Research

Scan the web

Find what peer-reviewed studies, official statistics and other sources already say about your questions.

How to do it

1. Start from your research questions.
2. Read what is already known before you recruit anyone.
3. Turn what the sources leave open into questions for interviews.

Tip. Each source is labelled peer-reviewed, preprint, official, news, forum and so on. Papers are looked up by their DOI, and findings from retracted ones are left out. Desk research is secondary evidence: it sharpens your questions but doesn’t replace talking to people.

The draft searches the web and reads the pages itself. A quote counts as checked only when it was found in a page that was actually read.

What you need

Start from:

• Brief or Research questions

It is better with: Web source.

What you get: Desk research

A desk research template has these sections:

• Summary
• Findings
• Open questions

Where it fits

• Discover (Double Diamond): Learn what is really going on, before jumping to answers.

Usually comes after

• Write a project brief
• Frame research questions

What to do next

• Synthesize insights
• Write a readout
• Find contradictions
• Check what new evidence changes

Templates that use it

• Exploratory study: We don’t know the problem well yet: why do people do what they do?
• Double Diamond: A whole project, from understanding a problem to a tested answer.
• Design Sprint: Five days from a big question to a prototype tested with real people.