What would you research if you could choose any physical object? For our course 'Information Design Research Methodologies', taught by Dietmar Offenhuber, we had to choose one object and try to research as much as we could about it. There are many things that have shocked me since I came to the US, but one of the most surprising facts has been how much people use checks here. Coming for a country where I had used this payment instrument only once, it was very interesting -and a bit annoying - seeing how banks make so easy to pay and send checks to mailing address, and so difficult online transfers.
This cultural shock is what made me choose bank checks as my research project. My main goal was to understand why people used them so much here (is it a cultural thing?, do banks promote it more than transfers?) and also to try to improve my personal faith in the checking system. What I found is that the use of checks is slowly decreasing but with a much slower trend than in the rest of the developed world, and that bank checks have a security system called MICR that is in fact what makes them work.
I still believe that online transfers are more secure, fast and easy (people who use a certain payment instrument use it because, well, they trust it more than others), but at least I feel more secure when I enter in my bank's online website to send a check to my landlord via normal mail.
For the research project we used quantitative (data analysis with R) and qualitative (interviewing relevant sources, reading papers...) methods.
More information about the project here
