Why bother with User Research?

As a Digital Consultant with a special interest in UX research, I was often asked what the point of user research was. I got that question from my colleagues, who often just proposed a research phase as a standard package because the tender specs asked for it. And we got the same question from clients, who were not quite sure if they needed this phase in their project.

In a digital consulting or design project, user research can have a number of different purposes, and it helps both the client and the consultant to be aware of these before deciding to invest the resources needed for a meaningful research phase.

The User Perspective

The most obvious purpose of user research is to find out more about the client’s customers – the users of their product or consumers of their service. Most clients will appreciate that knowing their target audience’s needs and expectations is important for designing products and services that meet these needs. But very often, the client assumes that they already know what their users want. Or, for one reason or another, they have a captive market, and a good user experience is seen as nice to have but low priority.

In such cases, the client tends to have a predetermined idea of the form the product should take and just needs to have it built. In this situation, more often than not, any user research findings are unlikely to have much impact on the final design, so it may appear a waste of time to conduct that research. However, the following are some other reasons to persist with at least some form of user research.

The Client Perspective

‘The client’ usually is more than one person, so they rarely have one monolithic view on a product. In the requirements gathering phase of any project the different views and expectations of the client team need to be consolidated and reconciled, and this is where the user perspective can come in useful, too.

Understanding the views of some actual users – independently from the client – helps the consultant to put the client’s requirements in a broader context. With that knowledge, there may then be opportunities to ‘refine’ or ‘focus’ the client’s direction based on insights from user research.

The Stakeholder Perspective

A digital product commonly has a range of stakeholders that do not fall neatly into the ‘client’ or ‘user’ categories. These may be service partners, content contributors, or internal users and administrators. Because these parties are not part of the client team, their voice may not be heard in the requirements gathering, unless that specifically includes a ‘stakeholder research’ component. Including them in the user research can help close that gap.

The Designer Perspective

The designers and developers of a digital product are typically not very familiar with a client’s business when they first set out on a project. The client’s brief will provide them an introduction to the product or service they are to design, but then they have to rely on the requirements gathering and user research to learn more about the task at hand and who they are designing for.

The more different perspectives inform the designer’s understanding of the product, the better their design can be expected to meet all the stakeholders’ needs. Even if the extent of that improvement is limited to the design of the user interface and minor user experience details that can be adjusted while remaining within the client’s predefined specifications, that may be worth the effort to make the final product as user friendly as possible.

Weighing off the costs and benefits

A full-fledged user research plan is only meaningful if the client is genuinely interested in the user perspective and open to designing their product or service around user needs. But even when that is not the case, we may still proceed with some research to realise one or more of the other benefits discussed. Or there may be scope to advocate for the users and sway the client, although that may be another project in its own right.

Every project and every client will have their unique set of circumstances and considerations. For some engagements, it will be worth proposing a holistic user research package, while others may call for a reduced research scope that can still provide some useful insights. And sometimes it may actually make sense to recommend no research at all, to avoid wasting resources. However, we should make that call only after considering all the potential benefits of elucidating not only the user perspective, but also those of the client, stakeholders and designers.

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Andy Giger is an Insight Facilitator with a background in neuroscience, science communication and customer experience design. He is exploring perspectives as a researcher, communicator and artist alike.