?? How To Make A Strong Case For UX Research
Getting a buy-in for UX research can be remarkably difficult. You might find yourself constrained by wrong assumptions and wrong expectations on what UX research actually entails.
Research doesn’t have to be time-consuming. It doesn’t have to be expensive. And it doesn’t have to be disruptive. Let’s see how we can address reluctance and make a strong case for UX research.
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Research Your Stakeholders
Stakeholders value research. But: they want to avoid disruptions and delays and minimize risk. They assume high costs, and more often, they fear that you might uncover failures which could be painfully expensive to fix — or that you could discover insights that conflict with top-level decisions.
When you face reluctance from stakeholders, try to understand where exactly it’s coming from. Study their KPIs, goals, constraints, priorities, and try to align your research with stakeholders’ objectives. As Erika Hall famously suggested, you need to build a strong relationship with a person before trying to change their mind.
Most importantly, study their previous experiences with research initiatives. Chances are high that the outcome of research stirred conflicts or problems that they’d like to avoid. In fact, they might not be against research, but the consequences that come along with it.
One of the most helpful strategies I’ve been using is to provide full transparency about the work we are doing. The decision making, the frameworks we use to make these decisions, how we test, how we gather insights and make sense of them.
It’s much more difficult to argue against real data and a real established process that has led to positive outcomes over the years. Stakeholders rarely know how we work. They rarely know the implications of last-minute changes. They rarely see the impact of last-minute changes based on hunches.
Explain how your work ties in with their goals. Stay high-level if you can, but don’t be afraid to get technical if you must. In the end, we all we come with our biases and expectations. Support your stakeholders, and you might be surprised how quickly you might get the support that you need.
UX Research Without Users Is Desk Research
UX research brings most value from research with actual customers —?preferably in their work environment, and in the setting that reflects their daily routine. While customer journey maps typically focus on a snapshot of the experience with your product only, research gives you an opportunity to understand where a product actually fits in your customer's work, what else they use, and how exactly they interact with it.
Some companies explore the option to use AI and replace UX research entirely by conducting simulated research with synthetic users —?AI-generated profiles that mimic user behavior and express simulated thoughts, needs and experiences. As Kate Moran and Maria Rosala rightfully state, UX research without users is desk research, and it can't replace actual testing with actual users:
As Vincent Koc has noted, most “synthetic” solutions lack unbiased external real world data for a given problem, e.g. reviews, transcripts, voice of the customer. At best, they could be used as an addition to existing research, rather than a replacement of actual UX research.
Track and Measure The Impact of UX Research
One of the most underrated lenses through which designers can present UX research is the lens of risk management. Good research drives insights, but it also prevents expensive experiments which often result in time efforts and resources that an organization could use elsewhere.
Explain to stakeholders how conducting user research reduces risk and prevents failures and that design without research is guesswork driven by assumptions. It’s also a good idea to find similar problems across teams to aim for more impact.
But to measure impact, you can't argue with risk mitigation alone. As Karin den Bouwmeester suggests , we can tracking the number of product changes based on research, references to research insights, number of UX research study observers and requests for research. So before diving into an organization-wide research effort, start where you expect the most significant impact and build confidence and trust first.
Anticipate objections about costs, competitions, and slowdons that stakeholders could have and explain the high cost of retrofitting research. To back up your arguments, Lizzy Burnam collected UX research statistics that help you make a strong case for the business value of research.
Suggest a UX research roadmap — with actions, timelines, roles, and costs to paint a clear picture of what your UX research ambitions encompass. And explain how you will use these outcomes to inform decisions. Showcasing previous successes of UX research can also help to convince stakeholders.
When UX Research Is Critical: Low Clarity, High Risk
Some companies don't know exactly when research is the right way to proceed, and when it only delays existing timelines. As a reliable way to mitigate risk for businesses, UX research is most effective when there is a lot at stakes, but very little clarity of what would be the right way forward. Product Design Eisenhower Matrix by Dragan Babic is a neat little helper to visualize priorities in the context of product design — and assess the right time for conducting extensive user research.
According to Dragan, the best time for research is when the risk is high, the clarity low. If you are in the low clarity / low risk quadrant, it will be difficult to make a decision, but cheap to experiment, so iterate, as fast, as cheap, and as much as possible. But: you won’t experiment if the risk is high unless you are on very tough timelines.
In some companies, UX research is seen as one-off activity, delivered by external agencies in times of uncertainty. In practice, every company can only benefit from integrating UX researchers deep into UX work, and sometimes UX researchers work within sales or customer success teams and shape relationship with customers on an ongoing bases.
UX research also helps measure and track the quality of digital experience over time — and in many ways, it shapes the notion of design success —?by tracking completion rates, completion times and design KPIs . These KPIs are defined based on the nature of the product, but typically include critical actions that users must be successful with.
Useful Templates To Build A Case For UX Research
1. “We don’t have access to users.”
? ”Unfortunately, we don't really have access to users or their data. Frankly, they are quite busy, and also remarkably expensive!”
???? “That’s understandable. But unfortunately, design without research is merely guesswork, and designing without enough research is inherently flawed. UX research helps mitigate and reduce the high risk of building a wrong or inaccurate feature that will disrupt, confuse or frustrate our customers. That's painfully expensive and remarkably time-consuming — and seriously threatens our long-term partnership with the organization.
Perhaps we could explore the limited options that we have to get access to at least some of our customers? We don’t really need much to get started — a few informal sessions around 25–30 mins would be a good start, and it would be fantastic to have a Sales representative or Customer Success representative to be on the call. It might be a great way to deepen our relationship by showing that we take interest in understanding the challenges and struggles customers experience, and addressing them in the next release.”
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2. “We don't have time or money for UX research.”
? “Currently we are in a critical phase of our project. Could we conduct some usability testing and research later, once we at least have a stable prototype?”
???? “Unfortunately, retrofitting UX research is almost impossible. In practice, once a product decision is made, product teams tend to seek evidence that support this decision, to “validate” it. But validation is a close-ended conversation, while the purpose of research to be open-ended, raising questions and surfacing struggles, rather than confirming a solution.
Before we invest [X] hours of work in the next [Y] sprints on a feature, spending literally $750,000 designing, building and marketing it, it's only reasonable to spend around $1,500 to conduct some due diligence and understand if we are actually solving a real problem that needs solving — and that this problem have a noticeable business impact. Do you think it's unreasonable?"
3. “Can we use AI tools to run research on a budget?”
? “Getting people for testing is always difficult and time-consuming. There are plenty of tools fro AI-powered synthetic testing out there. Why not just use it for UX research instead?"
???? "I’m afraid it’s not a good idea. UX research is user research, and it very much relies on observing real people experiencing real challenges with a real product. Synthetic testing could provide some insights into trends and behavior of a particular user group, but it's not research —?it's a simulation. For example, AI systems tend to respond much more positively than most humans do, and they tend to be too positive and optimistic when they repost “past behaviors”.
Also, synthetics users tend to care equally about everything, which doesn't reflect reality. And of course depending on the training data, some user segments will be better represented or prioritized, creating bias. On top of that, synthetic users carry the risk of hallucinations that are difficult to catch. So in short, we could use synthetic testing to complement UX research, but we can't use it to replace real-human UX research.”
4. "UX research is slow and time-consuming"
? “The market is brutal at the moment. We can't go into research mode for a month —?we need to deliver a new version to the market, experiment, launch an MVP and see what happens!"
???? "I absolutely understand that we need to be fast to deliver a product to the market. But there is quite a bit of research we can do while doing so. We can start with interviewing 5 users, 30 mins each, once a month. This would already give us some insights of how they use our product, where their challenges are and where they feel like they are losing time.
Once we want to go deeper, we can uncover significant UX challenges by observing 15–18 representative customers trying to complete 10–12 representative tasks with our product. We can measure success rates and success times, and report them to management. This data is also statistically significant and potentially represents tens of thousands of people who end up abandoning our product due to problems that we aren't aware of."
5. "We don't have any data about our users"
? “I absolutely understand our need to conduct UX research, but we don't have any data about our customers, so I'm not sure if it's going to bring any useful results."
???? “I think we can still do quite a bit with our UX research efforts. For example, we could listen in to customer calls and interview call center staff to uncover challenges that users have when interacting with our product. Analytics, CRM reports, support logs and call center logs are also a great opportunity to gain valuable insights, and Google Trends can help us find product-related search queries.
We can also map user sentiment on TrustPilot, Google reviews and our competitors. It would also be a good idea to interview colleagues who are the closest to our customers, e.g. in?sales, customer success, support, QA.?And we can understand what kind of data we should start gathering to discover meaningful insights long-term. That's an effort that's worth making to reduce risk of building a product nobody needs or wants.”
6. "We know our users fairly well, so no research is needed"
? “We know our users and what they want. In fact, customers don‘t know what they want anyway!"
???? “This might be true, but we don‘t know what they actually do. For example, our Customer Success representatives told us that around [X]% of customers cancel their subscription after less than [Y] months. What exactly are the reasons for that? What happened there? Our assumptions are often biased, based on stereotypes and follow hunches. But there might be remarkable business opportunity to grow and discover new markets here.
If anything, we will have real data that confirms what we know about our customers. But more likely we'll learn the different types of our customers, what their motivations and needs are —?but also how our product fits in their daily life and where their struggles are. It will give design teams a much more profound foundation to design from, instead of designing what seems to be about right.”
Key Takeaways
There is never enough research. To get the ball rolling, ask for very small commitments, and progress from there — most successful products come from continuous research that informs and guides design and business decisions. It might not take too long for research initiatives to be noticed, appreciated, supported — and perhaps even initiated by top-level management.
Useful Resources
Stakeholder Engagement
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Thank you so much for your support, everyone —?and happy designing! ????
UX Lead & Developer at MazeMap
4 个月Useful tips!
Qual Research at scale @getCurious | Ex-McKinsey
4 个月Really neat Vitaly! Thanks for the framework
Freelance Service Designer | UX Researcher | UX Research Manager | Workshop Facilitator
4 个月Great piece, Vitaly. Thanks for writing and sharing
Senior UX/UI Designer | 13+ Years in Design & Development | Design System Specialist | Mobile, SaaS & Responsive Web Solutions Expert
4 个月Thanks for sharing
It's awesome that you are sharing this! ??