Budgets: user research hierarchy of needs
This article will help you understand the hierarchy of “must have” and “nice to have” budget items for user research.
Note that this article was written during a time of economic uncertainty and corporate austerity. Focusing on the needs at the bottom of the pyramid can help you prioritize your spending. If user research budgets increase, it is a guide to some of the higher cost and higher value user research resources.
Software licensing for research tools
Fundamental to all user researchers’ toolkits are software tools to conduct research. These tools allow user researchers to host studies, recruit participants, and pay gratuities. Examples of these tools include Qualtrics XM, User Testing, User Zoom, Survey Monkey, and User Interviews. You may need budget to conduct remote sessions such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Tools like Mural or Miro enable electronic sticky note exercises.
Incentives
You may need to obtain incentives for participants recruited outside the standard research tools. Examples include gift cards, cash, or merchandise for participants recruited via sweepstakes, events, customer contacts, or social media.
Specialized recruitment
Some studies require hard-to-recruit participants with specialized skills or backgrounds. Example vendors who maintain large panels of users include respondent.io, Newton X, PingPong, and TestingTime. Additionally, there are large proprietary panels. You may need to contract with a market research firm to access these panels.
In-house customer panels
There are benefits to creating a customer panel specific for your organization. This type of panel allows you to conduct user research on a hand-picked set of customers who may be specific to your product or industry. There are setup, recruitment, management, and maintenance costs associated with internal customer panels.
Compute resources
You might need to use compute resources for your usability studies and benchmarks. I work in Azure at Microsoft. For me these might include virtual machines, Azure Kubernetes service clusters, or storage accounts that participants use during research projects.
Usability lab rentals
After three years of disuse during the COVID pandemic, usability labs may have aging equipment that needs to be replaced. You may need to pay rental fees on internal or external usability labs.
Research vendors
People in research vendor roles can be used to augment the work of user research employees. Research vendors may be hired to conduct specific benchmark or usability studies, or they may take on wider responsibilities. Vendors may also be hired in research operations roles to manage contracts, tool management, budgets, etc.
Outsourced studies
You might consider hiring professional user and market research firms for high-value, high-impact projects. If your research study needs a large number of participants, uses complex methodologies, or requires international participants (involving recruitment, localization, translation, and transcription), professional firms offer these specialized skills.
Travel
While travel and travel budgets are still limited for many organizations, I’m sure we all hope we can commence travel for customer visits, contextual inquiries, and in-person focus groups and interviews soon.
Analyst reports
Many analyst firms produce reports that contain excellent information such as market size, growth forecasts, adoption pace, sales, market share, etc. These reports are typically quite expensive. Combining analyst information with your own primary research can create richer insights. Some analyst firms in the technology sector include IDC (International Data Corporation), Forrester, and Gartner.
Conclusion
I encourage you to advocate for research budgets and budget transparency in your organization. If you receive a request to conduct a durable, impactful project, ask for budget to help conduct it.
