Why UX Research Repos Fail at Democratizing Insights

The Key Factors of Successful User Research

McKinsey created a design index that has shown “the potential for design-driven growth is enormous in both product- and service-based sectors because the market disproportionately rewards companies that truly stand out from the crowd.” This translates into a 2X–3X multiplier in company revenues and shareholder total returns. (By design, they mean “the process of understanding user needs, … then creating products and services to meet those needs. This covers physical, digital, and service design, and is not just about aesthetics.” For the purposes of this article, I’ll use the term user research to refer to this field because it’s less ambiguous.)

According to McKinsey, the four most important qualities that drive an overall design orientation are the following:

• analytical leadership—This kind of management approach looks at design performance as strictly as revenues and costs.
• user experience—This is somewhat self-explanatory. Companies that excel at User Experience break down internal barriers between physical, digital, and service design and have a holistic view of where design can make a difference.
• cross-functional talent—Successful organizations break down functional silos and make user-centric design everyone’s responsibility.
• continuous iteration—Continuously checking in with clients and iterating a mix of qualitative and quantitative research is key.

(If you’re interested, you can check your company’s design index in comparison to those of over 300 companies by taking this survey.)

Thanks to McKinsey, we now have a blueprint of what an organization must do to excel in the field of User Experience. But this is easier said than done because the way in which companies organize user research needs to adapt. The formalized research-plus-repo approach goes against two of the four success criteria of McKinsey. As a separate silo, research can never be cross-functional. Neither can it be continuous when it focuses on discrete projects that are driven by ad-hoc product-management needs.

The Solution: Collaboration

The alternative is collaborative user research: involving internal stakeholders who are not part of the user-research team in the user research process—especially having them participate in customer-facing interviews and discussions. This solves many problems right off the bat—for example:

• There is no need to share insights after the fact because the people who would be consuming them are hearing them from the client firsthand.
• There is no delay in the information flow. Stakeholders hear the clients’ needs and problems when they say them out loud.
• In-person interactions also build empathy toward customers and makes it harder for management to brush off the insights because of their effects on the bottom line.
• Ideally, analyzing raw interview data and gleaning insights from them is also a collaborative process, so people in different departments and disciplines can interpret the input together. There is no possibility of separate interpretations because the team is aligned.

Jared Spool is a high-profile promoter of collaborative user research. He is a usability, software, design, and research expert, having worked in the field of usability and design since 1978—before the term usability related to computers.

In his article titled “Attaining a Collaborative Shared Understanding,” Jared differentiates between contractual shared understanding and collaborative shared understanding. In the contractual approach, clearly defined and documented tasks and deliverables such as wireframes, design guidelines, and user-interface specifications act as a recipe for the stakeholders’ implementing the designs. This is the formalized, old-school way of doing user research. The major benefit of this approach is that it’s good at predicting the resources that are necessary for implementation to create the final output. On the other hand, such manuals are open to interpretation and can create a mismatch between the intent of the designer—or user researcher—and the final execution. Manuals are also static. The collaborative approach doesn’t remove stakeholders from the design process, but instead keeps these two groups working in constant, close interaction with one another. They define the spirit of the design rather than the actual output and produce great designs at the cost of inaccurate predictions about deadlines and resources.

Jared argues that exposure hours are the solution. This is the time researchers spend in face-to-face meetings with clients and company stakeholders from outside research. He recommends spending at least two hours every six weeks in client-facing interactions. His views very neatly tie into the conclusions from the interviews my team conducted at Airtime, as well as McKinsey’s four factors determining design success.

To demonstrate how easy it is for an organization to implement a continuous, collaborative research practice, we’ve created a Collaborative UX Research Playbook that summarizes the key steps to setting up such a practice and lists some tools that make your life easier.

Conclusion

Leading corporations such as Atlassian are already using exposure hours daily in their research practice. Stakeholders such as product managers and engineers not only attend customer calls but can observe how customers interact with their product, ask them questions directly, and do postmortems after sessions with researchers.

It is incredible to see how the simple idea of direct client exposure kills five birds with one stone. It allows continuous design iteration instead of your having to run discrete projects. It lowers costs. It makes information flow almost instantaneous. It builds organizational empathy toward the client. It pushes management toward more customer-focused decisions.

All of this makes customers happier and more loyal, which drives revenues. If well-capitalized market leaders are embracing collaborative research, why wouldn’t you?