""What if my company doesn't really do user research?" That's a question designers increasingly ask me, reflecting the reality around user research. Between AI-powered synthetic research, tight budgets, and more, it can be tricky to be an advocate for user research. But an interesting pattern emerged when I talked with 21 design leaders from around the globe. Many used an unexpected tool to argue for integrating user research: the business goals themselves."
"One of the good and bad things is that designers are often empathetic about the user's entire journey. We don't focus on individual user needs: we think about things from start to finish. That's what UX professionals are trained to do. As a result, it can be very easy to gather dozens of user observations in a single round of user testing. The problem? Designers don't understand priority. Teams often can't implement 20 different findings at once: they might have the capacity for 3."
Designers often empathize with the user's entire journey and gather many observations across end-to-end experiences. UX professionals frequently collect dozens of findings from a single round of testing, creating a clarity gap around which issues to prioritize. Teams rarely have capacity to implement numerous findings at once, typically acting on only a few high-impact items. Design leaders can leverage business goals to focus research on measurable outcomes and align recommendations with key metrics. Framing research as tied to revenue, retention, or conversion helps secure stakeholder buy-in and clearer implementation roadmaps. Small, hypothesis-driven studies reduce risk and produce prioritized, actionable insights.
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