June 6, 2024
4 min

Event Recap: Measuring the Value of UX Research at UXDX

Last week Optimal Workshop was delighted to sponsor UXDX USA 2024 in New York. The User Experience event brings together Product, Design, UX, CX, and Engineering professionals and our team had an amazing time meeting with customers, industry experts, and colleagues throughout the conference. This year, we also had the privilege of sharing some of our industry expertise by running an interactive forum on “Measuring the Value of UX Research” - a topic very close to our hearts.

Our forum, hosted by Optimal Workshop CEO Alex Burke and Product Lead Ella Fielding, was focused on exploring the value of User Experience Research (UXR) from both an industry-wide perspective and within the diverse ecosystem of individual companies and teams conducting this type of research today.

The session brought together a global mix of UX professionals for a rich discussion on measuring and demonstrating the effectiveness of and the challenges facing organizations who are trying to tie UXR to tangible business value today.

The main topics for the discuss were: 

  • Metrics that Matter: How do you measure UXR's impact on sales, customer satisfaction, and design influence?
  • Challenges & Strategies: What are the roadblocks to measuring UXR impact, and how can we overcome them?
  • Beyond ROI:  UXR's value beyond just financial metrics

Some of the key takeaways from our discussions during the session were: 

  1. The current state of UX maturity and value
    • Many UX teams don’t measure the impact of UXR on core business metrics and there were more attendees who are not measuring the impact of their work than those that are measuring it. 
    • Alex & Ella discussed with the attendees the current state of UX research maturity and the ability to prove value across different organizations represented in the room. Most organizations were still early in their UX research maturity with only 5% considering themselves advanced in having research culturally embedded.
  1. Defining and proving the value of UX research
    • The industry doesn’t have clear alignment or understanding of what good measurement looks like. Many teams don’t know how to accurately measure UXR impact or don’t have the tools or platforms to measure it, which serve as core roadblocks for measuring UXRs’ impact. 
    • Alex and Ella discussed challenges in defining and proving the value of UX research, with common values being getting closer to customers, innovating faster, de-risking product decisions, and saving time and money. However, the value of research is hard to quantify compared to other product metrics like lines of code or features shipped.
  1. Measuring and advocating for UX research
    • When teams are measuring UXR today there is a strong bias for customer feedback, but little ability or understanding about how to measure impact on business metrics like revenue. 
    • The most commonly used metrics for measuring UXR are quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers as opposed to internal metrics like stakeholder involvement or tieing UXR to business performance metrics (including financial performance). 
    • Attendees felt that in organizations where research is more embedded, researchers spend significant time advocating for research and proving its value to stakeholders rather than just conducting studies. This included tactics like research repositories and pointing to past study impacts as well as ongoing battles to shape decision making processes. 
    • One of our attendees highlighted that engaging stakeholders in the process of defining key research metrics prior to running research was a key for them in proving value internally. 
  1. Relating user research to financial impact
    • Alex and Ella asked the audience if anyone had examples of demonstrating financial impact of research to justify investment in the team and we got some excellent examples from the audience proving that there are tangible ways to tie research outcomes to core business metrics including:
    • Calculating time savings for employees from internal tools as a financial impact metric. 
    • Measuring a reduction in calls to service desks as a way to quantify financial savings from research.
  1. Most attendees recognise the value in embedding UXR more deeply in all levels of their organization - but feel like they’re not succeeding at this today. 
    • Most attendees feel that UXR is not fully embedded in their orgnaization or culture, but that if it was - they would be more successful in proving its overall value.
    • Stakeholder buy-in and engagement with UXR, particularly from senior leadership varied enormously across organizations, and wasn’t regularly measured as an indicator of UXR value 
    • In organizations where research was more successfully embedded, researchers had to spend significant time and effort building relationships with internal stakeholders before and after running studies. This took time and effort away from actual research, but ended up making the research more valuable to the business in the long run. 

With the large range of UX maturity and the democratization of research across teams, we know there’s a lot of opportunity for our customers to improve their ability to tie their user research to tangible business outcomes and embed UX more deeply in all levels of their organizations. To help fill this gap, Optimal Workshop is currently running a large research project on Measuring the Value of UX which will be released in a few weeks.

Keep up to date with the latest news and events by following us on LinkedIn.

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1 min read

How to create an effective customer journey map

Understanding your customers is central to any organization which wants to deliver an outstanding experience. But how do you understand your customers better? Tailoring their experience with your products and your organization to suit them should include a customer journey map.

It doesn’t mean your organization needs a brightly colored, fully designed infographic that outlines each and every action your user takes within your product. It does mean an effective customer journey map that promotes empathy and provides a clear vision for improving customer interactions. There are no rules around what that visualization looks like and it is up to your team to create one that makes the most of your customer’s journey.

What is customer journey mapping? 🤔

Customer journey mapping (sometimes referred to as a user experience map) is a technique that allows you to visualize your customer’s key touchpoints, sentiments, pain points, and actions. Plotted in sequential order. It’s a map of a customer’s experience with your brand or product, from awareness to purchase and beyond. 

Customer journey mapping helps you look beyond key touchpoints and encourages empathy with your customers. To understand who they are, even a persona to give them a life and demographic. Helping designers and key stakeholders understand where they are coming from. And where you can address their needs, avoid their pain points and encourage them to engage with your product. And even identify opportunities for innovation and improvement across the board.

Why you need a customer journey map 💥

What’s better than a customer that feels seen and understood once? A customer that feels the organization or product really understands their needs (and responds to their frustrations). Like all successful, long-term relationships, keeping customers returning is built on empathy and a solid grasp of their needs and frustrations. 

When you want to get to know your customer, like really get to know them, it’s essential to map their customer journey. Creating a shared understanding of what your customers think, feel, and struggle with as they interact with your organization. Spending the time to establish a customer journey map can help align around identifying known problems, identifying new user pain points, and removing roadblocks for your customers, ensuring their success.

Spending the time to get inside the mind and journeys of your customers through mapping helps your team to:

  • Create a visual guide of the end-to-end customer experience
  • Get an understanding of multiple customer pathways and unravel complex user experiences
  • Create target personas and allow insights to solve problems more effectively
  • Increase your organization’s empathy for your current and future customers
  • Identify potential pain points and roadblocks for your customers
  • Breakdown silos within your organization and improve alignment across teams
  • With a clearer understanding of your customers, better insights to achieve stakeholder buy-in

How to create a customer journey map 🛤️

Here are 8 key steps to get the most out of your customer journey map process:

  1. Bring key stakeholders together for an initial brainstorming session
  2. Identify potential user personas - demographics, pain points, interests, etc
  3. Create an empathy map - get a real feel for your customer, who they are, and what they want
  4. Flesh out your ideas with user research. Get under your user persona skin with focus groups, interviews, and surveys
  5. Identify possible customer touchpoints
  6. Choose the information you want to highlight - not everything will be relevant
  7. Decide on the best customer journey map tool to answer your questions
  8. Start building your map

Customer journey mapping examples 🗺️

Each and every customer’s journey is different. This, of course, means that there is no single best customer journey map example or template. Instead, the best customer journey map for any given situation will depend not only on your customers but also on your product, your team, and the goals you’re hoping to achieve by creating the map in the first place.

We’ve found a few examples of customer journey maps to help inspire your thinking:

Current state customer journey maps help you to visualize a user’s experience as it is right now. These are fact-based journey maps - to create an accurate, current state journey map. A good dose of user research data around your actual customers and interactions will help shape this.

An example of a customer journey map
An example of a customer journey map

Future state customer journey maps focus on what the customer journey can and should look like in the future. Although UX data is certainly an important aspect of understanding customers, future state journey maps involve a fair amount of creative speculation and interpretation. These customer journey maps focus on customer hopes and wants (future feelings), in addition to experiences and reactions. They can be a little objective and should be developed in balance with both positive and negative interactions.

Day in the life customer journey maps help you visualize your customer’s entire daily routine. Interactions with family, their commute, work meetings, afternoon coffee, etc. Regardless of whether or not the activities are related to your company. This type of journey map should be organized chronologically to give key insights into how and where customers are. What are the distractions, and where could they interact with your brand or product? How can key pain points be eased?

Service blueprints are a useful counterpart to a classic customer journey map. Whereas a customer journey map focuses on the thoughts, needs, and actions of the customer, a service blueprint reflects the perspective of the organization and its employees. What needs to happen behind the scenes to ensure the customer’s experience is the very best it can be.

Circular customer journey maps may be useful to visualize the customer journey as a circle or loop. Recognizing that some customers are recurring and non-transactional. Particularly through subscription-based relationships.

An empathy map is used to create a shared understanding of customers around their wants, needs, thoughts, and actions. This can be a great starting point to getting under your customer’s skin.

An example of an empathy map
An example of an empathy map

Wrap Up 🌯

There is no one size fits all customer journey map. Each customer is unique, each organization is different. Through creating customer journeys, personas and visualizing their key touchpoints, pain points, and understanding who they are, empathy throughout the organization can be generated. With this as a tool to bring key stakeholders on board and to pinpoint where products (and services) can be improved to keep customers or even bring new ones on board, the user experience can be better and more effective.

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1 min read

Exciting updates to Optimal’s pricing plans

Big things are happening in 2024! 🎉

We’re undergoing a huge transformation in 2024 to deliver more value for our customers with exciting new products like prototype testing, features like video recording, upgrading our survey tool, introducing AI, and improving how we support large organizations and multiple teams managing their accounts. These new products and features mean we need to update our pricing plans to continue innovating and providing top-tier UX research tools for our customers now and in the future.

Say hello to our new pricing plans  👋🏽

Starting July 22, 2024, we’ll be introducing new plans—Individual and Individual+—and updating our Team and Enterprise plans. We’ve reduced the price to join Optimal from $249 a month on the Pro plan to $129 on the new Individual plan. This reduction will help make our tools more accessible for people to do research and includes two months free on the individual annual plan, too.

We’ll be discontinuing some of our current plans, including Starter, Pro, and Pay per Study, and letting customers know about the changes that will affect their account via email and in information on the plans page in the app.

Prototype testing is just around the corner 🛣️ 🥳

The newest edition to the Optimal platform  is  days away, and will be available to use on the Individual+, Team and Enterprise plans from early August.  Prototype testing will allow you to quickly test designs with users throughout the design process, to help inform decisions so you can build on with confidence.  You’ll be able to build your own prototype from scratch using images or screenshots or import a prototype directly from Figma. Keep an eye out in app for this new exciting addition.

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1 min read

Workspaces delivers new privacy controls and improved collaboration

Improved organization, privacy controls, and more with new Workspaces 🚀

One of our key priorities in 2024 is making Optimal Workshop easier for large organizations to manage teams and collaborate more effectively on delivering optimal digital experiences. Workspaces is going live this week, which replaces teams, and introduces projects and folders for improved organization and privacy controls. Our latest release lays the foundations to provide more control over managing users, licenses, and user roles in the app in the near future.

More control with project privacy 🔒

Private projects allow greater flexibility on who can see what in your workspace, with the ability to make projects public or private and manage who can access a project. Find out more about how to set up private projects in this help article.

What changes for Enterprise customers? 😅

  • The teams you have set up today will remain the same; they are renamed workspaces.
  • Studies will be moved to a 'Default project' within the new workspace, from here you can decide how you would like to organize your studies and access to them.

  • You can create new projects, move studies into them, and use the new privacy features to control who has access to studies or leave them as public access.

  • Optimal Workshop are here to help if you would like to review your account structure and make changes, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

Watch the video 🎞️

What changes for Professional and Team customers? 😨

Customers on either a Professional or Team plan will notice the studies tab will now be called Workspace. We have introduced another layer of organization called projects, and there is a new-look sidebar on the left to create projects, folders, and studies.

What's next for Workspaces? 🔮

This new release is an essential step towards improving how we manage users, licenses, and different role types in Optimal Workshop. We hope to deliver more updates, such as the ability to move studies between workspaces, in the near future. If you have any feedback or ideas you want to share on workspaces or Optimal Workshop, please email product@optimalworkshop.com; we'd love to hear from you.

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