My two cents

There are two lovely methods that will help you to get started whenever you're doing a research project:

So, what is this CSD Matrix?

In this exercise, what you will do is list all the things that you are totally unsure of and where you don't have much knowledge.

Which are basically doubts.

And then you make another list of things where you have an hypothesis. You already have an idea, but you don't have the data yet to back it up.

These are your suppositions.

And then you make the list of the things, you know really well, and for which you have to data to prove it.

These are your certainties.

It's a good exercise because it shows you that you don't have to research everything.

Over the years, you have already gathered a lot of certainties.

It's always motivating to see that you don't have to start from scratch.

This mapping shows us what are the next steps for each category.

We want to transform our doubts into suppositions. And then our suppositions into certainties.

Think of it like your Kanban or Trello board for user research.

What might happen when you do this kind of exercise, is that you end up with so many information that it starts to get a little bit overwhelming.

That's the moment where you need to add a little bit of subcategories to make it less overwhelming.

For example, you could split the elements by priorities having the top priorities on the top. Things for later. And then finally the wishlist elements.

Now, it feels much less overwhelming as you see very clearly, which are the elements that you have to work on next.

You can also categorize these elements with other categories.

For example, you could categorize them by user groups, or business goals, or anything else, as long as it helps you to feel less overwhelmed.

If you are a nerd, you can get pretty nerdy with this kind of stuff.

Especially if you're working digitally. Because then You can add the links to each element.

For example, for each:

If you're extremely nerdy, you will love to do this kind of stuff with a Notion database, as it will allow you to add links and even have conversations and move things along as you are continuing your research journey.

I told you, you can get really nerdy!

This shows that This kind of mapping is not something that you just do at the start and it's done, but it's something that evolves over time.

When you have moved one doubt into a superposition, you can update it in that map.

That's also why I kind of love to have this stuff into a digital format, that can be easily shared and easily updated from anywhere.

Last thing to mention for my service designer friends. This method was created by Luis Alt from the Service Design agency Livework in São Paulo.

You know, Livework, the first agency in history which was focused on Service Design.

So if Luis has worked with it, you know, that it's some really good stuff.

For more details about that specific method, check out this article by the lovely Anna Kaley from the Nielsen Norman Group.

The second tool is something that I stole from a course about Grounded Theory.

At the start of a project, make a list of all your biases and hypothesis.

And then put that into a drawer.

Later when you have done your first draft of your research report. Go back into drawer. Take that piece of paper out, and compare your list of biases and your hypothesis with the report that you've just written.

Here. It will be very interesting.

Either your research confirms exactly your early hypothesis.

This might show that when you were analyzing the data, your biases maybe pushed you in the wrong direction, because you are just confirming what you already thought.

Or maybe the result of your research is completely different from what you had as early hypothesis.

This might show that you weren't as biased by your early hypothesis.