Impact is one of the metrics that determines your success as a researcher. Teaching and service play a role too. What sets apart great research professors is the number and quality of publications they can produce.

The process of creating knowledge is collaborative. Teams of experienced professors and their grad students work together to generate the knowledge they share in their publications.

Software tools play a role too. Tools like Excel, Tableau, SPSS, and NVivo play a role in helping you collect and analyze data. In some cases, custom tools are required to help manage this workflow. For example, your research might help companies assessing how well-embedded sustainability is in their corporate culture and need a tool that helps manage survey responses from across a large organization.

In some fields, the custom software is the phenomenon being researched. For example, you might develop a new data visualization technique or design tool.

In both of these cases, having the support of a design and development agency can give you an advantage.

Speed

Working with an experienced design and development team will increase your speed. Rather than having one of your students hobble together a solution with existing services and tools or pick up a programming language to build the solution, you can start building immediately. You don’t need to wait for your student to learn the tools.

The time it takes for your students to complete their theses will also decrease as they will spend more time working on their research questions and writing and less time fussing with the tools they need to use to collect data.

An agency will also have experience with processes like agile development and Jobs-to-be-done Theory that will help you manage your project’s scope so that you only build the features necessary to explore your research questions.

Quality

With the support of a professional design and development team, you will end up with software that works reliably. Practices like test-driven development make it harder for bugs to slip into your software when a change is made. It is possible to give a demo without stressing if the prototype will work. Having a well-built prototype or tool will ensure ecological validity and that only the variables you’re exploring having an effect.

Continuity

The goal of graduate school is to, well, graduate and this means that your research team will experience turn over as students move on. Maintaining continuity of a project can be difficult as the personnel changes. A design and development agency can act as the constant, as the repository of knowledge, as students flow through your lab. Having this resource will decrease the potential for knowledge to be lost and will help students get up to speed faster.

Loam is a team of designers and developers experienced in working with researchers. Our workflow makes it possible for us to move quickly move from concept to code. The sooner we can make your ideas real, the sooner you can publish that award winning paper.