Hi Sean! Thank you so much for your question. Well, research is part of any Research process, it doesn't matter if you are writing a scientific article or developing a new tool. In your question you describe a protocol (Exploratory research- POC- Prototyping-Iteration) and I assume that this is somehow standard. You also mentioned constantly checking results and tweaking, those would be the safeguards to prevent biases. I think that is more than enough to qualify it as Research, actually that would be Design Research. Would you agree? There's an article by Nigel Cross titled "Design Research: A Disciplined Conversation", you should check it out! I should have included it in the piece itself. My bad :)