I’m sick of the supposed Henry Ford quote.  You know:

If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’.

Of course, this quote is apocryphal¹.  The best ones often are.  This apocryphal quote made it all the way to Steve Jobs, who often used it to explain why Apple rarely uses research.

This quote and its repetition shows very little understanding of user research.  No researcher worth their notebook just goes out and says “so, what would you like us to give to you?” and then regurgitates that answer and feels proud of the research that they’ve just done.  I wouldn’t accept that research from the youngest user experience intern, let alone someone who calls themselves a researcher.

When you conduct research, you don’t know what the outcome will be.  Sometimes, you don’t even know what you’re looking for.  You conduct the research looking for that key insight, the unmet and unstated need.  You should, at least occasionally, go out and conduct research with no goal in mind other than, “let’s learn something new”.

After you’ve conducted your research, you analyze it to death.  You don’t just look for the easy quotes where a research participant tells you what they think they want.  You look deeper.  You go over your data with a fine-toothed comb.  You pull apart the data and put it back together in new and exciting ways.  And then you learn something new, and you go back and try to figure out the right thing to do with this new information.

Great research gives you insight that you didn’t have before and that you hadn’t yet imagined.  Great research can help form the basis of a whole new strategy.  Yes, there’s bad research out there that really does just regurgitate what someone said, but don’t let the existence of bad research stop you from conducting truly great research.