The research phase is crucially important because it not only underlies the project proper, but gives a tone to decision-making, so that separate decisions have a bigger value. The main function of research is to come up with answers to “why”, rather than “how”, helping to stick to a certain direction.
The modern-day research methodology certainly provides a lot of opportunities, namely Design Thinking, User Testing, and Big Data. These have in recent years boosted the speed of decision-making in design production, for instance, it has drastically cut the time needed for testing hypotheses and identification of weak spots/vulnerabilities.
