The Value of Research

Research makes every endeavor more successful. Why would you want to undertake an expensive digital project without doing your homework, or launch a product without testing it?

Some companies neglect to do research, and they end up regretting it. Why do they skip the research and dive right into product development, design, and even technical development? It may be a lack of awareness of the value of research, a skills gap, or perhaps because of misconceptions that research slows things down, or is too expensive. Let’s address these misconceptions.

Think of the time and money you could spend fixing things that are wrong with your digital product (or service offering) because you didn’t do up-front research, and didn’t test before launch. Not to mention the negative buzz from launching a failed product. Not doing research can be far more expensive than doing it.

Additionally, doing research ahead of a digital project can inform numerous aspects of the project—for instance, whether there’s a market and a price tolerance that will make building it a worthwhile venture. Increasingly, I'm seeing the research function in organizations move out of the user experience (UX) practice, so research can provide broader strategic direction about everything from a company's offerings, to whom they market to, to how they market (tactics and messaging). So, user research can have enormous strategic value beyond a particular project. For example, my "discovery research" ahead of web design projects is often broadly applicable and changes the way my clients define and approach their audiences, their brand identity, and their messaging.

If your concept and pricing pass muster, research can determine your audiences’ needs, motivations, and preferences related to your digital product. Research can also inform functional requirements, brand, information architecture and navigation, visual design, etc.--and help avoid missteps. So, doing research can help ensure that what you launch supports your target users’ needs and your company’s goals. Products must balance user and company needs to be successful.

But what about the cost of research? Thankfully, user research is extremely scalable, and I always counsel that—like chocolate—some is better than none.

Asking just three to five people to test a given website, mobile app, or other product can uncover the large majority of problems. Jakob Nielsen and Tom Landauer’s research found that testing with five participants would uncover 85% of problems in an interface without diminishing returns. That’s one day of research; surely you can take one day to make sure your digital project will succeed. And if you can run three rounds of tests at different junctures in a project, each with just five participants, then statistically speaking, you will have found all the problems with your interface.

In the context of a website design project, research activities such as surveys, interviews, and/or usability testing are important during discovery, as noted above. You should also employ research methods once you have navigation, design, and/or content to test, so you don't launch something that will be problematic for your target audiences and cost you lost leads and conversions.

Usability testing tools and techniques are adaptable, scalable, and can be self-guided (like tree tests and unmoderated sessions), so they can fit any reasonable project budget and timeline--and again, they are well worth the time and investment.

I have been engaged numerous times to help a client figure out why their website or app is not achieving its goals, and very often, I uncover problems that could have been avoided with a better understanding of the target audiences through research, and/or thorough testing during the design and development phases.

If you’d like to talk about how to reap the benefits of research in your organization, get in touch.