Communicating the Value of UX as a Researcher

Invite your colleagues to try out an interactive prototype themselves. Invite them to join research sessions with users. Invite your team and stakeholders to experience the designs themselves and let them slip into the users’ shoes. Or at least bring them a step closer to immersing themselves into the user’s experience. Just as when you're doing the research yourself, experiencing a design and seeing users experience a design first hand rather than reading a report helps to understand a finding. Without first-hand experience, it can be challenging to communicate and transmit the value of UX as a researcher.

As researchers, it’s crucial to have empathy for your audience. Depending on your context, including numbers can be a helpful component of UX value communication, especially when there’s already a strong quantitative culture. So when you have qualitative and quantitative data, try to share both. This can help you to convey the value of UX research in general. Abby, for example, does this by creating a TL;DR-overview for research projects.

TL;DR means “too long; didn’t read” which demonstrates the advantage of preparing overview sheets: They allow a glimpse of research insights to make people interested and learn more about the research findings and, therefore the users. Here’s an example of how this looks like for a usability test:

Research TL;DR overview example by Celonis

But be careful that you stick to valuable information and don’t fall into the trap of quantifying qualitative research in any case.

Double down on the emotional depth of UX research findings

UX researchers are often urged to quantify their findings - we will examine where this push towards quantification comes from, learn about strategies to cope with it, and share lessons we've learned so far.

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When working in a company setting, a dashboard can be a helpful way to increase the visibility of user research. At Celonis, Abby introduced a digital dashboard that presents different research indicators, like:

• a calendar view that shows when the team has direct contact with users in research sessions

• numbers around current UX activities (for example, five moderated usability tests conducted), involved users, and involved researchers

• references to internal project planning tools

Here's a glimpse of what that looks like for Abby and her team:

UX dashboard example by Celonis

The creation is a fluid process, and you can create and enhance the dashboard in several stages. Start by maintaining the information manually and making it part of daily/weekly team routines like Abby. This ensures that the whole team is aligned and aware of the UX efforts.

Another promising technique to communicate the value of UX as a researcher is by helping everyone around you to learn about UX research and UX in general because “UX” has become quite a buzzword. Every conversation about UX, UX research, and user research takes you a step forward. Participating in and giving internal lightning talks (for example at brown bag sessions) or sharing research approaches with another team, will help you raise awareness of UX research.

This tip is relevant for all researchers who find themselves in a setting where non-research colleagues will go out and conduct some research themselves. Of course, the required research skills can't be learned just by anyone with a tutorial. But you as a researcher can guide your colleagues to conduct research more successfully by establishing internal descriptions, templates, and best practices. By this, you will give your colleagues research guidance, and therefore guide the whole research practice at your organization. Don't get overwhelmed; start with your most common research method and critical remarks, and let this grow over time.

Getting new joiners in your organization in touch with user research right from the beginning is another component to communicate the value of UX as a researcher. When there's the chance, make user research and learnings from researching the users' experience a fixed element of onboarding programs or onboarding resources that new employees receive right from the start.

Communicating the value of UX as a researcher can be tough. But there are some techniques that help you to convey the value of UX in your organization. Here's a summary:

1. Let people experience it first hand

2. People love numbers (so include numbers you have)

3. Increase visibility with a UX dashboard

4. Raise awareness with talks

5. Establish a research blueprint and best practices

6. Create touchpoints from onboarding on

Stay patient, continue communicating the benefits and necessity of UX research step by step and make it a part of regular company events (like quarterly plannings). Even if it’s a slow process, it will be rewarding and powerful when the values are shared widely, not just by the UXers.