How UX research can get a seat at the table — a case study
As UX researchers, we don’t always get a seat at the decision-making table alongside the technical and business-savvy people in the organization. I have identified six steps we can take to get our discipline that seat and I am going to use a research project that I completed a few months ago at Microsoft as a case study and an example of a time when I got a seat at the product planning table.
(Note: If my references to this research study seem vague or unclear at times, it is because I am bound by confidentiality and unable to share any identifying information about the product.)
1. Identifying opportunities
We need to be looking for business questions, all the time.
My product team’s goal was to increase the paid adoption of the product. They had telemetry data that showed them the adoption funnel, but it didn’t tell them the “why”:
- Why don’t developers who can benefit from our product try it?
- Why do some developers try our product once or twice but never come back?
- Why do some developers use our product to create applications for testing and internal use, but not for external, customer-facing side of their business?
We need to identify and create awareness for the unique value that UX research can bring to the table.
Finding answers to the “why” question is one of our superpowers as UX researchers. So, I jumped in and volunteered my expertise to help answer those questions. My product team was pleasantly surprised to hear that I was capable and willing to take this on.
2. Knowing the decision-making process
We need to know the who/when/how of decision making in our organization.
If we want to be part of the decision-making process, then we need to learn about how decisions are made, who makes them, and when.
We then need to take advantage of this knowledge to have greater impact.
When I embarked on this large scale research project in early September of last year, I planned to work on it on and off in between all the other, more tactical research that I had to do and present my findings at the end of December. But a little research into the planning process revealed that the product team was going to start their planning meetings in mid-October. If I wanted to have any impact on this planning period, I had to deliver my findings by that date, or else, all decisions would have been made without them.
3. Being flexible
We need to adjust and adapt our research plans to meet decision-making deadlines.
My original research plan looked something like this:
- Screener survey to go out to people from all stages of the adoption funnel, including non-users of our product [2 week]
- Qualitative interviews with at least 5 people from each of the 8 stages of the funnel (40 interviews to schedule, conduct, and analyze) [6 weeks]
- Quantitative survey to validate the qualitative findings (again, had to reach people from all stages of the funnel) [4 weeks]
- Deliver impactful findings in 12 weeks
The change in my timeline meant that I needed to cut this time down by two-thirds. So, I adjusted my research plan accordingly:
- Mixed methods survey to go out to people from all stages of the adoption funnel [4 weeks]
- Deliver impactful findings in 4 weeks, then identify areas that would need follow up research
We need to be flexible with our methods while maintaining integrity of our research.
Of course we never want to use the wrong method and provide the wrong data to our team, but within the thresholds of acceptable methods, there is no reason to be rigid and miss the opportunity to have impact on the business.
By using a mixed methods survey, I was able to provide a good mix of quantitative and qualitative data in a way that helped us answer the “why” questions in preparation for semester planning.
4. Maintaining engagement with stakeholders and partners
We need to ensure stakeholder buy-in by publicizing our research plans and asking for feedback.
The best way to reduce the chances of our findings getting rejected by our stakeholders is to get their buy-in in advance. We need to not only tell everyone about our research and our proposed plan, but also get them invested in it by asking for input and feedback. When stakeholders feel involved in creating the research plan, they are less likely to dismiss the findings.
We need to identify and closely collaborate with partners from engineering and PM teams.
I got a very senior PM to sponsor my research right off the bat. Once she saw the potential value that my research could bring to the table and how it could help the team make better planning decisions, she started advocating for this project and worked with me to remove some of my roadblocks.
I also had a PM partner, whom I met almost daily for this project. He helped me with everything from collecting the team’s assumptions and hypotheses to checking the technical language of the survey to tagging the qualitative data. Simply put, this research wouldn’t have been so successful and impactful without this partnership.
5. Delivering impactful results
We need to translate our insights into business-relevant priorities.
UX researchers are good at analyzing research data and synthesizing them into insights. To have impact on the business, we need to learn to use those insights to inform business-related priorities.
I was invited to present the findings of the study in the first hour of the planning offsite meeting. One of the findings I presented was the top 10 blockers that the 500 survey respondents identified for adopting our product. When we looked closely at these blockers, we noticed that 6 out of 10 were about the quality of the different aspects of the product, e.g., things were slow or didn’t work together well or didn’t handle their enterprise requirements and so on. This was exactly what the team needed to hear as they started their planning efforts. Without this research, the team would have focused on developing new features and functionalities in order to compete with our competition, but having seen these results, they decided to de-prioritize new features and spend most of their resources in the coming semester on improving the quality of our product.
6. Elevating the research discipline
We need to build on the work of other researchers and in turn, empower others to build on our work.
At Microsoft, in addition to our individual contributions, we are evaluated on how we leverage other people’s work to be successful and how we contribute to other people’s success. I believe that if we build on each other’s expertise and experience, learn from each other, and then pay it forward by sharing those learning with others, we can collectively elevate the UX research discipline. The more impact research has in an organization, the more its value will be known and the more likely that researchers will be given a seat at the table.
Thanks you Max Peterschmidt for sharing your funnel research at an internal Microsoft conference and giving me the idea to do this study. Also thanks to Brian, Christy, Serguei, and Kirsten for giving me feedback on my methods and this article. Thank you Colby and Daria!
In turn, I am sharing my learnings with the community through this article and other internal and external channels. If you have any questions about this or any other UX research related topics, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.
