There is a lot of talk of an economic downturn and companies are readying themselves for it. At times like these, I think UX researchers are key to companies being resilient if those researchers have a laser focus on what should be our focus at all times—targeted, well-crafted, and impactful research.
Organizations hire researchers to make their products, services, and overall operation more effective and successful at achieving the objectives of the organization. For-profit organizations have objectives such as client satisfaction, revenue, and profit. Not-for-profit organizations have objectives like achieving the mission of the organization, satisfying the needs of the members, etc. A resilient researcher will focus on doing their work to optimize the organization’s objectives while fulfilling their purpose to improve the lives of the users that they serve.
What I’m discussing here should make the organization you work for more successful and more effective at weathering an economic downturn. In fact, I believe that research is critically important for organizations to rely on especially during difficult times. It’s the way of drawing a direct line between the users and the organization’s success. However, great research has its limits in terms of what it can do for an organization. For example, it can’t correct structural and fundamentals problems in an organization and we’re seeing those factors leading some companies laying off staff including researchers. I so feel for the researchers being let go from those companies.
Targeted Research
Most organizations don’t have all the researchers they need to do everything they’d like to do. Even if they did, they’d still need to provide focus and prioritizations for the work.
How should you decide what to do research on in an organization? Researchers at many of the companies I’m aware of don’t have a systematic way of determining the focus and priority of the work of their researchers. Some just do the research that their design team needs to be done which is usually just evaluative research. But solely doing evaluative research may not be the most effective use of a researcher’s time.
I believe that researchers and their research managers, should they have them, should use their research skills to determine what to work on. They should do structured interviews with the leadership stakeholders in their company or organization, using questions like “what keeps you up at night regarding your product/service portfolio and its relation to the success of the organization?” Once you hone in on a part of the portfolio that requires attention, dig into what aspects of the product/service that needs the most attention. Should design be the focus? Is there a greater need to identify unmet needs? Or, is the experience of discovering, learning about, trying, and buying what needs attention? Asking questions like these will ensure that you have an understanding of what the organization most needs help with to drive greater financial and organizational success.
Well-Crafted Research
Once you have that organization prioritization perspective, you can now decide what UX method or methods would be best to address the needs of the organization and who might be best to carry out the research. You should stay up-to-date on the field too in order to make sure that your work can benefit from the latest thinking and approaches. And don’t necessarily use the UX methods the way they were first designed. Feel free to innovate so that you can have a laser-focus on what you need to learn with the research.
Impactful Research
If you’ve done your work to determine what research to carry out that’s aligned with the organization’s priorities and you’ve chosen well-crafted methods, you’re well on your way to impact. In order to be truly impactful, you also need to address a series of “yeah-buts” that make those you’ll be providing the results to lack confidence in your research unless they’re dealt with. The yeah-buts could take the form of the following:
Sample
You used internal users
You used a very small sample
Your sample isn’t representative of the target population
Rigor
You seem to have used leading questions
How do I know that your results should be followed?
That bar in the bar-chart looks different from the others to me
Communication
Do you really expect me to read a 50 page document?
This all looks like expert mumbo jumbo to me
What should I do with this?
Not addressing these potential yeah-buts could compromise how impactful your results will be. How do you address these yeah-buts? Well, let’s consider each category in turn.
Sample
Make sure that you’re using a sample that is representative of population that you’re intending to understand with your research, meaning age, gender, race, social economic status, culture, country, etc. Also, ensure that you’re getting a large enough sample for what type of study you’re doing.
Rigor
Anyone can ask a question and get an answer. However, if you’re doing UX research right, you’re going to be making sure that you’re not asking leading questions and that you’re making sure to guard against biases and even to evaluate them. You should also be balancing qualitative and quantitative analyses of results and using statistics where appropriate. And indicate which differences are significant and which aren’t without getting into details like p-values. Those are for you and your UX research colleagues to discuss but will only confuse the non-experts you’ll be presenting to.
Communication
Empathize with the recipient of your UX research results. They’re typically busy people and don’t have the patience to read a 50-page document or listen to a two-hour presentation. Net it out! Do the hard work of determining which insights are the most important and then communicate those in a succinct manner using the vocabulary of the recipient of your work. Give them the assurance that you’ve done rigorous work by briefly describing your methods of collecting the data and how you analyzed them. But don’t overdo it! Don’t nerd out in the way that you might when presenting to your discipline colleagues. Also, make sure that you clearly state what implications of your research has and what change needs to happen to address the findings.
Tracking Impact
In addition to the yeah-buts, many researchers think they’re done when they’ve presented their results. Your research is only done when the results have had their impact. The organization didn’t hire you to carry out studies, they hired you to make a difference in the organization’s success. It’s part of your responsibility to track impact, along with your manager. Some findings may not have their impact for some time, like a release from now if it’s a software product or app. You should still track your recommendations, even it they are in a status like having been added to the product roadmap but not yet implemented.
Sharing Your Knowledge
Share anything you learned when recruiting participants, any innovations in methods, any analysis approaches that were novel, or methods of sharing and/or tracking your results. You should share what you learned with your discipline colleagues at your current company as well as with the wider community of UX researchers outside your own organization.
Increasing your impact and sharing your knowledge both should contribute to your personal internal and external eminence which is often also related to career advancement inside and outside your current organization.
Using the guidance I’ve provided in this post should make you more resilient as a UX researcher but should also help the organization you work for more successful and resilient during uncertain economic times.