Fast, Faster, Fastest

Let’s end this handbook by looking at a mental exercise that explains why alignment is important for your study design. Think about this scenario:

Sitting in front of you are a pair of running shoes, a bicycle, a car, and a plane. Your goal is to get somewhere as quickly as possible. Which of the four possible items should you use?

On the surface, this exercise seems easy. It would be best if you hopped on the plane because it’s the absolute fastest of the four options. But what if you were already at home? Using the plane would not only be much slower than walking, but you’d also spend lots of time and energy to even get on the plane.

Had you asked questions like “where are you trying to go,” “where are you starting from?” or “why are you trying to get somewhere quickly?” then your choice would’ve been much quicker and more confident.

Without a goal, designing a fruitful research study is impossible.

The lesson is simple: ask questions. You don’t want to start planning a study without a clear idea of what your stakeholders are trying to learn, how they define any relevant concepts, and a strong idea of how the findings will be used. Once you know these things, designing a study becomes much easier. Without a goal, designing your study to be fruitful will be next to impossible.

Asking additional questions can help you avoid doing fruitless research or, even worse, missing out on potential insights & opportunities. Remember: you don’t recognize the impacts of a poorly designed study until after it starts. 

Questions to ask Stakeholders When Planning a Study

• ”What’s the goal?”
• “What’s everyone expecting to learn?”
• “Are we learning as much as can with our limited resources?”
• “What happens after we wrap up the study?”
• “If we study this now, what other questions or topics are we delaying or ignoring?”

Above are some questions you should consider asking yourself or your stakeholders when designing a study. Get more help on questions to ask and make an impactful research plan in the guide below.

Guide 02: Aligning on a Study

Getting you and your stakeholders on the same before a study starts is critical for conducting fruitful research. If you can’t explain and convince your stakeholders that your study design is a great way to answer their research questions, you might want to rethink your approach. Remember, the “perfect” study that doesn’t happen wasn’t “perfect” to begin with. If you need to stop a study before it starts to make necessary changes or course-correct it, do it. You’ll thank yourself later.

The “perfect” study that doesn’t happen wasn’t perfect to begin with.

Once you’ve aligned on what needs to be studied, you should design and plan your study.

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Make it as Simple as Possible

Your goal is always to design a study as simply as possible. More complexity doesn’t translate to better results or more impactful learning. If anything, designing a complex, convoluted study gives you a false sense of control. In practice, you’ll have far too many things to manage and far too many opportunities to make mistakes.

Simple, straightforward research studies are also easy to explain to your stakeholders. They also help you focus on using your limited resources more effectively. Think about purposefully limiting the number of variables or topics to study. You’ll find it much easier to focus and be attentive when designing a research study.

You always want to ensure your study design is appropriate for your study goals and research questions. You design a qualitative study if you have qualitative research questions (or a quantitative study to answer quantitative research questions). Check out Collection 1, Handbook 2 for more on qualitative and quantitative research questions. Jump to the next two handbooks for more on qualitative and quantitative research.

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Go Theoretical

One helpful strategy is to revisit the theoretical plane (introduced in Collection 2, Handbook 1, Topic 1). There, anything is possible. You have no constraints. Ask yourself how you’d design your study if you had one full year to study certain questions or make specific decisions? What if you had 10,000 trained and passionate researchers working with you? What if you had a billion-dollar budget and access to every tool imaginable? In this theoretical plane, how would you design your study?

When you remove the frustrating constraints of the real world, you can be more creative in how you’d design a study. In some ways, get a clearer understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish with your research. The challenge then is figuring out how to bring that “theoretical” study design into the real world as best as possible.

If you’d have all of your 10,000 trained researchers meet with people individually in their homes to learn the most, you know that context is an important variable that you must design for. If you need to offer $10,000 to get interviews with very specific people, you know that you should budget more time for recruitment and/or more money for better, more enticing incentives.

What’s important to understand is that despite all your logic, planning, and intention, your study design is still a prediction.

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It’s Still a Prediction

Sometimes, your study design will collect unhelpful or biased data. That happens in research. It also happens with mature research cultures.  All study designs are predictions, and that means accepting something will go wrong. Something will be different than you planned for or expected. So, take a deep breath.

Your study design is about how to learn something, not what you'll learn.

What you can’t do is spiral into panic. You have to be flexible. You have to be ready to amend or pivot your approach. If participants didn’t show up or your interview guide isn’t working, make a change. You don’t want to complete a study as designed when you have evidence that it’s not working.

Communicate with your stakeholders on what’s happening and provide them options for changes. For hundreds of studies you might design in your career, not all of them will be unexpectedly stricken by bad luck. But be ready to develop your adaptability and resourcefulness the more research studies you design and run.

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Handbook Closing Thoughts

You’ll become better at designing efficient and impactful research studies with practice. Every time you look ahead and recognize the risks and challenges in your study, you’ll find yourself coming up with practical solutions. If you work in an immature research culture, trying to add some strategy and structure to even one phase of a research study can be the first step to conducting research that matters.

This Handbook covered some basic ideas for designing a study. But in practice, you’ll likely conduct either a qualitative or quantitative research study. Each type of research is full of rich, nuanced ideas that you can use to design smarter, more sustainable studies.

In the next handbook, let’s start with qualitative research.