- After a golden age where UXR teams grew in size, UX Researchers are now strongely impacted by economic layoffs
- The author tries to go beyond the usual “they (stakeholders) don’t get it!” as blaming others might be too easy. Instead, he wonders why UXR business value is still so weak after +15 years.
- For him, UXR is too focus on “middle-range research” that encompasses “user understanding and product development”. Basically, this is the type of research that wants to know How do users think/feel about X functionality/activity? What are the concerns or challenges with Y Why are users using/not using Z feature?
- But why are we stuck in this middle-range research you might ask? Because they bring lukewarm results that stakeholders can interpret to their advantage, to fit their agenda.
- He then claims that “understanding users is necessary to develop products” is a lie we tell to ourselves.
- Soooo, what can we do (according to him)? Leave middle-range research behind. Focus on macro-research (something we call “strategic research” here and there) instead. This type of research is “business first and future first”, things that executives love. However, that would mean that UX Researchers are equipped and trained to talk the business language.
Highlights (if any)#
“How is it possible to be so busy and yet not delivering enough business value?”
“Middle-range findings are usually not specific enough. They tend to be too general and descriptive, even when a researcher does an amazing job communicating. They’re hard to turn into specific recommendations and thus easy to poke holes in or ignore. They are most likely to trigger the post-hoc bias, which invokes the stereotype that researchers work for months only to tell us things we already know.”
“Modern data science has given everyone confidence they can pick winners without research. Just run an A/B test! Right or wrong, that’s how it often works these days.”
“Product managers love to ask for middle-range research that they can use to justify decisions they’re reluctant to make on their own. UX designers love to ask for middle-range research because it fits their model of what a proper design process should look like. Executives love to ask for the middle-range because they don’t really understand what UX Research is for, and it helps them do performative user-centeredness. In the end they will decide based on their own opinions.”
“Low-level, technical UX research isn’t always sexy, but it drives business value. When research makes a product more usable and accessible, engagement goes up and churn rates go down. Companies need that for the bottom line. Users get a better product. Win-win.”
“As a discipline we need to stop talking so much about story-telling and narratives. More important than that is learning to speak plainly and compellingly about the business and the product, in language that executives identify with and love.”