QA #1: How do I convince my boss / team / client that UX research is worth it?

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To convince your team that UX research is worthwhile you need to help them understand how the insights you collect is a potential goldmine.Here are some of the most common objections I hear and how I overcome them.

  1. ‘Research is expensive’. Not really. It can be as simple as meeting with a handful of users to ask some well-planned questions.
  2. ‘Research is slow’. it can be done in just a few hours of getting together with a user and asking them some focused questions.
  3. ‘Research is hard’. To start, all you need is 3 questions to a targeted group of people: What’s working for you? What’s not working? How would you improve your experience if time and money were no object?
  4. ‘We know what we need to build’. I’ve been in situations where I worked with a specific product for years, only to have my beliefs completely shattered within five minutes of watching someone try and use the app. Challenge assumptions asap.
  5. ‘We can do it later’. Spend time with your users as a way to yield a deeper understanding of their needs before you start building. If you don’t you’ll be forced to spend money to figure out what’s going wrong, then spend money to work around the restraints in order to fix it.
  6. ‘Our users have been asking for X feature, let’s build it’. Feature requests can be incredibly broad. But it is the intricacies of the feature that hold the true value for the user. By consulting them, you can narrow down the specifics for what they want within the feature.
  7. ‘We’ve got analytics and data, we don’t need research’. Great! Research doesn’t replace analytics and data, it is another piece of the puzzle in identifying the problem and determining how to solve it.
  8. ‘We’ve had some people try our apps and tell us what they think, we’re good’.
    Good research never ends and the quality of the questions you’re asking matters.

The idea is not to just conduct UX research once and be done but to build it into your culture and refine the quality of the research as you go.

Read more here: How to Overcome 8 Common Objections to UX Research or read our ebook to learn more about running your own user testing sessions.