BLOG

3 things you can do today to get more impact from UX research

November 22, 2022

Not seeing as much traction from your org’s UX research as you’d like? Whether you have a team of career/pro researchers, or research is run by designers or PMs*, you’ll want to ensure research is having the maximum impact, particularly when teams are running lean. Here’s how.

1. Prioritize like crazy

Only take on research projects for the top business priorities. There will always be more questions than can be answered with existing resources, and prioritization becomes even more important when teams are running super lean. But this doesn’t mean every study needs to be big in order to be “strategic” — a lean usability study run in 2–3 days can be super strategic if it identifies why you’re seeing a drop in a key area of your experience.

One challenge to prioritizing heavily is that researchers hate to say no when their colleagues ask for help. If you don’t have a research manager or research ops specialist who can triage responses, it can seem faster for a researcher to just run the study the team is desperately asking for. That’s where the next tip comes in.

2. Take a fresh look at existing insights

Your researchers don’t have to respond with a flat “no” when they can take a fresh look at existing insights and pull out relevant findings the team can use. We sometimes waste time and resources running repetitive studies, often because teams think their use case is special when in reality it very much resembles the situation another team was in a couple of months ago when a similar study was run.

Here’s an example. The app team runs a study to determine the best format (a list or side-by-side) for users to compare similar items and make a decision about which to purchase. A month later, the mobile web team wants to know whether a list of items or side-by-side is best for users to compare similar items and feel confident to make a purchase decision. The mobile web team insists theirs is a special use case and a new study is needed. But both the user task (comparing similar items to get to a decision) and footprint (mobile) were identical.

This example demonstrates the value of sharing knowledge within your organization, and this kind of general question about how to design general consumer purchase experiences has been studied by multiple companies and white papered over time, leading to best practices we see across the web (like, ahem, that side-by-side table comparing like items the last time you shopped at Amazon). Fresh research won’t likely add much.

The research is being requested so the team can make an informed decision, not because they want to run another study. Often insights can be gleaned from similar studies where the situation may not be 100% the same but so similar that the benefit of running fresh research does not outweigh the time that would be spent getting to something the team can launch. What I call a “B+” comparison. So start by asking what is already known about the question at hand. Has anyone on the team studied a similar (if not exactly the same) question recently? Is the data available through secondary research, sources like Baymard or Mintel.

In larger orgs with hundreds of researchers, it can be tricky to know who’s run something relevant in the past, but in smaller orgs with a handful of researchers it’s easier to stay abreast of overall findings. Which leads to the next step …

3. Track insights and impact

There’s a lot of conversation about research repositories. You can spend good money and get something fancy, and if you have a very large team that might be exactly what you need. But even if all you do is post all of your research reports onto a wiki, you’re making those insights available for all to see in a very lightweight but incredibly valuable way.

And while you’re at it, be sure you have a way to track the eventual impact of the work. What decisions were made as a result of the research? How were business metrics improved after updating the design based on research findings? How did the team benefit by learning more about your core users by participating in the research? There are so many ways to track impact, depending on what’s valuable to your org. Demonstrating impact is what’ll tie your work back to business objectives, ultimately showing the value of research activities beyond the pod.

Create a table with the following columns:

  • Title of the report

  • Author/Researcher’s name

  • Date of the report

  • Team/Pod name

  • Quick summary of the business question, what approach was taken, and what was found (1–2 sentences)

  • Keywords to make it easier to search later

  • Link to the report (which is hopefully stored in a team folder for longevity, not individual Google drives)

  • Impact of the research

Then, voila, you have a straightforward way to search past research and track the impact of every study.

* I want to be really clear that I’m very, very much in favor of having dedicated, trained researchers on the team (hello, researcher here). I recognize that realistically, there are often substantially fewer researchers on board than designers and product owners, but career researchers are invaluable, not just to run complex explicit studies but to help carry basic research activities forward regardless of who is gathering the insights.