Defining Experience Research

If you search online, you can find several, often hard-to-understand definitions for what experience research is. In the Fruitful digital library, this definition is used: experience research is an applied science to understand how people perceive, use and build relationships with products and services. Experience research is an abstract, emergent field that combines people-focused science with technology development and product design.

Experience research is an applied science to understand how people perceive, use and build relationships with products and services.

You can categorize the vast, growing body of scientific pursuit into two buckets: as being general or applied science. General science focuses on understanding the complex and mysterious world around us. Its aim is to collect more knowledge, discover the laws of the universe — both social and physical, and understand the truth about it all.

On the other hand, applied science focuses more on problems, decisions, and solutions. Experience research is an applied science because takes general science ideas and applies them to product and business-facing problems. Examples of how various general science is applied are listed below.

Your challenge and aim as an experience researcher are to apply strategies and theories from relevant scientific fields to understand the various parts of the UX triangle. You use your learnings to help your stakeholders make more informed, evidence, people-centered decisions when designing products and services.

But does research really matter? How important is it to research when building products and services?

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Experience Research Strengths

Experience research can impact products in many ways. While it’s not good practice to guarantee what will happen as a result of research, you can educate stakeholders that the impact of any research study will be felt in one of three ways: becoming confident, becoming smarter, or a combination of both.

Let’s start with confidence. Research can help your stakeholders recognize and validate what they know to be good or smart product decisions. Removing this feature, updating this homepage, adding new payment options? Research can shed light on how good or bad those decisions are. Your stakeholders often strongly believe in their ideas and vision for the product (think eureka moments in the shower or the commute home).Research can feel empowering if you find strong evidence to support you or your stakeholder's ideas.

But confidence post-research is nowhere near as impactful as clarity.

In research, being “wrong” leads to more impact than being “right”.

Imagine you have a breakthrough product idea when making breakfast. However, through research, you learn that participants dislike the idea completely. In the same way some evidence can build confidence, negative evidence can cut or corrode confidence when ideas or designs aren’t favored or appreciated. But what’s counterintuitive is that learning that your ideas are wrong leads to more impact than being right.

Being wrong means becoming smarter. Being wrong means understanding answers to an important question: Why? Why was the idea or design wrong? Why did things go differently than expected? Being wrong ultimately leads to better solutions because you get a better understanding of the problem and solution. And if research is a regular part of how the business build products, it can also mean discovering and implementing hidden opportunities before your competitors even know what’s happening.

In practice, however, your stakeholders are never completely right or completely wrong in their product decision-making. Most times, they’ll learn through research that some of their ideas and opinions are kind of correct and others are horribly wrong.

Below are additional reasons to conduct any amount of research. If you showed this list (above) to any stakeholder or business that doesn't conduct any research, chances are they'd show interest in attempting a research study.

Reasons to Conduct Experience Research

• Bringing clarity and confidence to decision-making
• Turn good product ideas into great or delightful ideas
• Catch and address bad product ideas early
• Identify and fix usability issues
• Uncover hidden or unexpected product opportunities, solutions, or ideas
• Reduce or help prioritize options or planned work
• Fill gaps or explain patterns in product analytics and log data
• Track large-scale emotion and behavior

But before jumping into method selection or recruitment, you need to first recognize an unpleasant but real fact: stakeholders and/or the business can completely avoid, reject or ignore research in favor of immediate goals or the larger business strategy.

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The Business can Ignore Your “Perfect” Research

If you asked, your stakeholders will tell you they care about building and delivering a meaningful and positive user experience. No one will flat out say they want to make a product or service worse or less profitable. Everyone is starting to care about the user experience. In fact, a quick Google search shows that terms like “UX,” “UX research,” or “customer experience” are only growing in interest. Couple that with the fact that more UX jobs are being created and more UX practitioners are hired,  it’s becoming clear that user experience is a necessary part of today’s businesses.

But what your stakeholders or the business might not explicitly think to tell you is that they’re being rewarded for things other than a meaningful or positive user experience. To make a crude point, a product owner or software engineer is rewarded for reaching specific product goals or creating reliable code. While they both might care — and voice an interest — about UX, the bulk of their focus, decision-making, and stress are focused elsewhere.

Your stakeholders and the business are often rewarded for things other than building meaningful user experiences.

Sadly, stakeholders' immediate and personal goals in big and small businesses can make your research incredibly challenging to apply. Things can quickly become political and tense because people’s lives, finances, desires, or future can be threatened by your research. Good research kills bad ideas, but unfortunately, bad ideas can be very profitable.

Not to say the obvious, but there are businesses that build products only to make a profit, even if it’s addictive, harmful, or detrimental to the larger society. No sample size, method, or study design can overcome closed-minded beliefs about personal goals or profitable business strategy. It can be incredibly disheartening to conduct meaningful research and have your work amount to nothing.

This doesn’t mean that your stakeholders are selfish or evil. Someone has to write the code, someone has to finalize the marketing copy, and someone has to manage corporate finances. It does mean recognizing that your research can be hard to implement or get started because of their focus elsewhere.

Remember that changing how your stakeholders build products is a marathon, not a sprint. Depending on how uninterested stakeholders or the business is in research, evolving their beliefs about research can be a slow, arduous process. Stay resolute and try not to be swayed by negative opinions.

There’s a clear difference between dealing with negative opinions about research and working in a toxic environment. Prioritize your mental and emotional well-being. No one benefits from you struggling to get respect at work. And remember that you have the power and right to leave and find a new place to work. Experience research is quickly becoming an established role in many businesses, so don’t be afraid to check out other job openings.

Don’t forget that even one well-executed study can challenge and reverse opinions. The best part of research is that it’s hard to unlearn something once you learn it.

Once your stakeholders learn something, it’s hard for them to unlearn it.

If you work in a research-immature culture (covered more in the next topic), your goal is to complete a small research study as appropriately and quickly as possible. A great way to showcase the value of research and move quickly is by conducting a few usability tests. Let your stakeholders almost painfully recognize ways they can improve the product. Inform them that changes for the betterment of those using the product mean a healthier, more sustainable, and more profitable product or service. Conduct multiple small studies as a way to build credibility and relationships for future, more complex research.

In the next topic, let’s focus on reframing research. Without understanding and reshaping how your stakeholders view research and what it actually is, you'll never be able to influence the product or drive impact with your research.