Creating Alignment Between UX Research and Your Company for Impact and ROI

Published:

September 25, 2024

Last Updated:

September 25, 2024

The need for user research and design professionals to connect their work’s value to the larger business’ goals is paramount to the future of the field, says Devin Harold—a design and UX leader whose career has included roles at companies such as Capital One and Verizon.

Devin shares advice for leaders and practitioners on ways he’s found success, creating influence and sustained impact in the process.

Editor’s note: This is adapted from a conversation between User Interviews’ Lead UX Researcher Morgan Mullen and Devin Harold.

📺 Stream this fireside chat.

How’d we get here?

Devin maintains we cannot continue to rely on our craft alone. Instead, we must also grow in comfort with situating and translating our work into business value for the company; tying insights and designs to its language and needs. UX is vital, but it’s not enough to simply “do” it. We have to advocate for it, too.

It’s important to note that UX research is not alone in this development. Devin notes that over 20 years ago, these same questions around value and metrics of alignment were being asked of marketing.

However, there are two differences, according to Devin:

1. There is a lot of variety in disciplines that feed user experience roles

The UX community draws folks from all over, from librarians and architects to industrial designers and social scientists. And although that variety has many benefits, one consequence is the lack of consistency in knowledge and toolsets. No two UXRs are drawing from the same corpus of knowledge. This has been compounded by the notion that anyone “can do” user research—at least some aspects of it.

2. There is a misalignment between UX research and business needs

UX research has developed a habit of attracting eyes and interest to the work, instead of linking the work to ongoing business needs, decisions, and pain points from the start. Although it’s important to design new features based on user feedback, we should not be doing that just to say we did so. Instead, we should be assessing the outcomes of value to the business and asking how our work—projects, tests, results—can influence them.

“Know your business really well, know your place in the business, and then tie your work to those business outcomes…and be sure you identify ways of measuring those outcomes.”

These developments have made for a diverse community of practitioners committed to various elements of the craft, but who can often feel isolated—siloed—from the pulse of the company in which they function. In short, many UX professionals feel invisible to their org, constantly battling for attention, resources, and time to put their craft to work

Devin believes that, like marketing before, we have an excellent opportunity to create stickiness for our work through a focus on connecting UX practices to business needs. These needs might sound different depending on your company or industry, but in general they revolve around creating, converting, expanding, and retaining revenue opportunities.

📺 Watch: Connecting UX research to revenue.

Ways to align UX research to the business

Ask questions and investigate

Devin’s first action item is exploratory research. Specifically, investigating—via question asking or desk research—the inner working of your product, company, and wider business.

A UX professional should be able to answer questions like:

What are the priorities of your group or business unit?
How are those priorities tracked or measured?
Where can you go to glimpse the progress of those priorities?
What is happening in your industry or among competitors?

Answers to those questions should naturally lead a user researcher to then ask, “How do my work activities connect to those priorities?” Getting a clear answer to this question is, according to Devin, step one.

Where should they look? A few good places to start include:

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) documentation
Product roadmaps
Quarterly earnings calls (for publicly-traded companies)

“Delivering an insight report…is not enough. A core part of our job is driving business outcomes, not driving research itself. Research is a means to better business outcomes.”

These all give a UX researcher frameworks for structuring our project activities. Our insights, Devin says, should plug into—via clarifying options, making decisions easier, or reducing pain points—these business elements.

Listen to Devin on creating a research strategy ⤵️

Identify and build cross-functional partnerships

UX research cannot exist in a silo. It needs to plug into other teams’ work, helping them to reach their goals and solve their problems. The more you know about the motivations, work habits, and preferences of your stakeholders, Devin says, the better partner you can be. And the better partner you can be, the more impact and—eventually—influence you’ll create.

Devin recommends treating your own team, even if it’s a team-of-one, like a business itself, with your stakeholders as customers. Are you anticipating their needs? If not, what should change? Are you sourcing feedback from them, attempting to glean action-oriented insights to help you?

📖 Read how to start building stronger stakeholder relationships.

Many of the skills that make user researchers excellent stewards of experiences on behalf of customers are the same that can make us excellent partners for our stakeholders. Just as we should be able to describe what motivates a customer to engage with a product, so too should we be able to describe how our stakeholders think and what we can offer them.

This ultimately leads to a research function that not only delivers project work, but amplifies and matures the practice of research in an organization over time. This provides an understanding of the value of UX research, increasing opportunities for business impact.

Find (or create) a UX case study

Sometimes it can be difficult, even with business metrics and good stakeholder partnerships, to get time with a stakeholder or budget for a project. In these cases, Devin suggests building a case study based on your past work, creating a bright line between the research activities you did with the business outcome (decision or revenue related) that was affected by it.

“Almost as important as having a case study is having partner alignment on its value. That way, even when you’re not in the room, someone can speak to the impact your research work had on their goals or needs. Without alignment, you won’t be building influence.”

The case study doesn’t have to be earth-shattering in scale or size. The most important thing is that the problem or opportunity—relevant to the business—is shown as having been influenced directly or indirectly by your UX research activities. This can be as small as a usability test (“Hey look! We didn’t misuse resources on that prototype!”) or more intensive like customer profiles (“My exploratory research led us to prioritize this feature over that one based on a more complete picture of our customer.”).

Can’t find an internal UX case study? Some UX case studies are presented as part of conferences or in communities online. Look for something in your industry or a similar product. Even an external case study is better than none at all.

That case study, says Devin, is your foothold to more stakeholder conversations, where you’ll inevitably learn other decisions they need to make that UX research can help inform. And that decision can be tracked to a business outcome that you can now say your work has influenced, giving you another case study (and maybe a stakeholder champion, too).

🎨 Learn how to build a UX portfolio, including a case study.

The three skills that create lasting UX impact

Devin thinks that in order to meet this current moment, UX professionals should add three skills to their toolkits: 1) compromise, 2) communication, and 3) collaboration.

These, he says, are vital at the higher levels of any organization, when leaders are vying for budget, resources, and headcount.

“If your leadership and stakeholders don’t see the same picture you do when making a case for UX, that’s a moment to collaborate with them, communicate your perspective, and show compromise on what you believe should happen. That’s not a moment to be rigid.”

Instead of talking at our partners and stakeholders, we should be influencing them with reason, persuasion, and balanced compromise. We will need to give some to get some—conducting short-term usability tests in order to eventually work on a larger exploratory study, for example.

📖 Read: Develop these skills for UX research success.

These “soft” skills will help us foster relationships and create the cognitive space to “sell” user research, which we very much have to do. Claiming we are surfacing empathy on behalf of the user is—although noble—not enough in today’s business climate.

Yes, we should advocate for the ethical treatment of customers via sound design principles, and we must do so in the language of our business partners. Only then, says Devin, will we—like marketing—become a core part of any successful business, securing more runway, resources, and recognition to sustain the discipline for decades to come.