User research is valuable because it accelerates your learning process, ultimately saving money and time on each project. However, demonstrating this value to stakeholders can be challenging, which often leads teams to defer research. While it requires an initial budget to initiate user research, it is truly an investment in the project’s overall success.
📊 If you need to demonstrate the value of user experience research (UXR) to your stakeholders, consider reviewing this article that outlines the four most common objections to conducting research, backed by solid statistics. This information can help you convince your team that research is worth the time, budget, and effort—even during uncertain economic times.
User Research Helps Build Better Products
Your team may be passionate about creating excellent work and genuinely attempting to understand user needs, but without direct conversations with users, you won’t be able to create the best possible product. Jared Spool, a renowned user researcher, shares a compelling story highlighting how even well-meaning teams can make critical mistakes without conducting research.
He once worked on the checkout process for an e-commerce site, where a login/registration form appeared after the user clicked “checkout.” The in-house team believed this setup would help repeat customers make purchases more easily. However, during usability testing, Jared discovered that users found the form frustrating. One user remarked, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.” Many repeat customers often struggled to remember their past purchases, leading to unnecessary registrations and password resets.
Jared recommended removing the login/registration page from the checkout process, which resulted in a 45% increase in completed purchases. This change translated to an additional $15 million in revenue in the first month alone, and over the course of the year, the company generated an extra $300 million in sales.
The lesson? Even if your team believes they are acting in the best interest of users, you won’t truly know until you obtain feedback from them. The additional step the team thought was facilitating the process was actually costing them significant revenue.
User Research Can Speed Up Your Product Development Process
It might seem counterintuitive that investing time in user research at the beginning of product development can actually save time later. However, understanding what you’re building and why can significantly reduce development time. According to the Interaction Design Foundation, investing in user experience (UX) and research can lead to substantial improvements later in the process.
“It is far less expensive to avoid designing a problematic product than to fix it later. When organizations invest in UX during a project’s initial phases, they can reduce product development cycles by 33% to 50%. This is crucial, as a one-fourth delay in bringing a product to market can lead to a 50% loss of that product’s potential profit.”
Although conducting user research at the start of a project may take some extra time, it will ultimately save time later by clarifying what your customers want and need. Research indicates that developers typically spend around 50% of their time on avoidable rework, which could often be mitigated by conducting initial research. Given that developers earn an average of $36 per hour, this wasted time can represent a significant financial loss, especially in projects with high uncertainty.
For instance, if you’re building a new website and it takes developers an estimated 40 hours to complete, any usability mistakes could require an additional 20 hours for fixes, resulting in at least $720 in unexpected costs. This time and money could have been more effectively utilized for preliminary research and other projects.
Choosing the Right Metric to Demonstrate the Value of User Research
Quantifying the value of qualitative activities like user research can be difficult, but you can simplify the process by establishing clear metrics that your research will impact.
Start with stakeholder interviews to learn about the metrics that matter most to them. These interviews can provide insight into their expectations for the project, their views on product development and research, and the outcomes they desire. Understanding these expectations will help you address any excuses given for sidelining research, such as “we don’t have time for that right now” or “we already know what our customers want.”
By conducting stakeholder interviews, you can uncover the underlying reasons for their hesitations and develop strategies to effectively demonstrate the value of user research tailored specifically to their needs.
First, you need to consider who the users are that you’re trying to help. To make this more concrete, let’s explore this section with a specific project example. Imagine we are a website that provides pet supplies. The team has received complaints about how challenging it is to update payment information on our site, so they have decided to launch a project to address this issue.
In this scenario, our diagram would look something like this:
Take a moment to visualize what this would look like for your project. It should be straightforward and easy to understand. The goal of this exercise is to identify the core problem and understand how the user fits into the overall picture, rather than outlining the entire project.
Metrics should be specific, normalized, comparable, and actionable.
Now we can tackle the more complex issue: how do we define a metric that our research will improve before we have created anything? Thankfully, we have already conducted stakeholder interviews and hopefully understand what this project should achieve. This is an excellent starting point for identifying a metric that can demonstrate the value our research adds to the project.
Returning to our online pet supply store example, if our goal is to make it easier for users to update their payment information on our site, the metric should show that this task is now easier to complete than it was previously. In this case, a suitable metric might be the percentage of users each week who are able to update their payment information in less than 30 seconds.
This metric is specific because it precisely defines what we are measuring. It is normalized, as it is a percentage of the total, meaning that even with a significant increase in users, the metric will remain unaffected. It is comparable because we collect it weekly, allowing us to track progress over time without becoming overwhelmed by data. Finally, it is actionable, as we can take steps to encourage users to complete the task in under 30 seconds.
Using this framework for setting metrics helps you avoid vanity metrics, such as simply tracking the number of users changing their payment information, which may only increase as your user base grows. It also clarifies what to look for in a metric that definitively communicates value to your team and stakeholders.
Presenting the Value of Your User Research to Your Team
After conducting your research and measuring your metric, it’s time to present your findings to your team. This is the stage in the process where others on your team can see the significance of the research. So, let’s explore what makes a great research report.
