Scrutinizing ignorance

Research is the careful investigation of a problem intended at the discovery and interpretation of facts through scientific methods.

The value of (user) research is discovering what you know, either by validating your assumptions or finding evidence that completely confounds your expectations.

Because you might know your best friend, or your spouse, or your parents.

But that doesn’t mean you know how their going to act in every particular situation, from using a smartphone app to booking a flight, to making a context-specific decision.

In truth, the only way to realize what you really know about the people and things that operate around you are to test and examine them in as a controlled situation as possible. And the only way to do that is to accept that while you might think you know everything, you can really only know what you can confirm systematically.

Indeed, scrutinizing our own ignornance is the only way we’ve come to comprehend anything.