Reasons Your Company Should Care About UX and UX Research

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UX research notes

6 min readMay 24, 2018

Aren’t you tired to explain why user experience is important and why your company should care about it? Have you even find yourself in situations even you explained all the things about user experience research to your designers, product managers, clients and business owners, the only response you get is a confused face or questions such as “Can you explain these again with numbers ?”.

This article will help you to tell all the necessary parties what is user experience research (UXR) and show them why it is very critical for their successful business.

This article will give a detailed picture of the role and impact of user experience and related research in a successful business with examples. It also shows Why/How UXR helps your company to grow the success.

UX and UXR as the Key to a Successful Business

Companies should adopt practices that elevate the business and provide a steady foundation of the brand, right?

The essential practice for creating a great business is to addresses the real customer needs which require companies to “start with the user experience and work backward to the technology” as Steve Jobs underlines [12].

The key to companies’ success is to give a great customer/user experience. According to a McKinsey report, 70% of buying experiences are based on how the users experience they are being treated.

How shall your company improve its processes to hold this key to a successful business? The rest of the document explains the impact of user experience and related research in successful business.

What is User Experience Research (UXR)?

Organizations must care about understanding customers and creating products for delivering exceptional service. Understanding our users open new ways of discovering and acting on organization’s areas of opportunity. User experience research (UXR) allows us enabling these functions in the company.

UXR brings insights to the company that helps in the creation of effective product strategies in understanding the problems, performing users’ need finding, interpret user actions and motivations. UXR is “the process of understanding the impact of design on an audience” [1].

UXR helps to improve user-centered UX strategies with end-user in mind

by providing a deeper perspective about “who are the users, in what context they’ll use the product or service, and what they need from the product” [2].

Shortly, UXR help designers to go beyond the surface meaning (e.g. analytics data) by creating a deeper picture of the whys of users’ needs and behaviors. This role of UXR empowers the UX team to elicit user requirements to define a product’s marketing requirement and scope to be able to make informed design decisions. Specifically, UXR can bring user-centered perspective to designers to show the users’ unmet needs and tasks that may enable designers to see beyond any solutions that currently exist in the marketplace [5].

The UXR Process

At the very beginning of the project, UXR sits together with stakeholders and learn about the needs and goals of the end users. After the initial kick-off meeting, UXR brings insights to the team by applying different methods (e.g. interviews, surveys, ethnography studies, literature review and data analytics). These insights empower the team to make informed decisions and validate early concepts. Then UXR works on the usability with an iterative approach by running tests, interviews and generally test assumptions to help design team.

Why UXR is Essential for Successful Business

Nielsen Norman Group says that “UX Without User Research Is Not UX” [8]. Without the users’ input, organizations risk creating products that fail. UXR will help with validating if your users get the best experience which is very essential for your brand image and for the long-term success of your projects. 32% of users will leave the brand they love after just a single bad experience [14]. According to a Forrester report, 70 % of the projects fail since they can not meet the users’ needs to get a higher acceptance [11].

UXR plays a critical role in improving UX with specific benefits. User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) list these businesses such as [1]:

• Increased productivity

• Increased sales and revenues

• Decreased training and support costs

• Reduced development time and costs

• Reduced maintenance costs

• Increased customer satisfaction

Especially, UXR will help:

• To create designs that are truly relevant to your users

• To create designs that are easy and pleasurable to use

• To understand the return on investment (ROI) of your user experience (UX) design [4]

The return on investment in UX and UXR is great and it can be measured [21]. For example, offering better experiences lead to having the greater number of users more loyal to brand. According to a PWC report, more than 3 users out of 5 think that a positive experience is more influential than a strong advertising [15]. People are willing to spend up to 16% more services that offer greater experience [14].

A great user experience supported by UXR is not only customer level. It also reduces development time and support costs. The cost of bad UX in IT project management is about $150 billion across all industries [17]. Conducting proper user experience research may reduce the development time of a project by 33% to 50% [10]. UXR can help reduce the cost of user support. For example, McAfee had % 90 reductions in support cost after usability testing [9].

Finally, UXR help to observe your competition. With UXR techniques companies can find out what competitors are doing

Examples

Amazon is a good example who continually run research to measure the user experience. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos focuses on long-term focus on customer experience than a short-term focus on profit as he mentions in his 2013 letter to shareholders:

“…I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align.”

Another example is IBM, where they treat UXR as an asset that helps to ensure that every product development decision benefits IBM users. IBM’s report that “every dollar invested in ease of use returns $10 to $100” [16].

According to IBM,

“every design is a hypothesis about a market, needs, solution, and relationship (What should we design? For whom? Why? How well did we do?) These are the questions that guide our research activities. Our researchers carefully align user needs and goals with the core value delivered through our products” [7].

Another example is UBER. UX research helps UBER to “learn about user constraints” [20]. UBER realizes the importance of user research when they test with users and driver partners. UBER UXR teams inform and influence product decisions in the company to improve and evolve their customer experience going forward [19]. UBER run user experience research to “uncover what matters most to riders and partners, and how [UBER] product helps or hinders them as they go about their lives” [18].

The Need for UXR Maturity in Your Company

Enabling a mature UX and UXR process in the company and allowing enough time and resources for conducting research properly saves time and money in the long run. This will help the company to gather the exact data needed to make the best available design decisions which will end up with successful products that require fewer changes in the long run.

Immature ways of running UX research is risky since it can be resulted with “gathering incorrect or incomplete information that can lead to poor design decisions and, ultimately, waste far more time and money than the time and money you originally saved by conducting discount user research” [6].

Here, I illustrated many explanations for the WHYs of UX research. Hope it will help you to change the UX culture in your organization.

References:

[1] https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/user-research.html

[2] http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/complete-beginners-guide-to-design-research/#what

[3] https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/an-overview-of-the-factors-of-success-for-new-product-development

[4] https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/user-research-what-it-is-and-why-you-should-do-it

[5] https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2017/10/what-ux-designers-really-want-from-user-research.php

[6] https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2018/05/avoiding-half-assed-user-research.php

[7] https://medium.com/design-ibm/the-vital-role-of-user-research-8c2f51a9cead

[8] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-without-user-research/

[9] https://ux.walkme.com/infographic-making-strong-business-case-roi-ux/

[10] https://medium.com/@usentric/3-ways-in-which-your-company-can-greatly-benefit-from-user-experience-research-64e41e72b4b7