Why user research needs to evolve

As we continue to approach an inflection in the evolution of user research, it feels important to unpack its expansive role in catalyzing innovation and propelling businesses forward. While grappling with economic turmoil and an increasingly volatile market, you cannot afford to miss out on the potential for research to be at the forefront of strategic innovation and foresight.

In recent months, what many have understood as a “reckoning” of sorts needs to not only account for shifting market needs and expanded capabilities of artificial intelligence tools, but also factor into how user research is positioned within organizational contexts and how its relevance is communicated across the stakeholder ecosystem. Although there are variations in the role and significance of user research across different domains and organizations, there are a few underlying threads that feel important to highlight as they underscore our approach to research and community engagement.

Before we get any further, I invite you to reflect on the emphasis placed on the idea of a user as this shapes how you perceive and imagine stakeholder relationships. I would argue that the construction of users is rooted in a type of objectification that allows you to reduce people’s experiences down to a set of user interactions and reinforces existing power dynamics. This also assumes a kind of passive engagement where the user lacks agency or active consent in shaping their own experience.

The Emergent Futures Lab articulates how, “Becoming a ‘user’ or a ‘human’ separates us into being a unique, complete-and-whole-in-itself entity facing a neutral world of ‘choices’ of what to use to fulfill our supposedly objective ‘needs’ and our less objective ‘wants’.” This phenomenon then extends to research where the goal becomes to assess these desires in order to drive “user-centric” outcomes.

An integral part of this conversation that I feel is often neglected is how dominant cultural practices of research reproduce coloniality. In particular, you can notice how the concept of objectivity in user research is inextricably linked to the objectification of research subjects under colonial paradigms. To further elaborate, I am suggesting that you might shift your research practices to be more relational. That requires a mindset shift in being able to see users as active stakeholders and shapers of the overall design experience.

What is the role of user research?

I think it’s really important to consider how user research is commonly perceived. Increasingly, user researchers are seen as the “advocates” for users in a business context and are often tasked with bringing the “human-centered” perspective to design and development. This creates an environment where user research is siloed and eventually becomes positioned as a nice-to-have afterthought rather than an essential part of business strategy and innovation.

Judd Antin, in an article titled “The UX Research Reckoning Is Here,” attributes this phenomenon to an overemphasis on middle-range research within recent years.

This responsibility also needs to fall on user researchers to better define and communicate their role and potential for impact. This is why I believe we need to recalibrate our research practices across multiple scales of transformation to ensure our work is actionable and feeds into various work streams to create meaningful impact.

Genevieve Conley Gambill in “A Farewell to UX Research” explains how focusing exclusively on the user experience can be limiting and also leaves a world of possibilities behind to boost potential impact. A key takeaway from Gambill is that “Research isn’t just about users, it’s about people. That can include non-users, potential users, lapsed users… but also people who won’t ever use the technology but are impacted by it in some way, shape, or form. And it’s also not just about people.”

How do you measure impact?

One significant challenge that inevitably plagues user research is the ability to measure its impact and justify the continued need for labor and investment. In contexts where it’s harder to measure how user research is creating value for the business, it becomes more susceptible to getting slashed. I feel a false dichotomy is often constructed when you position the focus on the user experience as being antithetical to business goals.

While there’s some truth to that in situations where profit is prioritized over user needs, you need to consider the complexity here when outcomes might not be immediately visible or measurable by conventional metrics. This shouldn’t diminish their impact but rather compel you to reconfigure how we assess success.

One of the contributing factors to highlight here is how user researchers are often closest to the user experience, which can subsequently lead to them being in a position to advocate for social impact and corporate responsibility. However, in order for this to be truly effective, it needs to seep throughout the organizational culture.

TB Bardlavens discusses how product equity has become a business imperative for the future of digital products. This is an important point to highlight because it points to an emerging culture of stakeholder engagement and brings forth an invitation to engage with “users” differently. Bardlavens explains how, “The reassessment of success is also a conversation about power; the power to influence policies, metrics, goals, and outcomes… it’s a provocation to interrogate leaders’ ability to articulate what guardrails exist, to be clear about the amount of risk they’re willing to take when balancing potential metric loss for societal gain.”

Where should user research go?

There’s a growing need to think expansively about user research and what its future looks like across product lifecycles, service ecosystems, and beyond. User research remains a critical aspect of design and innovation, but it’s facing a looming uncertainty. With that, there’s also a larger question of where user research belongs within organizational contexts.

Should it be coupled with design and user experience? Should it exist separately on its own? Frankly, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach here.

Regardless of where user research sits within an organization, I want to draw our attention to how we understand and approach research. In my work with Pause and Effect, we view research as a process of learning and responsible inquiry. A core aspect of research is building capacity for relational engagement.

Here, I feel organizations often fall short because despite investing in research, they struggle to see the fruits of their labor. Then the question of where user research should lie instead shifts to how we should engage with our stakeholders and what we want those relationships to look and feel like.

This is precisely why we need to intentionally invest in cultivating relationships, building trust, and practicing reciprocity within our research practices. In order for you to truly realize the potential of research, you need to see it as a collaborative process that grows and evolves over time. This needs to happen internally within the organization and externally within the community.

In order to get greater buy-in and support for research, it’s essential that people across different workstreams participate in the research process and allow that wealth of insight and knowledge to actively feed into their work and transform it. I want to emphasize that this is not a call to democratize research at the expense of specialized researchers who lead their craft. Rather, this is a recognition that in order for research to truly be impactful, it needs to be a relational practice.

Final thoughts

I think you really need to push beyond the idea of users and critically consider who is being impacted by and in turn shaping the work you’re engaged in. By cultivating relational practices for research, you’re inevitably leveraging the collective capacity for creativity and imagination that exists within your organizations and beyond.