The only ... er... problem I have with Whitney's diagram & article is that it seems to compare market research with usability, instead of clearly comparing market research with user research. I think it's an important distinction.

Actually, in this diagram I am not talking about market research v. user research, but about research v. evaluation.

Both market and user research are done (usually) before or early in a project as a way of understanding the market or the people who will use the product. The difference in this case is the purpose of the research, and the scope required. I would collect site visits, contextual inquiry, any sort of initial ethnographic study, user profiles, personas, scenarios of use and so on under the rubric of user research. The purpose is to understand what customers want or how they interact with the product (at many different levels).

Usability evaluation (and in this case, I mean it in the "small u" sense) is done during or at the end of the design and development process to evaluation how successful the product design was in meeting the needs that were hopefully identified during a research and analysis stage of work.

Go back to my definition: Market (and maybe user) research tells us what our customers want; usability evaluation tells us whether we have met their needs with our product.

Hi Whitney,

Thanks for the clarification. The reason I highlighted the distinction between user and market research is the question of who does what in an organization. Market research focuses on affinity and, as you know, affinity is only one component to designing interactive systems. It's the old conundrum of "what people say they like is often immaterial to what the system needs to offer." Too, when I collect data to help design a system, the observed data is (from my perspective) more valuable than the affinity data.

I do agree on your distinction between research and evaluation...and I agree both are important.