What Proactive UX Research Looks Like

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Proactive UX research anticipates the critical user experience decisions that a team faces. The team’s UX research effort uncovers sound findings and insights to ensure they make the best possible decisions for their users and customers.

This is in contrast to how most teams conduct their UX research today. Most teams react to questions that arise during the design process. Can the users successfully use the thing we are building? Have we designed this thing to meet their expectations?

These are important questions to answer. Teams often answer them through validation techniques, such as usability testing. However, they focus the team on one particular aspect of design: making sure the team delivers a solution that works well.

Of course, the team does need to deliver a well-executed solution to the users’ problem. And having a rigorous usability testing program will uncover where their execution isn’t working. It gives the team a chance to fix any identified issues before release.

However, these questions, and the methods teams use to answer them, only touch the surface of the users’ experiences. They focus on smoothing out the experience of a particular solution, whether it’s the best solution or not.