How can UX Researchers demonstrate value for organizations?
Three areas to focus on and demonstrate research impact
I’ve been a researcher for 10 years and the #1 question I get is, “how do researchers demonstrate value to organizations?” I thought I would write this article to answer that question.
The value of research to an organization can be defined by answering any of questions listed below.
- How might we increase revenues from the existing business?
- How might we increase revenues from new business by finding new uses of existing products?
- How might we decrease operational costs?
- How might we increase shareholder value?
- How might we increase customer satisfaction so we can improve the first four business outcomes above?
- How might we create a culture of customer centricity so that more customer-centric (vs. those that are not vetted with customers) ideas are implemented so we can improve the first four business outcomes above?
Creating value in three different areas of research
- Improve customer advocacy and build a culture that makes each employee an advocate for our customers
- Build delightful products through user experience (UX) research
3. Improve customer experience (CX) beyond the product (think Sales experience, Support, etc.)
Let’s breakdown value for each research area.
- Improve customer advocacy
Customer advocacy is to rally the organization to better know customer needs so all jobs within a company contribute in some way to solving customer needs so we’re aligned across functions and departments and it’s explicit as to what we’re trying to solve. I’ve found the ways research insights are communicated and the way stakeholders and employees are involved in the research process to be critical for customer advocacy. Here are 3 examples of demonstrating value by making each employee a customer advocate and champion. Value is measured by employee engagement and participation and is as important as insights that impact the product as making each employee a customer champion creates a customer-centric culture and multiplies the impact of research.
A. Company wide live interviews with customers At Coupons.com I hosted a monthly company-wide event called ‘Customer Wednesdays’ where I would host a live interview with a customer on the second Wednesday of the month.
The topic for discussion and invites would be sent a week before the event. Topics would range from getting customers to talk about their preferences on if, how and when they want to receive coupon notifications to showing customers early designs on new features to get feedback. The main goal here is to get participation by as many employees so we can align on customer needs and thus deliver exceptional products. During the interviews employees would join a Slack channel and post questions or takeaways which would then be summarized and shared with all. Initially, I moderated interviews and after some time I helped prepare Product Managers or owners of different products/experiences conduct the interview. These live conversations helped product owners ask for more research and be proactive in driving action based on what they learned during the interview.
How to demonstrate value: Participation was monitored at each session and so was the involvement in the Slack discussion. An increase in both these areas is great to report especially if you are summarizing these over the year. A healthy discussion usually involves participation from at least 30% of your company in a year. Reporting on qualitative metrics via surveys on how useful the session was to employees is also demonstrating value. Another way is to share with whoever you’re trying to demonstrate value emails or thank you notes from participants (employees and leaders) as they are indicators too. Sessions like these were always rated above 4 on a 5 point scale for usefulness and satisfaction. Session recordings and takeaways can be documented in a central repository for employees to access.
B. Personas can be powerful in aligning different functions and geographies on what’s important to our customers.
At RingCentral, we’ve created postcards of the personas and handed them to employees at a live interview with a persona. We’ve also created large format wall posters so different locations (currently in Denver, Xiamen, St. Petersburg) have these at each office. Educational sessions on how to use them are conducted and product meetings start with aligning goals to personas. At Coupons.com we also included videos of customer journeys for each persona so they were used in Sales material and Leadership off sites to champion customer needs. We also identified the values of each persona and defined product strategy that informed which values to maintain and which values to grow. Over time measuring the growth in each persona (audience segment) is a good indicator of how they affect business outcomes.
How to demonstrate value: Personas are usually the first step in customer advocacy. When accompanied with richer formats like videos and powerful data like customer value, reach, and market size they can be used in training material for employees and help to sell products. A good indicator of value is how many people have them at their desks, how many conversations refer to them and which teams are using them.
C. Sharing research insights in a meaningful way with all
Researchers have the best jobs in my opinion as each research study unpacks many takeaways to help our customers have a better experience and can be relevant and useful to all employees. However, digesting all of it in a meeting can be a lot. Ideally, each person in the company needs access to these research nuggets and not just stakeholders who asked for the research. I find the best way to circulate these insights is to use customer video highlights that are shorter than 2 minutes to share with employees in a weekly cadence. Link it to the larger presentation and people are more likely to view it. If they want to further learn more they can schedule meetings with researchers or use the research repository to navigate through the other studies. Infographics as seen in the image are another way to share insights in a meaningful way. Hopefully, as a researcher, your research repository maps mental models of how employees want to search for studies.
How to demonstrate value: My research repository hosted on Google Sites was the most liked post when I shared it on our messaging platform. I also have analytics for how many views each report gets to understand engagement and interest. Most importantly, I track how many go on our product roadmaps and how that impacts our business outcomes.
2. Build delightful products through research
There are 3 areas related to product research and each has very different measures for success.
A. The first is related to generative user research that seeks to better understand people and their behaviors. For example, we conducted generative research on how and why people use video meetings or how people grocery shop. These studies are rich in context and help dive into behaviors and opportunities to build successful products or features or optimize existing ones. Insights are used to validate hypothesis. Stakeholders usually use insights to make strategic decisions on the direction to pursue based on customer behavior. For example, on how people grocery shop we found shopping lists inform where they go to shop that week (among their 2–3 go-to stores). Coupons could influence which store they visit, so finding savings for their shopping lists based on nearby stores was a loved feature.
How to demonstrate value: For generative research value is demonstrated when insights guide product strategy and direction. Success is measured by the researcher’s presence in strategic meetings and the ability to guide those conversations. Ultimately, success is determined if these ideas got onto product roadmaps and implementations were able to affect business outcomes positively.
B. The second is evaluative user research when you assess a concept that is either rudimentary (design on a paper napkin) or a full developed idea (beta product). Based on how fully developed the concept is a variety of mixed methods needs to be used (see methods here). I used qualitative methods (interviews, focus groups, usability tests, etc.) and/or quantitative methods (surveys, Google Analytics and A/B testing, etc.). For example, we take learnings from our qualitative interviews on how people use our video meetings product and use quantitative methods like surveys to prioritize user needs which feed into product roadmaps. We follow this with a usability test with customers during a beta launch to ensure their needs matched their mental models before launching to all customers.
How to demonstrate value: For evaluative research, our insights are usually to inform designers on how to improve the product or which direction would be better suited for our user’s needs. It is even more powerful if you could use products like Optimizely or VWO for A/B testing and implement some of your insights on actual visitors to your website to see which takeaways perform better. Influencing design direction is another great way to show value especially if it can be quantified into actual customer performance. For example, Design B shows 3% of traffic logged into the website more than Design A is good story supported by data. Increases in acquisition, activation, retention, referral (AARR) can all be directly tied to business outcomes and ultimately revenue.
C. The third is innovation. Innovation can even happen by finding a new use to an existing product during generative or evaluative studies. There are many ways to discover new uses and new users. Some of it can happen by connecting the dots during a research study and some can be more deliberate by using business models (see Strategyzer’s course) that take you through a step by step process to help find new ideas and evaluate them.
How to demonstrate value: At Coupons.com we introduced our personas to the company in a Brown Bag session and then asked each employee to submit an idea on how to better cater to each persona’s needs. We received 60 new ideas which informed the roadmaps of our products. I also participated in a similar program at RingCentral where employees had to pitch ideas in groups of 3–6 and my team won the first place in this Innovation Competition and more importantly our idea is being implemented. Products that are implemented will be measured for increase in AARR metrics and thus affect business outcomes.
3. Improve the customer experience beyond the product, for example, sales experience, support experience, etc. I have implemented a broader Customer Experience program (vs. UX which is limited to the product experience) using Net Promoter Score (NPS) to guide change in an organization by aligning business goals and improving business outcomes by improving customer satisfaction. For example, at RingCentral we measure every touchpoint of the overall experience from the time a customer is aware of our products to the sales call to the implementation and customization of our products to their needs to the onboarding experience and usage of our products and finally the support experience. The most important analysis to come from these surveys is the importance-satisfaction chart that indicates what’s the most important aspect of the overall experience for the customer. For example, at RingCentral it is delivering what the sales team promised and at Coupon.com it is meeting marketing goals of campaigns. Now that we’ve found areas that can be improved to deliver the biggest bang for your money we can initiate multiple programs to address that one area.
How to demonstrate value: The NPS survey measures satisfaction every 6 months so program and product changes can be measured on the NPS scale for improvement and more importantly tied to revenue to understand the impact on business outcomes.
Conclusion: Research can easily be buried on a computer hard drive or lost the second the research presentation is over so it’s up to researchers to improve visibility and affect business outcomes. Sometimes the value can be translated into numbers and at other times we need to bring visibility with company-wide research presentations to reinforce and build a customer-centric culture. Either way, partnering with different functions (see image) and building an army of customer advocates will help you move farther, faster.
