Scoping Impactful UX Research

As a UX researcher, we strive to make the research result impactful to the company, and ultimately, to influence the product and design direction. That’s generally how we evaluate the success of a research study. But, impactful research doesn’t just emerge out of the void. It requires UX researchers to pay attention to every detail inside each stage of the research process, as even a single and seemingly tiny mistake could lead to the failure of making the research impactful.

I’ve seen many UX researchers who have placed great emphasis on selling their research results or making aggressive design suggestions but still failed to impact design. When looking into details of the research they’ve done, one could see that the fundamentals of the research already indicated their likely failure, which is that it lacked an impactful research scope. So, what are those critical building blocks for an impactful research scope? Let’s put ourselves under an analytical lens for a thorough analysis of this problem.

A common problem seen with many Junior UX Researchers is: they stay in linear response mode to address stakeholders’ requests or questions, and fail to identify the intrinsic needs sitting inside the deepest minds of the stakeholders about the critical information they need to make decisions with confidence. For example, when a stakeholder comes to you to help validate a new feature they want to implement and you start interviewing your stakeholders to understand their needs. Then, you find out the reason why they want this feature is simply because the competitors have the same feature. Based on your understanding, you start developing a plan to help your stakeholder validate if this feature is something their customers would need (Pic. 1).

Pic. 1: Linear Response Mode

The whole process may sound logical, but only understanding the stakeholders’ needs can’t help you scope out impactful research. After all, UX research expertise is founded on the fact that people often don’t know what they want intrinsically, and neither do your stakeholders. When stakeholders start copying competitors’ offerings or features as their own product requirements, what does this imply? It means your stakeholders don’t know what your users need, so they figure that if their competitors can make money from that new feature, then surely they could, so decide they will provide the same thing and try to sell it to their customers. In this scenario, if you directly design your research study to only validate the usefulness of that new feature, you may achieve a conclusion of whether the feature is useful or not and if lucky you may be able to create personas for the feature. But till now, do you think you have answered the stakeholders’ questions? In the short term, maybe yes, at least they know if there are people who would pay for this feature, but what about in the long term? Will they just keep copying competitors’ offerings again and again? Possibly!

So, what is the essence of impactful UX research? The answer is profound and insightful research questions. However, this important essence is often neglected by UX researchers; not to mention that some UX researchers don’t even know what a good research question should look like. That’s why, in this article we talk about how “Impactful UX research comes from your profound and insightful research questions.”

Let’s go back to the previous problem we discussed. What’s wrong with the linear response mode? The real problem is in this mode, you don’t spend enough time getting to understand the whole picture of the business problem those stakeholders are facing. There is a lot of research you need to do to help you scope out your research before you can actually do any UX research (Pic. 2).

Pic. 2: Preliminary Scoping Research

1. Stakeholder Research

I prefer not to call this stage “Stakeholder Interview,” since simply because you are good at conducting interviews, it doesn’t mean you can do research. Research is about the craft of inquiry and inquiry comes from the curiosities developing in a researcher’s mind. How far your research could go depends on how deep your curiosities are.

When receiving a request or question from your stakeholders, there are critical questions you need to ask yourself:

• Why did your stakeholders request this particular research?
• Is there something they feel less confident about or are they under any specific pressures from either internal (e.g., from peers or senior management) or external (e.g., competitors or market) sources?
• How do your stakeholders make decisions? What data do they need to support their decision-making process?
• What do stakeholders expect of this research?

In reality, you will face various stakeholders, such as business stakeholders (i.e., PM), technical stakeholders (i.e., R&D), and UX stakeholders (i.e., Designer). The challenging part is how you synthesize and balance their different perspectives. In this stage, therefore, the role of a UX Researcher is like that of a doctor helping diagnose a patient’s problems (remember, never expect your stakeholders to tell you the answer directly), and then working out the correct prescription to address the problem. If you have a chance, try your best to involve all the stakeholders in your stakeholder research stage to give you a whole picture of the request.

2. Problem Space Research

Only seeing the surface of the problem would result in curing only the symptoms, not the disease. To successfully scope impactful research, you need to correctly interpret the problem space. This stage would help you form the problem space of the request and give you a more holistic view. So, before you develop a research plan, be sure to give yourself enough time to dive into the problem space and decide the lens for the research.

Doing UX research is not only about UX design or users, you also need to take market status, business strategy, and technology potentials into consideration. The problem space is shaped by the synergy of the knowledge of the Market, Business, and Product aspects (Pic. 3).

Pic. 3: Basic Components of Problem Space

1. Market

• What is the overall market status, ecosystem, and landscape?
• Who are the major players in this market? Who are the competitors?
• How do Industry Analysts interpret the market?
• What is the emerging trend or buzzword in the market?
• Are there any available market research or industry research reports? What are the key findings from those research reports?

2. Business

• What is the company strategy within the next 5 or 10 years?
• What is the product roadmap for the next 3 years?
• What are the target market and customers?
• What are the value proposition and core competency of the product?
• What is the current business performance? What challenges will the business encounter for the product line?

3. Product

• What is the capability and potential of the technology used in the product?
• How does the product work?
• What is the strength and weakness of the technology?
• What are the limitations of the technology?
• How distinguished is the product?

For example, if you need to help identify the opportunity for 5G applications for a telecom company, how will you form the problem space? For merging technology, the first thing you need to do is to understand the technology itself. If you don’t understand what 5G is, what its strength and limitations are, and why the technology is appearing, how can you envision a future for users? Then, if you don’t understand your company strategy and blueprint for 5G within say the next 10 years, you could end up losing your focus and study things that your company is not interested in putting their money into (sometimes it is just that the market is not big enough to make it worthwhile for your stakeholders). You will also need to listen to the voices from the market, what kind of future or scenarios are they talking about? What do customers think about 5G?

When you have done the research covering these three basic components of the problem space, you will have a clearer picture of the context of the problem you need to solve. Remember, we are UX researchers, studying users is what we have a passion for. And so, the last step is to put users at the center of the problem space (Pic. 4). Here, think about the following questions to help you frame insightful research questions:

Pic. 4: Research Questions Framing

• What is the snapshot of the user mental model and their behaviors? What is the current social trending theme in the product field?
• For example, elderly IT literacy is increasing since the smartphone has become pervasively embedded in elderly life.
• How might user behavior change under the context of an emerging market trend or new technology?
• How might the product influence users?
• What problems will the product solve for users? Are these problems worth being solved?

Every UX researcher wants their research to be impactful, but the thing is, as a UX researcher, what you need to do is usually more than what you think. An impactful research study requires UX researchers to keep challenging the current assumptions until you get to the real heart of the matter and approach it from a meaningful perspective to probe into the problem space. While doing UX research in private sectors, time matters, especially when today’s agile development is already the mainstream. Even so, it’s not an excuse for UX researchers not to do those above preliminary research aspects. Research is an accumulated knowledge-building process and insights don’t come from a flash of inspiration. Insights are rooted in a deep understanding of the domain, the users, the market, and the product. What you need to do is to think big and act agile.

So, UX Researchers, start practicing to ask insightful research questions!