A review by dashtaisen
Just Enough Research: Second Edition by Erika Hall, Erika Hall

informative fast-paced

5.0

"Just Enough Research" is great. This quote summarizes Erika Hall's approach to research in UX design:

"The best teams are Spock-like. They embrace data while encouraging and inspiring everyone working on a product to look beyond what can be measured to what might be valued."

The author gives a brief introduction to various kinds of qualitative and quantitative research, and some guidelines for choosing the right kind of research for the questions that teams are trying to answer. She doesn't shy away from complexity or try to hide it; instead, she provides straightforward appraisals of the challenges of approaches without going into overwhelming detail. She also offers valuable strategies for navigating organizational politics, and business leaders' tendencies towards "surrogation" – the tendency to become so obsessed with measurement that they lose sight of the strategy and meaning behind what they're trying to measure. The book would be worth reading just for the author's critiques of surveys, Likert scales, and the Net Promoter Score (NPS)! But really the whole book is excellent. This is one of the few books I've read that makes a strong connection between the kind of research that happens in industry with academic research.