What is UX Research and what is its importance?

UX research is the systematic study of what users need, how they behave and in what context they use a product or service, carried out before, during and after design. Its purpose is to base decisions on evidence about real people instead of internal assumptions, reducing the risk of building the wrong thing and improving it continuously once it is live.

Picture the steering committee of a regional bank six weeks after launching a redesigned mobile onboarding flow. The project was delivered on time and approved by every executive who saw it. Yet the completion rate is lower than the old process, the contact center is receiving calls from customers who got stuck on the identity verification screen, and the digital banking director has to explain to the board why a well-funded project is producing complaints. Nobody made an obvious mistake. The team designed for the customer it imagined, a person with a new phone, a quiet room and plenty of patience, and never watched a real customer trying to open an account while standing in a supermarket queue. UX research is the discipline that prevents that conversation, and it is far cheaper to practice before the launch than to explain after it.

The logic is simple. Whenever a new product is created, physical or digital, the intention is to have customers who consume it, which is why generating a good solution for those customers matters so much. UX research has as its main objective to reveal valuable information to incorporate into the design process, and thus to obtain a better result and understand what customers really need. This article explains what UX research is, how it is applied through the stages of design, and why it has become a management question and not only a design one. It builds on our overview of UX and the myths that surround it, which separates interface from experience.

What is UX research?

User experience research is a study carried out at different stages of design in order to know the target user and the requirements that user may have with respect to a product or service. It also allows the team to understand the real contexts in which people interact with it: the device, the environment, the urgency and the alternatives they have at hand. Its methods range from interviews and observation, through surveys and analytics, to usability tests and diary studies. The Nielsen Norman Group, one of the most respected authorities on the subject, organizes 20 research methods across three dimensions and over time within a typical product development process, and offers a message that executives should remember: do not just run usability tests, do what you need, according to the question you are trying to answer.

That last point is important, because many organizations equate UX research with a usability test at the end of a project. A test confirms whether people can use something that has already been designed. Research, in the fuller sense, starts earlier and asks whether the thing deserves to be designed in the first place, who it is for and what problem it solves. The earlier the finding arrives, the cheaper the change, since altering a concept costs a conversation, while altering a released product costs development time, customer goodwill and often a campaign that must be explained.

What do you gain from UX research?

With UX research a company obtains three things that are hard to get any other way. The first is the ability to segment your buyer persona effectively. Knowing the buyer persona is essential when making design decisions, and it requires real data to ensure that the company is designing for an existing customer and not for a convenient fiction. Personas built in a workshop from the team's impressions are hypotheses. Personas built on interviews and observed behavior are evidence.

The second is an understanding of the needs and problems of that buyer persona. When customers are interviewed, besides defining their demographic characteristics, the team must understand which needs or problems the product will meet, in order to focus on solving them and offer users what they are really looking for. The distinction between what people say they want and what they need in order to achieve their goal is where much of the value of research lies, and it explains why customer surveys alone often disappoint. The third is the continuous improvement of the product or service. Once the design has advanced or is complete, the team must test with users to find the problems the product may have and improve it continuously until the result provides a good user experience.

Why is UX research important for the business?

For years the argument for design was aesthetic. Today there is evidence that it is financial. McKinsey tracked 300 publicly listed companies across several countries and industries for five years, collecting more than two million financial data points and recording more than 100,000 design actions. In The business value of design, it reports that companies in the top quartile of its McKinsey Design Index achieved 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher total returns to shareholders growth than their industry peers over the period. The study also found that the leaders treat the user experience as a core discipline and iterate continuously with users, while about 50 percent of the companies surveyed carried out user research before generating their first design ideas, and over 40 percent were still not talking to their end users during development.

That last finding is the practical lesson. The correlation between design performance and financial results does not prove that research alone produces growth, since leading companies do many things differently. But it does show that the habit of listening to users early and often is a common trait of the firms that outperform, and that a large share of companies still skip it. In markets where products and prices converge, the experience is often the only durable difference, and experience cannot be improved reliably without understanding the people who live it.

When should UX research be applied?

User experience research can be applied at any stage of the design process, with a different objective in each. The three moments below are the ones that matter most for planning.

Before starting to design, the aim is to collect information that clarifies who the company is designing for and whether the proposed solution responds to their needs, in addition to understanding with whom it is competing. This is the stage in which interviews, field observation and the analysis of competing alternatives pay off the most. A retailer that is considering a click-and-collect service would, at this point, find out how its customers currently shop, what makes them abandon a purchase and which competitors have already trained their expectations.

During the design process, the aim is to test progress with users and make improvements along the way, instead of waiting until the end. Every product team wants its work to be successful, and testing early prototypes with a handful of users is the most economical way to avoid committing to a flawed idea. When the product is ready to go, it must be tested to confirm that the improvements made during the process had a positive effect. UX research should never be considered finished, since there will always be aspects to improve in order to give an excellent user experience. A released product generates a continuous stream of behavioral data, support tickets and customer comments that is the raw material for the next cycle.

How does UX research change by industry?

In banking and insurance, research concentrates on trust and friction at moments of high consequence: identity verification, claims, payments and error messages. Observing five customers trying to report a claim from a roadside can reveal more than a quarterly satisfaction survey. In retail and e-commerce, the focus is on findability, the checkout flow and the experience across channels, because small frictions multiply across thousands of daily sessions. In healthcare, research must account for stress, accessibility and the limited digital confidence of some patients, and for the fact that errors can have real consequences.

In B2B services and software, the users are often different from the buyers, so the research has to map both: the person who uses the tool every day and the executive who approves the budget. In public services, the challenge is inclusion, since the user base is diverse by definition. These are illustrative scenarios, but they share a rule. The more costly an error is for the customer or the company, the more it pays to observe real behavior before deciding. Our article on usability testing in UX design describes one of the most practical techniques for that purpose.

How reliable is the data that UX research produces, and what are its limits?

UX research is a method that produces reliable data because it brings the company close to real customers and lets it see how they will interact with its product, instead of relying on opinions inside the building. That reliability has conditions. The participants must resemble the people who will actually use the product, the tasks must reflect real situations and the facilitator must avoid leading the person toward the answer the team hopes to hear. A study with the wrong participants can be worse than no study, because it lends false authority to a flawed conclusion.

There are also honest limits. Small qualitative samples are excellent for discovering why a problem occurs but cannot say how frequent it is, which is why mature teams combine them with analytics and surveys. People are not always reliable about their own future behavior, so what they do in a test is more informative than what they promise to do. And research informs decisions without making them: it reduces uncertainty, but the executive still has to weigh cost, timing and strategy. Treating research as an input to judgment, and not as a substitute for it, is what separates organizations that use it well from those that use it as a ritual.

What does UX research mean for the C-level?

For the chief executive, UX research is a risk control mechanism for investments in digital channels and new offers. It does not guarantee success, but it reduces the chance of funding a project that customers will not adopt, and it shortens the time between a flawed assumption and its discovery. For the chief financial officer, the case is cost avoidance and conversion. The cost of correcting a problem found in research is small compared with the cost of correcting it after launch, and improvements in completion rates, support calls and abandonment translate directly into revenue and cost to serve.

For the chief commercial and marketing officers, research is the way to know what customers value and why they choose or leave, which informs positioning, messaging and the buyer persona. For the chief customer officer, it is the source of the insight needed to retain and build loyalty, since customers who find a product easy and relevant stay longer. The common thread is governance. Companies that benefit from research make it a routine, with a budget, an owner and a rule that significant launches are informed by customer evidence, rather than a one-off activity that depends on an enthusiastic designer.

How can a director get started next week?

Begin with the decisions, not the methods. List the three most important digital or service changes your organization will make in the next six months, and for each one write down the assumption about customers on which its success depends. Then ask a simple question: what is the quickest way to test that assumption with real customers before we spend the budget? Sometimes the answer is five interviews, sometimes an analysis of existing support tickets and web analytics, sometimes a quick prototype shown to eight users.

Recruit participants who truly resemble your buyer personas, and observe more than you ask. Watch where people hesitate, what they misunderstand and what workaround they invent. Share the findings with the executives who must make the decisions, ideally by letting them watch a short session, because seeing a customer struggle is more persuasive than any report. Repeat the practice at the next stage of the project. To make sure that your research is focused on the right audience, build the profile of your buyer persona with the ICX Persona Playbook toolkit, and review our five UX design tricks to improve your website for quick wins once you know what your users need. In our experience the method is simple to apply and can be adapted to the size and maturity of the organization, which makes it feasible inside any company.

How ICX helps

ICX Consulting is a commercial strategy and customer experience firm headquartered in Miami, and we use research to connect what customers need with what the business decides. Our UX research practice plans and runs the studies that give your teams reliable evidence, and it is complemented by usability and accessibility evaluations and UX analytics that show how people behave once the product is live. We translate the findings into experience design decisions and prioritize them by their impact on revenue, retention and cost to serve. If you want to know where your customers are struggling before they tell you by leaving, request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant.

If you focus your UX research on the right audience for your product, building the buyer persona profile is the first step. Download the ICX Persona Playbook toolkit to use a structured template that will help you.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between UX research and market research?

Market research studies what groups of people think, buy or intend to buy, usually through surveys and sales data. UX research studies how people behave when they use a product or service and why they struggle or succeed. The two complement each other, since one explains demand and the other explains the quality of the experience.

How many users do you need for a UX study?

It depends on the method and the question. Small qualitative studies with a handful of participants per user segment are often enough to reveal the most serious usability problems, while quantitative studies that measure rates or compare designs require larger samples. Run more than one small round instead of a single large one.

When is UX research worth the investment?

It pays the most when a decision is expensive to reverse, when many customers will be affected, or when internal opinions disagree. A new digital channel, a redesigned purchase flow or a high-volume service process are typical examples, because a small improvement is multiplied by every customer who goes through it.

Who should be responsible for UX research in a company?

Ideally a dedicated researcher or a design team lead who works closely with product, marketing, sales and service. Even without a specialist, a company can assign an owner who plans studies, shares results and ensures that important decisions refer to them.

Does UX research end when the product launches?

No. After launch, real usage data, customer comments and support tickets reveal new problems and opportunities. Treat the launch as the beginning of a cycle of observation and improvement, not as the end of the research.

Products and services succeed when they solve real problems for real people, and the surest way to know what those problems are is to ask and to observe. If you would like to bring that discipline into your organization, the ICX Consulting team is ready to help you plan the research that your next decision needs.