UX Research Audit

Business Strategy <> UX Research Strategy

Across the dozens of clients and hundreds of projects we've worked on through the years, we find that the most successful are those whose Business Strategy clearly delineates a set of specific choices: who your products are for; what needs they satisfy; what customer questions they answer.

UX Research should focus on filling in those blanks, and helping you to form a strategy that is coherent and customer-centered. UX is not just what the product looks like - it's also a philosophy around how a business strategy is formed.

Likewise, once formed, your business strategy can then inform your UX Research team and its structure, and focus: with an audience and its needs identified, your UX Research can focus on generating product feature ideas that are centrally informed by your customers' needs. In the parlance of Jobs-To-Be-Done: your customers hire your product to do a job. Understanding the nuances of those jobs allows you to devise a product uniquely suited to

UX Research teams are not invoked, they evolve - often from a place of an initial pain point. Perhaps a disappoint product launch, or a competitor entering the market with a unique and appealing feature set serves as an impetus for a company to get more "customer focused."

From these reactionary beginnings, UX Research may focus on righting the wrong, fixing the problem, and easing a customer complaint. These are worthy starting points with much potential... if handled deftly.

Strategic thinking in general is hard; if a strategy is a set of choices, making those choices is rarely easy. Frequently they are choices between two options which seem quite equal and full of potential - two markets which may have much to offer, but are incompatible with eachother.

So too with UX Research strategy: curing a poorly-performing product feature through extensive usability testing takes time and effort; discovering new customer needs to satisfy is equally time consuming and complex. UX Research teams often grow in response to known problems, and even senior-level hires are expected to contribute to a growing backlog of product fixes.

Why look for new problems to solve, when there are already plenty we know about?

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