Specifically the value of UX/Product Design and User Research
State of UX conversations
It’s a hot topic – How to prove the value of UX design or user research. From my own experience, it’s probably the most consistently asked about topic in LinkedIn threads on or in various UX forums, panels and UX focused leadership talks. And the most common answers centre around “show the data!” – show the uplift in engagement metrics, conversion, or user verbatim. And yes, DO THAT.
But also (and here is where I get unapologetically spicy) FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Why is value so difficult to show?
Following the money
After over two decades of working in design, and the last few years design + research, I am still floored at how many UX practitioners don’t know “how to business”… They know about user insights, app reviews, NPS scores, and often the tiniest of shifts in engagement metrics from analytics, which is great and exceptionally helpful for them to execute their craft. They DON’T know how the company actually makes money and the impact their work, their tools, their org structures have on the money made or money saved by the company. Many don’t know about margins, commissions, rolling commercial deals, on platform advertising, on-platform third party tech costs , yadda yadda yadda…
Why does knowing any of this matter? Because every other billable discipline can trace their financial contributions to the company (e.g. commercial, product management) or their department’s output is so crucial to getting a product out into the world in definitive terms (e.g. tech).
Most UX departments don’t have access to (or, really, don’t follow up with relevant departments) on the financial impact of their work. In certain organisations, this might be tricky to deduce if the revenue streams are not reasonably straightforward, like an affiliate structure, or if the company’s analytical platform is a colossal mess, but most companies can draw a rough line between engagement and conversion metrics to current and projected revenue when a new feature or product at launched (at a minimum, the more major changes and big new things).
Mucking in on two tracks of work
Can’t get the financial numbers from the business to prove your discipline’s value? Time to muck-in, make friends and think with two brains.
Muck-in
Both design research can find themselves focused in one direction or another depending on company structure or priorities, but both the strategic/holistic and the tactical need to be in the field view. Often, the researchers on my team would get frustrated because they are either generating larger pieces of ethnographic research that nobody seems to either buy into or remember to implement or they are stuck in the weeds of “desk research” and evaluative testing and are missing the big picture. Designers would get burnt out with doing very tactical work all of the time, just wanting to tackle something innovative or visionary, but found taking big whacks of dedicated time to work on such things as either indulgent or “yet another task”.
This is where “dual track” comes in.
And I’ll use research as the example here: Think of how you can weave larger research questions into your tactical day-to-day. Use insights from the evaluative work to start collating bigger themes to research on a higher level. You need to work with your designers and PMs to ensure the users are present in the more tactical work – this is the one bit that can seem to be of value to those in the business that have low UXR maturity. But this is also your “in” for larger, holistic research and insights – the avenue to bring those pieces of work into execution. If you have the luxury of a massive research team, budget and the company behind you, you can take the months needed to create big, beautiful, fully validated reports. But often those are the ones that are ignored as they have sat outside of the day to day scrabble of delivery. Designers deal with similar issues around innovation beyond catching up with competitors.
Tackle the immediate alongside the long term
For research: What questions around mindsets and buying behaviour can you add to that survey around search functionality? Which video clips of tangential remarks from that user interview can you use to justify a larger line of inquiry? How can you simplify or delegate some tasks of tactical research that eat up extra time you could spend bringing those lofty insights down to earth to something immediately deliverable?
For design: Very similar issues from a design POV can be tackled in a similar way – for example, doing your sprint work alongside a North Star vision piece that keeps getting pushed off. When solving one user problem, how can you keep a hold of the ideas that are great for the future, but have to be scaled back today due to immediate constraints? (e.g. what we called “keeping in the bottom drawer” in advertising) How can you keep a repository of future UX ideas in a way that can be easily pulled together for a larger North Star piece in the future?
Make dedicated time a reality
At the moment, getting dedicated time to do anything that isn’t directly related to immediate delivery can seem like the most excessive indulgence (at least to those not in your discipline!), but trying to couch it in terms of aiding future revenue or cost savings terms can help a lot, especially if it’s taking up 10% or less of your team’s time. Don’t knock it, though 2-4 hours ain’t much, you can still do a lot! But knowing the state of the business financials will help reinforce your argument in terms the rest of the company prioritises and understands.
Make friends
Build the relationships to sell it through
It sounds easy, but it’s amazing how many people still don’t grasp this notion in real terms – you can’t influence anybody if you don’t know what drives them. UX practitioners will get all up in users’ business to figure out what makes them tick and how to best influence them to engage, yet often do not use these investigative skills on their own colleagues; don’t network outside of their immediate squads or peers. You can have the most useful insights and the most innovative designs – if you haven’t built the relationships, if you haven’t framed your pitch to address what your stakeholders and business partners find most important, you’ve wasted as stupid amount of time and effort. Make friends. Get to know people. Bring in those research skills to figure out how to marry commercial, company and user needs together.