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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you missed our recent live training on Prototype Testing, don’t worry—we’ve got everything you need right here! You can catch up at your convenience, so grab a cup of tea, put your feet up, and enjoy the show.
In the session, we explored the powerful new features of our Prototype Testing tool, offering a step-by-step guide to setting up, running, and analyzing your tests like a seasoned pro. This tool is a game-changer for your design workflow, helping you identify usability issues and gather real user feedback before committing significant resources to development.
Here’s a quick recap of the highlights:
1. Creating a prototype test from scratch using images
We walked through how to create a prototype test from scratch using static images. This method is perfect for early-stage design concepts, where you want to quickly test user flows without a fully interactive prototype.
2. Preparing your Figma prototype for testing
Figma users, we’ve got you covered! We discussed how to prepare your Figma prototype for the smoothest possible testing experience. From setting up interactions to ensuring proper navigation, these tips ensure participants have an intuitive experience during the test. For more detailed instructions, check out our help article
3. Seamless Figma prototype imports
One of the standout features of the tool is its seamless integration with Figma. We showed how easy it is to import your designs directly from Figma into Optimal, streamlining the setup process. You can bring your working files straight in, and resync when you need to with one click of a button.
4. Understanding usability metrics and analyzing results
We explored how to analyze the usability metrics, and walked through what the results can indicate on click maps and paths. These visual tools allow you to see exactly how participants navigate your design, making it easier to spot pain points, dead ends, or areas of friction. By understanding user behavior, you can rapidly iterate and refine your prototypes for optimal user experience.
It’s a chicken and egg situation when it comes to securing funding for a large transformation program in government. On one hand, you need to submit a business case and, as part of that, you need to make early decisions about how you might approach and deliver the program of work. On the other hand, you need to know enough about the problem you are going to solve to ensure you have sufficient funding to understand the problem better, hire the right people, design the right service, and build it the right way.
Now imagine securing hundreds of millions of dollars to design and build a service, but not feeling confident about what the user needs are. What if you had the opportunity to change this common predicament and influence your leadership team to carry out alignment activities, all while successfully delivering within the committed time frames?
Meera Pankhania, Design Director and Co-founder of Propel Design, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, on traceability and her learnings from delivering a $300 million Government program.
In her talk, Meera helps us understand how to use service traceability techniques in our work and apply them to any environment - ensuring we design and build the best service possible, no matter the funding model.
Background on Meera Pankhania
As a design leader, Meera is all about working on complex, purpose-driven challenges. She helps organizations take a human-centric approach to service transformation and helps deliver impactful, pragmatic outcomes while building capability and leading teams through growth and change.
Meera co-founded Propel Design, a strategic research, design, and delivery consultancy in late 2020. She has 15 years of experience in service design, inclusive design, and product management across the private, non-profit, and public sectors in both the UK and Australia.
Meera is particularly interested in policy and social design. After a stint in the Australian Public Service, Meera was appointed as a senior policy adviser to the NSW Minister for Customer Service, Hon. Victor Dominello MP. In this role, she played a part in NSW’s response to the COVID pandemic, flexing her design leadership skills in a new, challenging, and important context.
From funding to delivery: ensuring alignment from start to finish 🏁🎉👏
Meera’s talk explores a fascinating case study within the Department of Employment Services (Australia) where a substantial funding investment of around $300 million set the stage for a transformative journey. This funding supported the delivery of a revamped Employment Services Model, which had the goal of delivering better services to job seekers and employers, and a better system for providers within this system. The project had a focus on aligning teams prior to delivery, which resulted in a huge amount of groundwork for Meera.
Her journey involved engaging various stakeholders within the department, including executives, to understand the program as a whole and what exactly needed to be delivered. “Traceability” became the watchword for this project, which is laid out in three phases.
Phase 1: Aligning key deliverables
Phase 2: Ensuring delivery readiness
Phase 3: Building sustainable work practices
Phase 1: Aligning key deliverables 🧮
Research and discovery (pre-delivery)
Meera’s work initially meant conducting extensive research and engagement with executives, product managers, researchers, designers, and policymakers. Through this process, a common theme was identified – the urgent (and perhaps misguided) need to start delivering! Often, organizations focus on obtaining funding without adequately understanding the complexities involved in delivering the right services to the right users, leading to half-baked delivery.
After this initial research, some general themes started to emerge:
Assumptions were made that still needed validation
Teams weren’t entirely sure that they understood the user’s needs
A lack of holistic understanding of how much research and design was needed
The conclusion of this phase was that “what” needed to be delivered wasn’t clearly defined. The same was true for “how” it would be delivered.
Traceability
Meera’s journey heavily revolved around the concept of "traceability” and sought to ensure that every step taken within the department was aligned with the ultimate goal of improving employment services. Traceability meant having a clear origin and development path for every decision and action taken. This is particularly important when spending taxpayer dollars!
So, over the course of eight weeks (which turned out to be much longer), the team went through a process of combing through documents in an effort to bring everything together to make sense of the program as a whole. This involved some planning, user journey mapping, and testing and refinement.
Documenting Key Artifacts
Numerous artifacts and documents played a crucial role in shaping decisions. Meera and her team gathered and organized these artifacts, including policy requirements, legislation, business cases, product and program roadmaps, service maps, and blueprints. The team also included prior research insights and vision documents which helped to shape a holistic view of the required output.
After an effort of combing through the program documents and laying everything out, it became clear that there were a lot of gaps and a LOT to do.
Prioritising tasks
As a result of these gaps, a process of task prioritization was necessary. Tasks were categorized based on a series of factors and then mapped out based on things like user touch points, pain points, features, business policy, and technical capabilities.
This then enabled Meera and the team to create Product Summary Tiles. These tiles meant that each product team had its own summary ahead of a series of planning sessions. It gave them as much context (provided by the traceability exercise) as possible to help with planning. Essentially, these tiles provided teams with a comprehensive overview of their projects i.e. what their user needs, what certain policies require them to deliver, etc.
Phase 2: Ensuring delivery readiness 🙌🏻
Meera wanted every team to feel confident that we weren’t doing too much or too little in order to design and build the right service, the right way.
Standard design and research check-ins were well adopted, which was a great start, but Meera and the team also built a Delivery Readiness Tool. It was used to assess a team's readiness to move forward with a project. This tool includes questions related to the development phase, user research, alignment with the business case, consideration of policy requirements, and more. Ultimately, it ensures that teams have considered all necessary factors before progressing further.
Phase 3: Building sustainable work practices 🍃
As the program progressed, several sustainable work practices emerged which Government executives were keen to retain going forward.
Some of these included:
ResearchOps Practice: The team established a research operations practice, streamlining research efforts and ensuring that ongoing research was conducted efficiently and effectively.
Consistent Design Artifacts: Templates and consistent design artifacts were created, reducing friction and ensuring that teams going forward started from a common baseline.
Design Authority and Ways of Working: A design authority was established to elevate and share best practices across the program.
Centralized and Decentralized Team Models: The program showcased the effectiveness of a combination of centralized and decentralized team models. A central design team provided guidance and support, while service design leads within specific service lines ensured alignment and consistency.
Why it matters 🔥
Meera's journey serves as a valuable resource for those working on complex design programs, emphasizing the significance of aligning diverse stakeholders and maintaining traceability. Alignment and traceability are critical to ensuring that programs never lose sight of the problem they’re trying to solve, both from the user and organization’s perspective. They’re also critical to delivering on time and within budget!
Traceability key takeaways 🥡
Early Alignment Matters: While early alignment is ideal, it's never too late to embark on a traceability journey. It can uncover gaps, increase confidence in decision-making, and ensure that the right services are delivered.
Identify and audit: You never know what artifacts will shape your journey. Identify everything early, and don’t be afraid to get clarity on things you’re not sure about.
Conducting traceability is always worthwhile: Even if you don’t find many gaps in your program, you will at least gain a high level of confidence that your delivery is focused on the right things.
Delivery readiness key takeaways 🥡
Skills Mix is Vital: Assess and adapt team member roles to match their skills and experiences, ensuring they are positioned optimally.
Not Everyone Shares the Same Passion: Recognize that not everyone will share the same level of passion for design and research. Make the relevance of these practices clear to all team members.
Sustainability key takeaways 🥡
One Size Doesn't Fit All: Tailor methodologies, templates, and practices to the specific needs of your organization.
Collaboration is Key: Foster a sense of community and collective responsibility within teams, encouraging shared ownership of project outcomes.
“If storymapping could unearth patterns and bring together a cohesive story that engages audiences in the world of entertainment and film, why couldn’t we use a similar approach to engage our audiences?’Donna Lichaw and Lis Hubert
User Experience work makes the most sense to me in the context of storytelling. So when I saw Donna Lichaw and Lis Hubert’s presentation on storymapping at edUi recently, it resonated. A user’s path through a website can be likened to the traditional storytelling structure of crisis or conflict, exposition — and even a climax or two.
The narrative arc and the user experience
So just how can the same structure that suits fairytales help us to design a compelling experience for our customers? Well, storyboarding is an obvious example of how UX design and storytelling mesh. A traditional storyboard for a movie or TV episode lays out sequential images to help visualize what the final production will show. Similarly, we map out users' needs and journeys via wireframes, sketches, and journey maps, all the while picturing how people will actually interact with the product.
But the connection between storytelling and the user experience design process goes even deeper than that. Every time a user interacts with our website or product, we get to tell them a story. And a traditional literary storytelling structure maps fairly well to just how users interact with the digital stories we’re telling.Hence Donna and Lis’ conception of storymapping as ‘a diagram that maps out a story using a traditional narrative structure called a narrative arc.’ They concede that while ‘using stories in UX design...is nothing new’, a ‘narrative-arc diagram could also help us to rapidly assess content strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.’
Storytelling was a common theme at edUI
The edUi conference in Richmond, Virginia brought together an assembly of people who produce websites or web content for large institutions. I met people from libraries, universities, museums, various levels of government, and many other places. The theme of storytelling was present throughout, both explicitly and implicitly.Keynote speaker Matt Novak from Paleofuture talked about how futurists of the past tried to predict the future, and what we can learn from the stories they told. Matthew Edgar discussed what stories our failed content tell — what story does a 404 page tell? Or a page telling users they have zero search results? Two great presentations that got me thinking about storytelling in a different way.
Ultimately, it all clicked for me when I attended Donna and Lis’ presentation ‘Storymapping: A Macguyver Approach to Content Strategy’ (and yes, it was as compelling as the title suggests). They presented a case study of how they applied a traditional narrative structure to a website redesign process. The basic story structure we all learned in school usually includes a pretty standard list of elements. Donna and Lis had tweaked the definitions a bit, and applied them to the process of how users interact with web content.
Points on the Narrative Arc (from their presentation)
Exposition — provides crucial background information and often ends with ‘inciting incident’ kicking off the rest of the story
Donna and Lis pointed out that in the context of doing content strategy work, the inciting incident could be the problem that kicks off a development process. I think it can also be the need that brings users to a website to begin with.
Rising Action — Building toward the climax, users explore a website using different approaches
Here I think the analogy is a little looser. While a story can sometimes be well-served by a long and winding rising action, it’s best to keep this part of the process a bit more straightforward in web work. If there’s too much opportunity for wandering, users may get lost or never come back.
Crisis / Climax — The turning point in a story, and then when the conflict comes to a peak
The crisis is what leads users to your site in the first place — a problem to solve, an answer to find, a purchase to make. And to me the climax sounds like the aha! moment that we all aspire to provide, when the user answers their question, makes a purchase, or otherwise feels satisfied from using the site. If a user never gets to this point, their story just peters out unresolved. They’re forced to either begin the entire process again on your site (now feeling frustrated, no doubt), or turn to a competitor.
Falling Action — The story or user interaction starts to wind down and loose ends are tied up
A confirmation of purchase is sent, or maybe the user signs up for a newsletter.
Denouement / Resolution — The end of the story, the main conflict is resolved
The user goes away with a hopefully positive experience, having been able to meet their information or product needs. If we’re lucky, they spread the word to others!Check out Part 2 of Donna and Lis' three-part article on storymapping. I definitely recommend exploring their ideas in more depth, and having a go at mapping your own UX projects to the above structure.
A word about crises. The idea of a ‘crisis’ is at the heart of the narrative arc. As we know from watching films and reading novels, the main character always has a problem to overcome. So crisis and conflict show up a few times through this process.While the word ‘crisis’ carries some negative connotations (and that clearly applies to visiting a terribly designed site!), I think it can be viewed more generally when we apply the term to user experience. Did your user have a crisis that brought them to your site? What are they trying to resolve by visiting it? Their central purpose can be the crisis that gives rise to all the other parts of their story.
Why storymapping to a narrative arc is good for your design
Mapping a user interaction along the narrative arc makes it easy to spot potential points of frustration, and also serves to keep the inciting incident or fundamental user need in the forefront of our thinking. Those points of frustration and interaction are natural fits for testing and further development.
For example, if your site has a low conversion rate, that translates to users never hitting the climactic point of their story. It might be helpful to look at their interactions from the earlier phases of their story before they get to the climax. Maybe your site doesn’t clearly establish its reason for existing (exposition), or it might be too hard for users to search and explore your content (rising action).Guiding the user through each phase of the structure described above makes it more difficult to skip an important part of how our content is found and used.
We can ask questions like:
How does each user task fit into a narrative structure?
Are we dumping them into the climax without any context?
Does the site lack a resolution or falling action?
How would it feel to be a user in those situations?
These questions bring up great objectives for qualitative testing — sitting down with a user and asking them to show us their story.
What to do before mapping to narrative arc
Many sessions at edUi also touched on analytics or user testing. In crafting a new story, we can’t ignore what’s already in place — especially if some of it is appreciated by users. So before we can start storymapping the user journey, we need to analyze our site analytics, and run quantitative and qualitative user tests. This user research will give us insights into what story we’re already telling (whether it’s on purpose or not).
What’s working about the narrative, and what isn’t? Even if a project is starting from scratch on a new site, your potential visitors will bring stories of their own. It might be useful to check stats to see if users leave early on in the process, during the exposition phase. A high bounce rate might mean a page doesn't supply that expositional content in a way that's clear and engaging to encourage further interaction.Looking at analytics and user testing data can be like a movie's trial advance screening — you can establish how the audience/users actually want to experience the site's content.
How mapping to the narrative arc is playing out in my UX practice
Since I returned from edUi, I've been thinking about the narrative structure constantly. I find it helps me frame user interactions in a new way, and I've already spotted gaps in storytelling that can be easily filled in. My attention instantly went to the many forms on our site. What’s the Rising Action like at that point? Streamlining our forms and using friendly language can help keep the user’s story focused and moving forward toward clicking that submit button as a climax.
I’m also trying to remember that every user is the protagonist of their own story, and that what works for one narrative might not work for another. I’d like to experiment with ways to provide different kinds of exposition to different users. I think it’s possible to balance telling multiple stories on one site, but maybe it’s not the best idea to mix exposition for multiple stories on the same page.And I also wonder if we could provide cues to a user that direct them to exposition for their own inciting incident...a topic for another article perhaps.What stories are you telling your users? Do they follow a clear arc, or are there rough transitions? These are great questions to ask yourself as you design experiences and analyze existing ones. The edUi conference was a great opportunity to investigate these ideas, and I can’t wait to return next year.
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