The Business Value of UX Research
3 tips on how to convince decision-makers on the value-added of better understanding your users.
It is popular to blame poor products on companies not doing (enough) UX Research. In my work I have had the opportunity to discuss with people who do UX Research in various industries. Most of them would agree that often stakeholders tend to run away from the practice, because they don’t find it “important enough” in order to allocate sufficient budget and/or time for it.
Teams pushing for and doing UX Research see themselves as guardians of user needs — an organisation’s mission is to meet those needs and the best way to do so is to build products and services that actually meet those “real” needs. A lot of us would agree that the mental dialogue goes on as something like this: “Why stakeholders don’t want to invest in UX Research? Why don’t they understand the importance of it for the people who will use the product?Why do they see the situation only through their own lense?”
Stakeholders are also people, and people are not innately bad - they just act in their own best interest. They are as they are because of the position they are put in, and they do have their own expertise. So pointing a finger to them “You don’t know your user. What you believe about her needs is wrong. Let me show you” often creates hostility. And that’s not because one of the two sides is wrong, but because they don’t find common language.
In the majority of cases when we do UX Research it is always in some kind of a “service provider” context — you are either external and you are doing it for a client, or you are doing it for your own organisation. So technically your stakeholders are also your users in a way. They also have needs and, as a guardian of the user needs, you should address them too. So let’s put ourselves in the decision-makers shoes and see the situation from their point of view. What are their objectives? How might we help achieve them by also meeting the needs also of the final user?
Here are three approaches which I believe can help you convince your stakeholders to see UX Research as something they need, and not only as something that final users might need.
1. UX Research brings business value… measurable in numbers 💸
UX Research is data. Well-done UX Research is very good data. Very good data is money.
UX research, though, also costs money. In the majority of cases decision-makers always have some sort of financially-related objective. This might be cost reduction or revenue increase. In any case, money does play a very serious role when a decision is made. And oftentimes it’s maybe not even your stakeholder who will be making this investment decision — it will be someone with a position and expertise even further away from the reality of the final users.
Top-business-school-or-university- financial-risk-spreadsheet kind of people love data. Especially in numbers. Why? Because numbers are tangible and less subjective. They might remain unmoved by arguments like “Thanks to User Research we will do a product that users will love”. Why? Because it doesn’t speak to them. How does this argument address their need directly? Well, it doesn’t. They would turn to be much more receptive to a defence like “ After doing this change on the product, following the insights from the UX Research, we increase sales by 20% “. Now you do speak their language.
Another way to address this is by assessing the cost-benefit of UX Research. By digging to find out the real problem to solve, we can validate or disprove hypothesis early on in a product/service development. This allows us to make decisions, backed by real-life data. The cost of this would be much less than developing something which no one wants to use after.
UX Research has an invisible ROI: the spared cost of doing something useless. Here is the paradox: if the future benefit of a change suggested by research are not easy to estimate, the potential costs of building a crappy product can be estimated in a few minutes. For example, the number of days of engineers needed to develop a digital product will always surpass the number of days needed to conduct UX Research. It’s money saved in labor costs, but also money saved in opportunity costs linked to time to market.
Recently, a client wanted to build a mobile application to strengthen its relationship with key users thanks to curated content. Prior to the start of the development, we did a user research with a pool of diverse profiles (current and potential users). The results showed that a mobile application will not be an efficient answer to the way the user explore and use content. Not only we helped the client save a fair amount of budget, but we also provided him with useful insights on the experience, which will be used on his current website redesign. The cost of the UX Research? Less than one third of the estimated costs of the mobile application. Planned investments have now been redirected to improving the experience and content on the website, as it would be an adequate response to the existing user need.
Note: When presenting your argument it is always beneficial to add real-life examples. In case you don’t have any directly related to the product/service your team is working on, don’t hesitate to be in touch with other teams in your organisation who can share their experience with you.
2. UX Research will help the organisation work more efficiently 👥
Stakeholders are also employees and they do understand the importance of teams being aligned around a common, shared vision. Insight and conclusions made from UX Research have the advantage of being “neutral” — they reflect the point of view of the final users.
Any ambitious project requires to coordinate several expertises. In big organisations, this means several teams, each one with their goals, agendas and gut feelings. If Engineers and Designers can’t agree on what to do next because they might have their own opinions and beliefs, nothing will happen. The same logic applies to Legal and HR working on a company policy or Marketing, Sales and Customer Support working on a product launch plan . As facts always beats opinions, you can use UX Research to bring documented problems from real customers or employees to the table. Therefore, it’s not about who is the strongest in the org charts, but about how everyone can work together to solve something happening in the real world.
Bringing this neutrality on the table can release tension between teams and settle many long-dated debates on the direction a product/service/process should take. This adjusts the balance of power and creates a sense of ownership in each member of the team, which in turn leads to stronger motivation and better collaboration.
A few years back, we conducted a UX research for a French airport. The insights gathered served us to analyse the user journey — we documented each step from the moment the user leaves the plane, up to the moment she arrives to the city center. At each stage, we highlighted the various companies and departments that could act to improve the experience and how they could also help the ones involved on the next stage, with the goal to deliver higher quality of the experience. We presented this in front of more than 50 business representatives of each company, in order to help them realise that the best way to achieve a great and consistent customer experience is through their collaboration. The following debate was not about politics and “business” territories. It was about solving real problems with concrete actions.
Note: Be careful with that one though. It can be very appropriate if your stakeholder is a leader of a team. However, if not well presented, it might cause higher management to become averse to the idea as they might feel they are losing a bit of their power to decide. Study well the person in front of you and what their personal beliefs and goals are.
3. UX Research will help the organisation to stand out 💡💥
Humans are very interesting creatures — from one side we seek belonging to a group, we wish to be accepted and to conform with what others are. But on the other side, we strive to show our uniqueness, we want to be pioneers in the things that matter to us. Organisations are governed by humans, so we can observe a very similar behaviour. UX Research, as methodology, taps into that dynamic — it helps organisations understand what users want, and therefore helps create appreciation and acceptance of the organisation by users. However, UX Research can also help turn brands into explorers. UX Research interviews are “explorational interviews”- between 1h and 2h long, and open up the discussion to topics, which are much larger than the specific product/service. We often stumble upon insights, which would lead us to discover new, unexplored development opportunities for product/service offer, process, partnerships, team organisation and etc. And by implementing them, organisations can find an opportunity to lead the way in their industry.
Last year, we helped a public service organisation build a relationship strategy with small business owners via educative content. Our first intuition was to build a community portal and to compete with various medias to promote long content, written by experts. After travelling 3 000 kms across France to meet more than 20 entrepreneurs, we found out that a mobile application with short, straight to the point educative content, promoted by local representatives of the administration would be far more efficient and useful. The insight gathered led us to a less competitive ecosystem and a more accurate distribution model. This saved time as well as budget for content and media buying.
Some final notes
Due to its empirical nature, UX Research is a methodology which offers insight into what an “objective” reality is. When done well and in a frequent manner, it has the power to align the objectives of users and organisations.
It does have its cost though. It is never a question of price, but a question of value and it is up to you to defend it in a way, which will be well perceived by the person in front of you. Selling well UX Research to stakeholders will serve your objective. Because it’s stakeholders who have the power to make the decision to do or not to do UX Research. And if they are really sold on it, they will continue doing it, which will have a material impact on the product/service; and thus on the final user.
So the next time you see hesitation in your decision-makers’ eyes on whether investing in UX Research is a good idea, ask them this: do they want to put all the work in creating something and hoping it will have value, or do they want first to know what that value is?
