No design without research

Interaction design

Like industrial design, the discipline (...) would start from the needs and desires of the people who use a product or service

Bill Mogridge, Designing Interactions (2007:14)

Can interaction design exist without research?

The naysayers - a classification

The itch-scratchers
The scornful
The dismissive
The defeatist

1. The itch-scratchers

# users	your itch %
0	100%
1	50%
2	33%
3	20%

When you release your code,
you release your itch

2. The scornful

3. The dismissive

Great designers are like great novelists: acute observers of human behaviour.

Don Norman, Workarounds - Leading Edge of Innovation (2008)

Design research is about uncovering the common patterns that underpin individual human behaviour.

4. The defeatist

https://fordes.de/posts/ruleBasedUXEvaluation.html

Research for software-making

Time
Money
Effort
Some common sense advice

if the goal is to describe a shared perception, belief, or behaviour among a relatively homogeneous group, then a sample of 12 will likely be sufficient (…) A sample of 6 interviews may have been sufficient to enable development of meaningful themes and useful interpretations.

How Many Interviews Are Enough? An Experiment with Data Saturation and Variability, by G. Guest, A. Bunce and L. Johnson (2006)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1525822x05279903

Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.

Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users by J. Nielsen, (2000)
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/