instead of personas, which are often ineffective and not actionable.
• Knowledge design: solving user problems and innovating based on what research reveals about users' "knowledge gaps."
• Task-oriented design: organizing the design for tasks, rather than features.
• Tips and tricks to leverage user psychology and behaviors.

Numerous examples illustrating these methods from various industries. A practice example evolves along with the book, demonstrating these knowledge-oriented methods by thoroughly detailing each step of the process.

Who should read this book? This is a how-to book written for UX researchers and designers familiar with UCD methods who want to apply more evolved methods to website, software, product, and service projects. This book was written for both less experienced UX practitioners as well as more veteran researchers and designers. Additionally, UX managers and directors will benefit from these methods, which will improve procedural and scheduling aspects of their UX projects.