Time, money, people, access, reach. The resources we have at our disposal can also become constraints. In the real world, research projects don’t always follow a perfect plan. There are times when we have to be pragmatic and work with what we have, but there are limits. Knowing where those limits are and when to push back can be really challenging. If we don’t push back in the right way, our research results and design decisions could be compromised and if we push back in the wrong way, we may be inviting a whole host of new resourcing constraints that might just make life harder for us.

Let’s take a look at some research approach compromises that you should push back on, some examples of useful workarounds that will still allow you to gain the insights you need for your project and some constructive ways to lead those push back conversations.

4 research depth compromises that you should push back on

When you’re asked (or told) to talk to experts and frontline staff instead of users or customers

We know we’re not our users and this is definitely one of those moments where we have a responsibility to speak up and try to find a better way. Experts and frontline staff who interact with users or customers all day long certainly have a lot of value to contribute to the design process, however you really do need to gather insights from the people you’re designing for. Failing to include users or customers in your research has a high likelihood of coming back to bite you in the form of poorly designed products, services and experiences that will need to be redesigned costing you more time and money. If you do happen to get away with it and produce something that is fit for purpose, it’s because you were lucky. Don’t base your design decisions on luck and don’t let your stakeholders and team do it either.

When you’re told to just run a focus group (and nothing else)

Focus groups are a pain for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest issues is that the information that you’ll gather through them more often than not lacks depth, context and sometimes even authenticity. When you bring a group of people together into a room, instead of useful and useable insights, you’re more likely to end up with a pile of not-so-helpful opinions and you open your research up to a delightful thing called groupthink where your participants may say they agree with something when they actually don’t. Also, the things that people say they do in a focus group might not align to what they actually do in reality. It’s not their fault – they most likely think they’re being helpful but they’re really just giving you a bunch data you can’t be sure of.

When you’re told to just run a survey (and nothing else)

There’s a time and a place for when a survey might be appropriate, but a standalone research study isn’t it. A survey on its own isn’t enough to gain an appropriate level of depth to inform complex design decisions – it’s more of a starting point or a study to complement a round of user interviews. Surveys don’t allow you to dig deeper into participant responses – you can’t ask follow up questions in that moment and keep asking questions until you get the insight you need. You also don’t know what they’re doing or where they are when they complete your survey. You have no context or control over their environment – they might not complete the whole thing in one sitting and may leave it open on their device while they go off and complete other non-survey related tasks.

Surveys function best when they’re brief and don’t take up too much of your participant’s time because if they’re too long or require in-depth detail to be shared, people might just start providing quick or less than helpful responses just to get through it and finish. If there’s an incentive on offer, you also run the risk of participants providing nonsense responses just to complete the study to obtain the reward or they might just tell you what they think you want to hear so they don’t miss out.

When you’re told to skip discovery research

Skipping this very important early step in the design process in the hopes of saving time or money can end up being quite costly. If you launch into the design stage of a new product or a major redesign of an existing product without conducting UX research upfront, you’ll likely end up designing something that isn’t needed, wanted or fit for purpose. When this happens, all that time and money you apparently ‘saved’ – and then some – will get spent anyway trying to clean up the mess like I mentioned earlier. Start your design journey out on the right foot and work with your team and stakeholders to find a way to not skip this critical piece of research.

4 research depth compromises that won’t kill your project

Talking to a smaller group of users when the only other alternative is doing no research at all

If you have to choose between talking to 5 users or customers or no one at all, always pick the former. Talking to a smaller group is far better than talking to absolutely no one and essentially designing off your and your team’s opinion and not much else. Research is scalable. You don’t have to run 20+ user interviews to gather useful and deep insights – in many cases patterns tend to appear around the 5-10 participants mark. You can run your research in smaller bites and more often to save on time and keep your project moving along. If you’re short on time or money or your customers are hard to reach location wise, run your user interviews over the phone!

Guerrilla research

I’ve met people who aren’t a fan of the term ‘guerilla research’. I’ve been told it’s a negative term that can imply that you’re doing something you don’t have permission to be doing. Well guess what? Sometimes you are! We’re not all in privileged positions where UX research is an accepted and willingly supported practice. UX maturity comes in many shapes and sizes and some of us still need to prove the value of UX research to our stakeholders and organisations.

Hitting the streets or a customer facing environment (e.g., a store) with a mobile device for a few hours one afternoon is a good way to gather research insights quickly. While you will have to limit your interactions with participants to under 3 to 5 minutes, it can be a good way to get a lot of responses to a handful of big burning questions that you might be tackling during your discovery research.

As always, research begets research and this approach might give you the insights you need to secure buy in for a much larger piece of research. You might also use this technique to gather quantitative data or run a quick usability test a new feature. First-click testing tools like Chalkmark for example, are great for this because all the participant has to do is click on an image on a screen. It takes seconds for them to complete and you can include post study questions in the tool for them to answer or you can just have a conversation with them then and there.

Remote research

When it comes to remote research there are a lot of different methods and techniques covering the entire design process from start to finish. It’s super flexible and scalable and the level of depth you can achieve in a short space of time and effort can be significant. The depth compromise here is not being in the same room as your participants. For example if you’re running a remote card sort with OptimalSort, you won’t get to hear a conversation about why certain cards were placed where they were, however you will gather a decent amount of solid quantitative data quickly and most of the analysis work is done for you saving even more time. You can also fill in any qualitative research gaps by including pre and post study questions and you could also use your findings to help prove the need for resources to conduct face to face research to complement your remote study.

Live A/B testing

Also called split testing, live A/B testing on a website or app is a quick way to test out a new feature or an idea for a new feature. Much like with remote research, you won’t get to ask why your research participants did what they did, but you will obtain quantitative evidence of what they did in real time while attempting to complete a real task. It’s a quick and dirt cheap way to find out what does and doesn’t work. You could always ask your website visitors to complete a quick exit survey when they leave your website or app or you could consider positioning a quick poll that appears in the moment that they’re completing the task e.g., during checkout. You can test anything from a whole page to the language used in a Call to Action (CTA), and while the results are largely quantitative, you’ll always learn something new that you can use to inform your next iterative design decision.

How to constructively push back

When approaching push back conversations it can be helpful to try to understand where these requests or constraints are coming from and why. Why are you being told to just run a focus group? Why isn’t there any funding for participant recruitment or a reasonable amount of time for you to complete the research? Why has it been suggested that you skip talking to actual users or customers? And so on. Talk to your stakeholders. Consider framing it as you trying to understand their needs and goals better so that you can help them achieve them – after all, that is exactly what you’re trying to do.

Talk to your team and colleagues as well. If you can find out what is driving the need for the research depth compromise, you might just be able to meet any constraints halfway. For example, maybe you could pitch the option of running a mixed methods research approach to bridge any resourcing gaps. You might run a survey and 5 x 20 minute user interviews over the phone or a video call if you’re short on time for example. It’s also possible that there might be a knowledge gap or a misunderstanding around how long research takes and how much it costs. A little education can go a very long way in convincing others of the importance of UX research. Take your stakeholders along for the journey and do research together where possible. Build those relationships and increased UX maturity may follow.

Pushing back might feel intimidating or impossible, but it’s something that every UX researcher has had to do in their career. User and research advocacy is a big part of the job. Have confidence in your abilities and view these conversations as an opportunity to grow. It can take some practice to get it right, but we have a responsibility to our users, customers, team, stakeholders and clients to do everything we can to ensure that design decisions are supported by solid evidence. They’re counting on us to gather and provide the insights that deliver amazing experiences and it’s not unreasonable to have a conversation about how we can all work better together to achieve awesome things. It’s not about ensuring your research follows a pitch perfect plan. Compromise and pragmatism are completely normal parts of the process and these conversations are all about finding the right way to do that for your project.

Summary: You’ve run some user interviews and a couple of cards sorts, now it’s time to learn how to make the case for larger research projects.

In many ways, the work you do as a researcher is the fuel that product and design teams use to build great products. Or, as writer Gene Luen Yang once put it: “Creativity requires input, and that's what research is. You're gathering material with which to build”.

One of the toughest challenges for a user researcher is making the case for a bigger project. That is, one potentially involving more participants, a larger number of research methods, more researchers and even new tools. Sure, you’ve done small studies, but now you’ve identified a need for some bigger (and likely more expensive) research. So how exactly do you make a case for a larger project? How do you broach the subject of budget and possibly even travel, if it’s required? And, perhaps most importantly, who do you make the case to?

By understanding how to pitch your case, you can run the research project that needs to be run – not whatever you’re able to scrape together.

What’s your research question?

You know how important the research question is. After all, this is what you center your research around. It’s the clear, concise, focused and yet also complex heart of any research project. The importance of a good research question holds true from the smallest of studies right through to the massive research projects that require large teams of researchers and involve usability tests in real-world locations.

We’ve written about user research questions before, but needless to say, keep your question top-of-mind as you think about scaling your research. While most other aspects of your research will get bigger the larger your research project grows (think things like budget, number of participants and possibly even locations), your research question should remain concise and easy to understand. ‘Say it in a sentence’ – This is a good rule to keep in mind as you start to meet with stakeholders and other interested parties. Always have the detail ready if people want it, but your question is basically an elevator pitch.

Your research question will also form an important part of your pitch document – something we’ll come back to later on in this article.

Why do you need to scale up your research?

With your research question in hand (or more likely in a Google Drive document), you have to start asking yourself the tough questions. It’s time to map out the why of this entire process. Why exactly do you need to run a larger research project? Nailing all of this detail is going to be critical to getting the support you need to actually scale up your research.

To help get you thinking about this, we’ve put together some of the most common reasons to scale a user research project. Keep in mind that there’s a lot of crossover in the below sections simply due to the fact that methods/tools and participants are essentially 2 sides of the same coin.

You need more participants

Recruiting participants can be quite expensive, and it’s often a limiting factor for many researchers. In many cases, the prospect of remunerating even something like 10 participants can blow out a small research budget. While certain types of testing have ideal maximums for the number of participants you should use, scaling up the number of people feeding into your research can be quite fruitful. This could either running more tests with a lower number of participants or running a few tests with more.

By bringing in more people, you’re able to run more tests over the course of your project. For example, you could run 5 card sorts with different groups. Or, you could carry out a larger series of usability tests and user interviews with groups of different demographics and in different locations.

It’s easy to see how useful a larger or even unrestricted recruitment budget can be. You can go from needing to scrounge up whoever you can find to recruiting the ideal participants for your particular project.

You want to investigate new tools and methods

User research has been around in one form or another for decades (and possibly even longer if you loosen your definition of ‘user research’). With this in mind, the types of tools available to researchers have come along way since the days of paper prototypes – and even paper card sorts. Now, a cursory Google search will throw up dozens of UX tools tailored for different research methods and parts of the research process. There are tools for validating prototypes, getting fast feedback on UX copy and running complex, branching surveys. As just one example, we (at Optimal Workshop) offer a number of tools as part of our platform, focusing on areas including:

• Tree testing: Tree testing is a usability technique that can help you evaluate the findability of topics on a website.
• Card sorting: A research technique that can show you how people understand and categorize information.

You can read more about the Optimal Workshop platform here on our features page if you’re interested in learning more.

Integrating more tools is a strong reason to scale a research project, as tools can both lighten your workload and open up entirely new avenues of research. Plus, you’ll often find tools will automate difficult parts of the research process, like recruitment and analysis. Using one of our tools as an example, with Reframer, you can take notes during a user interview, tag them, and then Reframer will help you pull out various themes and insights for you to review.

A bigger project usually means a bigger budget, allowing you to spend time investigating possible new methods, tools and research techniques. Always wanted to investigate tree testing but could never quite find the time to sit down and assess the method and the various tools available? Now could be the perfect time.

You want to do on-location research

Remote testing has fast become one of the most practical options for user researchers who are short on time and budget. Instead of needing to go out and physically sit down with participants, researchers can instead recruit, run tests and analyze results as long as they have a decent internet connection. It makes sense – on-location research is expensive. But there are definitely some major advantages.

It is possible to conduct user interviews and usability tests remotely, but the very nature of these types of research means you’ll get a lot more out of doing the work in person. Take a user interview as just one example. By sitting down face to face with someone, you can read their facial expressions, better pick up on their tone and establish a stronger rapport from the outset.

Being able to go to wherever your users are means you’re not constrained by technology. If you need to study people living in rural villages in China, for example, you’re unlikely to find many of these people online. Furthermore, in this example, you could bring along a translator and actually get a real feel for your audience. The same applies to countless other demographics all over the world. Scaling up your research project means you can start to look at traveling to the people who can give you the best information.

Who has a stake in this project?

One of the most important (and potentially difficult) parts of scaling a research project is getting buy-in from your stakeholders. As we’ve mentioned previously, your pitch document is an essential tool in getting this buy-in, but you also need to identify all of your stakeholders. Knowing who all of your stakeholders are will mean you get input from every relevant area in your organization, and it also means you’ll likely have a larger support base when making your pitch to scale your research project.

Start by considering the wider organization and then get granular. Who is your research project likely to impact? Consider more than just product and design teams – how is your larger project likely to impact the budget? Again, capturing all of this detail in the pitch document will help you to build a much stronger case when it comes to convincing the people who have the final say.

Note: Building strong relationships with C-level and other people with influence is always going to be useful – especially in a field like UX where many people are still unsure of the value. Investing time into both educating these people (where appropriate) and creating a strong line of communication will likely pay dividends in future.

Create your pitch document

If you’re from the world of academia, the idea of pitching your research is likely second nature. But, to a user researcher, the ‘pitch’ often takes many forms. In ideal circumstances, there’s a good enough relationship between researchers and UX teams that research is just something that’s done as part of the design process. In organizations that haven’t fully embraced research, the process is often much more stilted and difficult.

When you’re trying to create a strong case for scaling your research project, it can help to consolidate all of the detail we’ve covered above (research question, high-level reasons for a running a larger project, etc.) and assemble this information in the form of a pitch document. But what exactly should this document look like? Well, borrowing again from the world of institutional research (but slightly tweaked), the main purpose of a research proposal is to explain that:

• The research question is of significance
• The planned methods are appropriate
• The results will make a useful contribution to the organization

With this in mind, it’s time to take a look at what you should include in your user research pitch document:

• Your research question: The core of any research project, your research question should query a problem that needs to be solved.
• The key stakeholders: Here’s where you list out every team, agency and individual with a stake in your research, as well as what this involvement entails.
• Data: What information do you currently have on this subject? Pull in any relevant details you can find by talking to other teams in your organization. If you’re researching your customers, for example, have a chat to sales and customer support staff.
• Tools/methods: How will you execute your research? List all of the tools and research methods you plan to use. If you can see that you’re going to need new tools, list these here. This leads on nicely to...
• Budget: What are the financial implications of your larger research project? List the new tools you’ll need and your estimates for recruitment costs.

You don’t necessarily need to take your pitch document and present it to stakeholders, but as a tool for ensuring you’ve covered all your bases, it’s invaluable. Doing this exercise means you’ll have all of the relevant information you require in one place.

Happy researching!

Read more elsewhere

• Asking the right questions during user research, interviews and testing – This is a great guide for crafting research questions from UX Collective. It’s full of helpful tips and considerations.
• How to create use cases – Use cases are one of the best tools to map out particular tasks your users perform and find problems they might encounter along their journey.
• How to become a more valuable UX professional: 3 factors to increase your worth – One way to have more influence and better effect change is to increase your value as a UX professional.
• Do I need a degree to become a good UX Designer? – You can have a wonderful career in the field of user experience without a degree in a related area of study.

There’s not much a parent won’t do to ensure their child has the best chance of succeeding in life. Unsurprisingly, things are much the same in product development. Whether it’s a designer, manager, developer or copywriter, everyone wants to see the product reach its full potential.

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Key to a product’s success (even though it’s still not widely practiced) is UX research. Without research focused on learning user pain points and behaviors, development basically happens in the dark. Feeding direct insights from customers and users into the development of a product means teams can flick the light on and make more informed design decisions.

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While the benefits of user research are obvious to anyone working in the field, it can be a real challenge to convince others of just how important and useful it is. We thought we’d help.

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Define user research

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If you want to sell the importance of UX research within your organization, you’ve got to ensure stakeholders have a clear understanding of what user research is and what they stand to gain from backing it.

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In general, there are a few key things worth focusing on when you’re trying to explain the benefits of research:

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• More informed design decisions: Companies make major design decisions far too often without considering users. User research provides the data needed to make informed decisions.
• Less uncertainty and risk: Similarly, research reduces risk and uncertainty simply by giving companies more clarity around how a particular product or service is used.
• Retention and conversion benefits: Research means you’ll be more aligned with the needs of your customers and prospective customers.

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Use the language of the people you’re trying to convince. A capable UX research practice will almost always improve key business metrics, namely sales and retention.

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The early stages

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When embarking on a project, book in some time early in the process to answer questions, explain your research approach and what you hope to gain from it. Here are some of the key things to go over:

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• Your objectives: What are you trying to achieve? This is a good time to cover your research questions.
• Your research methods: Which methods will you be using to carry out your research? Cover the advantages of these methods and the information you’re likely to get from using them.
• Constraints: Do you see any major obstacles? Any issues with resources?
• Provide examples: Nothing shows the value of doing research quite like a case study. If you can’t find an example of research within your own organization, see what you can find online.

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Involve others in your research

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When trying to convince someone of the validity of what you’re doing, it’s often best to just show them. There are a couple of effective ways you can do this – at a team or individual level and at an organizational level.

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We’ll explain the best way to approach this below, but there’s another important reason to bring others into your research. UX research can’t exist in a vacuum – it thrives on integration and collaboration with other teams. Importantly, this also means working with other teams to define the problems they’re trying to solve and the scope of their projects. Once you’ve got an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve, you’ll be in a better position to help them through research.

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Educate others on what research is

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Education sessions (lunch-and-learns) are one of the best ways to get a particular team or group together and run through the what and why of user research. You can work with them to work out what they’d like to see from you, and how you can help each other.

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Tailor what you’re saying to different teams, especially if you’re talking to people with vastly different skill sets. For example, developers and designers are likely to see entirely different value in research.

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Collect user insights across the organization

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Putting together a comprehensive internal repository focused specifically on user research is another excellent way to grow awareness. It can also help to quantify things that may otherwise fall by the wayside. For example, you can measure the magnitude of certain pain points or observe patterns in feature requests. Using a platform like Notion or Confluence (or even Google Drive if you don’t want a dedicated platform), log all of your study notes, insights and research information that you find useful.

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Whenever someone wants to learn more about research within the organization, they’ll be able to find everything easily.

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Bring stakeholders along to research sessions

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Getting a stakeholder along to a research session (usability tests and user interviews are great starting points) will help to show them the value that face-to-face sessions with users can provide.

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To really involve an observer in your UX research, assign them a specific role. Note taker, for example. With a short briefing on best-practices for note taking, they can get a feel for what’s like to do some of the work you do.

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You may also want to consider bringing anyone who’s interested along to a research session, even if they’re just there to observe.

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Share your findings – consistently

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Research is about more than just testing a hypothesis, it’s important to actually take your research back to the people who can action the data.

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By sharing your research findings with teams and stakeholders regularly, your organization will start to build up an understanding of the value that ongoing research can provide, meaning getting approval to pursue research in future becomes easier. This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but it’s a practice that all researchers need to get into – especially those embedded in large teams or organizations.

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Anything else you think is worth mentioning? Let us know in the comments.

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Read more

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• Selling your design recommendations to clients and colleagues – Guest writer Jeff Tang outlines some of his techniques for presenting UX recommendations and answering objections.
• Quantifying the ROI of UX – Ashlea McKay delves into one of the toughest UX questions to answer: “What do we get for our money?”
• How to lead a UX team – With user-centered design growing in organizations around the world, we’ll need capable leaders to run UX teams.
• How do I explain what UX is? – Ashlea McKay covers how you can explain UX to people who may not necessarily have familiarity with the field.

As the focus on user-centered design continues to grow in organizations around the world, we’ll also need effective leaders to guide UX teams. But what makes a great UX leader?

Leadership may come as naturally as breathing to some people, but most of us need some guidance along the way. We created this article to pull together a few tips for effectively running UX teams, but be sure to leave a comment if you think we’ve missed anything. After all, part of what makes a great leader is being able to take feedback and to learn from others!

The difference between a manager and a leader

There’s a pretty clear distinction between managers and leaders. As a leader, your job isn’t necessarily to manage and tell people what to do, but instead to lead. You should enable your team to succeed by providing them with the tools and resources they need.

Know your team’s strengths and weaknesses

Intel’s Andy Grove, who infamously ruled the Silicon Valley semiconductor company with an iron fist, may be a polarizing figure in the leadership sphere, but he did institute (or at least help popularize) some techniques that are still widely practised today. One of these was to sit in an office cube with his fellow employees, instead of in a siloed office by himself. There’s a good lesson here. Instead of sealing yourself away from your team, immerse yourself in their environment and their work. You’ll develop a much better understanding of the types of problems they deal with on a daily basis and as a result be in a better position to help them.

You can also take this a step further and conduct an audit of your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Also known as a skills audit, this process is more commonly performed in organizations at scale, but it’s a good way to show you where your capabilities lie – even in small teams. With an intimate understanding of your UX team you’ll be in a good position to assess which projects your team can and can’t take on at any given time.

Taking this process even further, you can undertake a skills audit of yourself. If you want to develop yourself as a leader, you have to understand your own strengths and weaknesses.

This quote by Donald Rumsfeld, although it applies to crisis management, provides a great way to self-audit: “There are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the things we don't know we don't know". You can see a visual example of this in the Johari Window:

Source: Wikipedia

Here’s how you can take this approach and use it for yourself:

• Identify your known unknowns: Skills you don’t currently possess that you’re able to recognize you need yourself.
• Identify your unknown unknowns: Skills you don’t know you don’t currently have, but which your team can identify by asking them.

When it comes to projects, be inclusive

NASA astronaut Frank Borman, echoing a sentiment since shared by many people who’ve been to space, said: “When you're finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you're going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people?”.

On an admittedly much smaller scale, the same learning can and should be applied to UX teams. When it comes time to take on a new project and define the vision, scope and strategy, bring in as many people as possible. The idea here isn’t to just tick an inclusivity box, but to deliver the best possible outcome.

Get input from stakeholders, designers, user researchers and developers. You certainly don’t have to take every suggestion, but a leader’s job is to assess every possible idea, question the what, why and how, and ultimately make a final decision. ‘Leader’ doesn’t necessarily have to mean ‘devil’s advocate’, either, but that’s another role you’ll also want to consider when taking suggestions from a large number of people.

Make time for your team

Anyone who’s ever stepped into a leadership role will understand the significant workload increase that comes along with it – not to mention the meetings that seemingly start to crop up like weeds. With such time pressures it can be easy to overlook things like regular one-on-ones, or at the very least making time for members to approach you with any issues.

Even with the associated pressures that come along with being a leader, stand-ups or other weekly meetings and one-on-ones should not be ignored.

Sit down with each member of your team individually to stay up to date on what they’re working on and to get a feel for their morale and motivation. What’s more, by simply setting some time aside to speak with someone individually, they’re more likely to speak about problems instead of bottling them away. Rotating through your team every fortnight will mean you have a clear understanding of where everyone is at.

Hosting larger stand-ups or weekly meetings, on the other hand, is useful in the way that large team meetings have always been useful. You can use the forum as a time for general status updates and to get new team members acclimated. If there’s one piece of advice we can add on here, it’s to have a clear agenda. Set the key things to cover in the meeting prior to everyone stepping into the room, otherwise you’re likely to see the meeting quickly get off track.

Keep a level head

You know the feeling. It’s Wednesday afternoon and one of the product teams has just dropped a significant amount of work on your team’s plate – a plate that’s already loaded up. While it can be tempting to join in with the bickering and complaining, it’s your job as the leader of your UX team to keep a level head and remain calm.

It’s basic psychology. The way you act and respond to different situations will have an impact of everyone around you – most importantly, your team. By keeping calm in every situation, your team will look to you for guidance in times of stress. There’s another benefit to keeping a level head: your own leaders are more likely to recognize you as a leader as well as someone who can handle difficult situations.

Two leadership development consultants ran a study of over 300,000 business leaders, and sorted the leadership skills they found most important for success into a numbered list. Unsurprisingly, an ability to motivate and inspire others was listed as the most important trait.

Be the voice for your team

While no user researcher or designer will doubt the value of UX research, it’s still an emerging industry. As a result, it can often be misunderstood. If you’re in charge of leading a UX team, it’s up to you to ensure that your team always has a seat at the table – you have to know when to speak up for yourself and your team.

If you a problem, you need to voice your concern. Of course, you need to be able to back up your arguments, but that’s the point of your role as a leader. Those new to leadership can find this aspect of the the job one of the hardest parts to master – it’s no surprise one of the key qualities in a great leader is an ability to speak up if they feel it’s the right thing to do.

Finally, you’ve got to assume the role of a buffer. This is another general leadership quality, and it’s similarly important. Take the flak from executives, upper management or the board of directors and defend your UX team, even if they’re not aware of it. If you need to take some information or feedback from these people and give it to your team, pay close attention to how you relay it to them. As an example, you want to be sure that a message about reducing customer churn is made relevant and actionable.

Master your own skill set

Stepping into a UX leadership position isn’t an excuse to stop developing yourself professionally. After all, it was those skills that got you there in the first place. Continue to focus on upskilling yourself, staying up to date on movements and trends in the industry and immersing yourself in the work your team carries out.

A leader with the skills to actually function as a member of their team is that much more capable – especially when another pair of hands can help to get a project over the line.

Wrap up

The field of user research continues to grow and mature, meaning the need for effective leaders is also increasing. This means there are near-limitless opportunities for those willing to step into UX leadership roles, provided they’re willing to put in the work and become capable leaders.

As we stated earlier, many of the skills that make a great leader also translate to UX leadership, and there’s really no shortage of resources available to provide guidance and support. In terms of UX specifically, here are a few of our favorite articles – from our blog and elsewhere:

• The essential qualities of a UX leader – Leaders in the UX industry share their thoughts as to what makes a good UX leader.
• Building and managing UX teams: A 360 degree guide – A slightly different approach to the one we’ve taken here, this article explains how to build and manage a UX team.
• Effective UX leaders – A discussion on the characteristics of effective UX leaders. It’s full of useful points.
• What does a truly inspirational design team leader look like? – A talk by Ashlea McKay at UX New Zealand 2015 in which she shares 8 qualities of inspirational design team leaders.

"Dear Optimal Workshop

How do I quantify the ROI [return on investment] of investing in user experience?"

— Brian

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Dear Brian,

I'm going to answer your question with a resounding 'It depends'. I believe we all differ in what we're willing to invest, and what we expect to receive in return. So to start with, and if  you haven’t already, it's worth grabbing your stationery tools of choice and brainstorming your way to a definition of ROI that works for you, or for the people you work for.

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I personally define investment in UX as time given, money spent, and people utilized. And I define return on UX as time saved, money made, and people engaged. Oh, would you look at that — they’re the same! All three (time, money, and humans) exist on both sides of the ROI fence and are intrinsically linked. You can’t engage people if you don’t first devote time and money to utilizing your people in the best possible way! Does that make sense?

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That’s just my definition — you might have a completely different way of counting those beans, and the organizations you work for may think differently again.

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I'll share my thoughts on the things that are worth quantifying (that you could start measuring today if you were so inclined) and a few tips for doing so. And I'll point you towards useful resources to help with the nitty-gritty, dollars-and-cents calculations.

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5 things worth quantifying for digital design projects

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Here are five things I think are worthy of your attention when it comes to measuring the ROI of user experience, but there are plenty of others. And different projects will most likely call for different things.

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(A quick note: There's a lot more to UX than just digital experiences, but because I don't know your specifics Brian, the ideas I share below apply mainly to digital products.)

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1. What’s happening in the call centre?

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A surefire way to get a feel for the lay of the land is to look at customer support — and if measuring support metrics isn't on your UX table yet, it's time to invite it to dinner. These general metrics are an important part of an ongoing, iterative design process, but getting specific about the best data to gather for individual projects will give you the most usable data.

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Improving an application process on your website? Get hard numbers from the previous month on how many customers are asking for help with it, go away and do your magic, get the same numbers a month after launch, and you've got yourself compelling ROI data.

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Are your support teams bombarded with calls and emails? Has the volume of requests increased or decreased since you released that new tool, product, or feature? Are there patterns within those requests — multiple people with the same issues? These are just a few questions you can get answers to.

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You'll find a few great resources on this topic online, including this piece by Marko Nemberg that gives you an idea of the effects a big change in your product can have on support activity.

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2. Navigation vs. Search

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This is a good one: check your analytics to see if your users are searching or navigating. I’ve heard plenty of users say to me upfront that they'll always just type in the search bar and that they’d never ever navigate. Funny thing is, ten minutes later I see the same users naturally navigating their way to those gorgeous red patent leather pumps. Why?

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Because as Zoltán Gócza explains in UX Myth #16, people do tend to scan for trigger words to help them navigate, and resort to problem solving behaviour (like searching) when they can’t find what they need. Cue frustration, and the potential for a pretty poor user experience that might just send customers running for the hills — or to your competitors. This research is worth exploring in more depth, so check out this article by Jared Spool, and this one by Jakob Nielsen (you know you can't go wrong with those two).

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3. Are people actually completing tasks?

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Task completion really is a fundamental UX metric, otherwise why are we sitting here?! We definitely need to find out if people who visit our website are able to do what they came for.

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For ideas on measuring this, I've found the Government Service Design Manual by GOV.UK to be an excellent resource regardless of where you are or where you work, and in relation to task completion they say:

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"When users are unable to complete a digital transaction, they can be pushed to use other channels. This leads to low levels of digital take-up and customer satisfaction, and a higher cost per transaction."

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That 'higher cost per transaction' is your kicker when it comes to ROI.

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So, how does GOV.UK suggest we quantify task completion? They offer a simple (ish) recommendation to measure the completion rate of the end-to-end process by going into your analytics and dividing the number of completed processes by the number of started processes.

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While you're at it, check the time it takes for people to complete tasks as well. It could help you to uncover a whole host of other issues that may have gone unnoticed. To quantify this, start looking into what Kim Oslob on UXMatters calls 'Effectiveness and Efficiency ratios'. Effectiveness ratios can be determined by looking at success, error, abandonment, and timeout rates. And Efficiency ratios can be determined by looking at average clicks per task, average time taken per task, and unique page views per task.

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You do need to be careful not to make assumptions based on this kind of data— it can't tell you what people were intending to do. If a task is taking people too long, it may be because it’s too complicated ... or because a few people made themselves coffee in between clicks. So supplement these metrics with other research that does tell you about intentions.

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4. Where are they clicking first?

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A good user experience is one that gets out of bed on the right side. First clicks matter for a good user experience.

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A 2009 study showed that in task-based user tests, people who got their first click right were around twice as likely to complete the task successfully than if they got their first click wrong. This year, researchers at Optimal Workshop followed this up by analyzing data from millions of completed Treejack tasks, and found that people who got their first click right were around three times as likely to get the task right.

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That's data worth paying attention to.

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So, how to measure? You can use software that records mouse clicks first clicks from analytics on your page, but it difficult to measure a visitor's intention without asking them outright, so I'd say task-based user tests are your best bet.

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For in-person research sessions, make gathering first-click data a priority, and come up with a consistent way to measure it (a column on a spreadsheet, for example). For remote research, check out Chalkmark (a tool devoted exclusively to gathering quantitative, first-click data on screenshots and wireframes of your designs) and UserTesting.com (for videos of people completing tasks on your live website).

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5. Resources to help you with the number crunching

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Here's a great piece on uxmastery.com about calculating the ROI of UX.

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Here's Jakob Nielsen in 1999 with a simple 'Assumptions for Productivity Calculation', and here's an overview of what's in the 4th edition of NN/G's Return on Investment for Usability report (worth the money for sure).

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Here's a calculator from Write Limited on measuring the cost of unclear communication within organizations (which could quite easily be applied to UX).

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And here's a unique take on what numbers to crunch from Harvard Business Review.

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I hope you find this as a helpful starting point Brian, and please do have a think about what I said about defining ROI. I’m curious to know how everyone else defines and measures ROI — let me know!

If you’ve ever presented design findings or recommendations to clients or colleagues, then perhaps you’ve heard them say:

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• “We don’t have the budget or resources for those improvements.”
• “The new executive project has higher priority.”
• “Let’s postpone that to Phase 2.”

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As an information architect, I‘ve presented recommendations many times. And I’ve crashed and burned more than once by doing a poor job of selling some promising ideas. Here’s some things I’ve learned from getting it wrong.

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Buyers prefer sellers they like and trust

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You need to establish trust with peers, developers, executives and so on before you present your findings and recommendations . It sounds obvious, yet presentations often fail due to unfamiliarity, sloppiness or designer arrogance. A year ago I ran an IA test on a large company website. The project schedule was typically “aggressive” and the client’s VPs were endlessly busy. So I launched the test without their feedback. Saved time, right?Wrong. The client ignored all my IA recommendations, and their VPs ultimately rewrote my site map from scratch. I could have argued that they didn’t understand user-centered design. The truth is that I failed to establish credibility. I needed them to buy into the testing process, suggest test questions beforehand, or take the test as a control group. Anything to engage them would have helped – turning stakeholders into collaborators is a great way to establish trust.

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Techniques for presenting UX recommendations

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Many presentation tactics can be borrowed from salespeople, but a single blog post can’t do justice to the entire sales profession. So I’d just like to offer a few ideas for thought. No Jedi mind tricks though. Sincerity matters.

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Emphasize product benefits, not product features

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Beer commercials on TV don’t sell beer. They sell backyard parties and voluptuous strangers. Likewise, UX recommendations should emphasize product benefits rather than feature sets. This may be common marketing strategy. However, the benefits should resonate with stakeholders and not just test participants. Stakeholders often don’t care about Joe End User. They care about ROI, a more flexible platform, a faster way to publish content – whatever metrics determine their job performance.Several years ago, I researched call center data at a large corporation. To analyze the data, I eventually built a Web dashboard. The dashboard illustrated different types of customer calls by product. When I showed it to my co-workers, I presented the features and even the benefits of tracking usability issues this way.However, I didn’t research the specific benefits to my fellow designers. Consequently it was much, much harder to sell the idea. I should have investigated how a dashboard would fit into their daily routines. I had neglected the question that they silently asked: “What’s in it for me?”

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Have a go at contrast selling

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When selling your recommendations, consider submitting your dream plan first. If your stakeholders balk, introduce the practical solution next. The contrast in price will make the modest recommendation more palatable.While working on e-commerce UI, I once ran a usability test on a checkout flow. The test clearly suggested improvements to the payment page. To try slipping it into an upcoming sprint, I asked my boss if we could make a few crucial fixes. They wouldn’t take much time. He said...no. In essence, my boss was comparing extra work to doing nothing. My mistake was compromising the proposal before even presenting it. I should have requested an entire package first: a full redesign of the shopping cart experience on all web properties. Then the comparison would have been a huge effort vs. a small effort.Retailers take this approach every day. Car dealerships anchor buyers to lofty sticker prices, then offer cash back. Retailers like Amazon display strikethrough prices for similar effect. This works whenever buyers prefer justifying a purchase based on savings, not price.

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Use the alternative choice close

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Alternative Choice is a closing technique in which a buyer selects from two options. Cleverly, each answer implies a sale. Here are examples adapted for UX recommendations:

• “Which website could we implement these changes on first, X or Y?”
• “Which developer has more time available in the next sprint, Tom or Harry?”

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This is better than simply asking, “Can we start on Website X?” or “Do we have any developers available?” Avoid any proposition that can be rejected with a direct “No.”

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Convince with the embarrassment close

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Buying decisions are emotional. When presenting recommendations to stakeholders, try appealing to their pride (remember, you’re not actually trying to embarrass someone). Again, sincerity is important. Some UX examples include:

• “To be an industry leader, we need a best-of-breed design like Acme Co.”
• “I know that you want your co mpany to be the best. That’s why we’re recommending a full set of    improvements instead of a quick fix.”

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Techniques for answering objections once you’ve presented

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Once you’ve done your best to present your design recommendations, you may still encounter resistance (surprise!). To make it simple, I’ve classified objections using the three points in the triangle model of project management: Time, Price and Quality. Any project can only have two. And when presenting design research, you’re advocating Quality, i.e. design usability or enhancements. Pushback on Quality generally means that people disagree with your designs (a topic for another day).

Therefore, objections will likely be based on Time or Price instead.In a perfect world, all design recommendations yield ROI backed by quantitative data. But many don’t. When selling the intangibles of “user experience” or “usability” improvements, here are some responses to consider when you hear “We don’t have time” or “We can’t afford it”.

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“We don’t have time” means your project team values Time over Quality

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If possible, ask people to consider future repercussions. If your proposal isn’t implemented now, it may require even more time and money later. Product lines and features expand, and new websites and mobile apps get built. What will your design improvements cost across the board in 6 months? Opportunity costs also matter. If your design recommendations are postponed, then perhaps you’ll miss the holiday shopping season, or the launch of your latest software release. What is the cost of not approving your recommendations?

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“We can’t afford it” means your project team values Price over Quality

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Many project sponsors nix user testing to reduce the design price tag. But there’s always a long-term cost. A buggy product generates customer complaints. The flawed design must then be tested, redesigned, and recoded. So, which is cheaper: paying for a single usability test now, or the aggregate cost of user dissatisfaction and future rework? Explain the difference between price and cost to your team.

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Parting Thoughts

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I realize that this only scratches the surface of sales, negotiation, persuasion and influence. Entire books have been written on topics like body language alone. Uncommon books in a UX library might be “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini and “Secrets of Closing the Sale” by Zig Ziglar. Feel free to share your own ideas or references as well.Any time we present user research, we’re selling. Stakeholder mental models are just as relevant as user mental models.