User Research Smoke & Mirror

Part 1: Design vs Science
Here the author feels that we had put too much emphasize in using science as a tool to research on design strategies for good user experience. And there are too many seemingly-scientific tools available to us that the author feels that we take these as a means to avoid doing a real job to design based on deep experience and good instincts.
I feel that this is very true especially in real life situations where we are taught scientific approaches towards a good design but there are often cases of good designs that defy the scientific approaches. In my opinion, personal judgement and perception is the key for a design and comments and various feedback is the key to a good design. We should not based our design on scientific approaches but more on our creativity and aesthetic sense.

Part 2: Research as a Design Tool
The author use the example of a design tool: Eye-tracking which tracks the amount of attention span a reader gives for certain areas of a webpage. This tools is supposedly efficient as it helps companies to further improve the 'blue area' which the readers would not pay much attention or to increase the 'red area' to capture longer attention span. However, without the tool, I feel that the examples that were shown in the author's blog, example this:
Here, we can see the reason why there is not much 'red zones' as the website looks 'messy'. It is quite common logic that we can tell that the website disperse too much information all over the website and its hard to capture long attention span. However, Eye-tracking Tool does have its usefulness as it provides a good interface in generalizing 'hotspots' for a website and that can be used as a guideline for companies to further improve on the user experience of their websites.

Part 3: Research as a Political Tool
Here the author gives a concrete evidence of why scientific approaches and research towards good design experience is needed - Politics. Somehow, companies would not accept new changes or ideas to existing prototypes unless there is some substanial results from research that is recognized by the companies. They want to see results from research by surveys, user testing and such. User research also helps to futher convince companies on choices of good design or talk them out of bad design experience.

Finale: Concluding thoughts
For the rest of the articles, I personally feel that between user research for good design and good design based on own perception and aesthetic, there is a balance and trade-off between the two. In the example where Organic proposed the idea of research of 'Persona Rooms' which its catered specifically for individuals. However, it is not feasible in my opinion due to the following reasons:

1. The 'Persona Room' is for work areas and if a company has lots of employees, there will not be enough space
2. What if the employee who purchase this 'Persona Room' and quit the job halfway
3. The cost of research following by the cost of making this 'Persona Room' will not be cheap
   

In conclusion, I feel that to propose a good design experience. One must have do some work using his/her aesthetic senses and perception to come up with a prototype first. Then using the scientific approaches of user design, he/she can test the design to get various feedbacks and comments and use these feedbacks and comments as a basis to further improve on the design.