Greg Bernstein in Making research more durable:
Something I stress to my teams is that the questions asked of us as researchers are often tightly scoped to what’s top of mind for our cross-functional partners and stakeholders. Sure, answering these questions at face value will help us with today’s decisions and will likely earn us positive peer reviews, but at enormous opportunity cost. We instead should provide helpful answers while also illuminating the next larger context. This is how research findings shift from disposable to durable.
Researchers — or more generally people doing research — tend to be curious bunch, so more juniors tend to make the mistake of focusing research on learning anything, that in turn makes the research directionless, results vague, rarely having an impact on design or product decisions. So the answer is clear, make sure each study is clearly focused on answering one or few large questions. Every detail (like participants, method, or guide) needs to be focused on answering that one question, so making an unknown detail known.
The problem with this approach is what the above article points out: we strip the possibility of learning truly new information, so unknown unknowns. So the solution is to set the research questions, and then broaden the scope, peeking overt the edges on what else is there besides our immediate focus.
Where things get really interesting is when we look besides one study and try to build a research system. Collecting questions and answers into a repository is helpful, but rarely leads to new insights. But having information on unknown unknowns laid out enables people to learn new things from existing studies.
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