Why all businesses should invest in UX research

If you ask most folks around a business whether they think UX research is important, the majority will say yes. But believing in the value of research, and investing in it are two different things—with very different roadblocks to overcome.

While almost all product folks know you should invest in research, securing budget and getting buy-in from around the business is another story.

UX research is how you get inside your user’s mind. It helps you build user-centric designs that meet actual user needs. It’s how you replace intuition with insights to save time, money, and effort when pursuing your business goals.

With 62% of product professionals saying the demand for user research has increased in the past 12 months, and 75% planning to scale research even further next year, the time for sitting on the fence is over.

Unsurprisingly, the answer is all businesses should invest in UX research.

Maybe you’re a founder of a startup taking your first product to market and need to validate product-market fit and ensure your end product adequately meets your target audience’s needs.

Perhaps you’re a small business trying to understand why sales are slowly falling month after month.

Or you could be in a product team at a global enterprise, looking to get stakeholder buy-in before launching new features to outpace your competitors.

UX research unlocks value for all business, regardless of scale, product, or customer. UX research is how you identify what users want, and ensure you design and deploy the right features, rather than wasting time and money on the wrong ones.

It doesn’t need to start big, but it needs to start. No matter the size of your business, if you’re not running UX research you’re missing out on valuable user insights that can help improve decision-making across your organization. From product design to sales and marketing—understanding your users enables you to build user-centric experiences that focus on meeting and exceeding customer needs.

Insights trump intuition, every single time.

In short, UX research saves you time, money, and effort by giving you insights into what users really want, instead of relying on educated guesses. Intuition and ideas are valuable assets to a product team, but they only get you so far. You need data-backed insights to ensure you’re making informed decisions every time.

Investing in UX research can be a big step for businesses, but it’s well worth it. Here are six reasons why investing in UX research should be a priority for your organization.

There’s no denying that the biggest reason for investing in UX research is just how much time and money it can save you. It’s a simple calculation:

Versus…

When you conduct user research upfront, you’re able to validate or reject ideas and designs before spending time, effort, and money developing them. UX research asks users what they want, instead of presuming what they want—saving you valuable resources. Investing early on avoids developing and deploying designs that simply don’t meet user needs.

Depending on the size of your organization and product functionality, building the wrong thing can cost anywhere from several thousand dollars, to several million. Not only is this wasted money, but it’s a huge amount of wasted time that could have been invested building something your users actually want to see.

Without investing in UX research, at least 50% of your development team’s time is spent doing entirely avoidable reworks. Your developers—whether in-house or external—are expensive, and their time is incredibly valuable. Moving un-tested designs into development will cost you more in post-production than if you’d invested in UX research to build the right thing the first time around.

Another benefit of investing in UX research is that it’s crucial for creating (and keeping!) loyal customers. Why? Two reasons:

The result? Users get the products they expect, while feeling they’re involved in the process, and valued by you—improving the customer experience, increasing customer satisfaction and NPS scores.

Let’s say you send out a customer feedback survey, and users repeatedly highlight a new feature they’d like. Not only does this investment in UX research help inform your UX roadmap, but it ultimately helps you create a more user-centered product and increase customer loyalty.

By making decisions and developing features off the back of feedback, you show users they’re valued and listened to, cultivating positive user <> product relationships and nurturing loyalty.

88% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know above all other forms of marketing. In a world of fake news and AI-generated marketing, human-to-human recommendations are gold dust for reaching new users.

While a less direct link than others on this list, investing in UX research unequivocally attracts and converts new users.

We know that UX research boosts to user loyalty, and interwoven with your loyal customers is the much-lauded brand advocate.

If you’re investing in UX research and acting on insights, your existing users become brand advocates, who recommend your product or services to others. This increases acquisition organically, reducing the amount you spend on costly acquisition campaigns.

But, that’s not all—UX research also enables you to investigate and optimize the journey people undertake before converting to new customers. By conducting surveys, interviews, and usability testing, you can ascertain what works and what doesn’t when it comes to attracting and converting new customers.

Your existing customers were all once prospects, meaning they have unique insights into what motivated their conversion to paying customers—and what doubts they had along the way. You can then use these customer insights to improve the acquisition process for future customers.

Okay, this one feels somewhat obvious, but we can’t go without mentioning it: the undebatable truth of UX research and design is that it’s the key to building better products, and—by extension—better customer experiences.

User research unlocks value in many ways, from guiding overarching strategic direction and product discovery to delving into the nitty-gritty with specific usability issues.

The plethora of UX research methods that are available to you and your team make uncovering decision-driving insights easy at all stages of the design and product development process. Whether you have a specific focus or are just looking for insights to help guide your decisions, there’s a UX research method to help you.

Just a few ways different methods can help are:

Of course, this is just an example. The truth is, UX research methods are versatile, and can be applied at many stages of the UX design process. There’s no rulebook for using UX research methods throughout the product development process—they’re tools to provide guidance and direction as and when you need them.

UX research doesn’t just impact users—it benefits your wider organization by creating a user-centered culture and generating atomic research nuggets you can store in your research repository and use across the team. For example, insights uncovered during user research can help:

The insights discovered through user research can inform and optimize your day-to-day decision-making, but they also have the potential to shape your entire growth strategy. UX research can guide you toward the best way forward—whether we’re talking about something as simple as updating a button, or as impactful as navigating uncertainty in your business and industry.

Last, but by no means least, UX research keeps you competitive. One way is by engaging in competitive product analysis to monitor the competition and benchmark your product.

Investing in UX research also ensures you’ve got your finger on the pulse of UX research trends and what customers want next. By continuously talking to users and understanding their needs, you’ll find that you uncover opportunities for innovation that competitors haven’t yet identified.

For example, consider the case of AI. It’s making its way into every industry—and we’re not surprised. AI has the power to automate and optimize tasks like nothing we’ve seen before. But, applying AI to your own products isn’t straightforward. With thousands of applications, knowing where to focus your efforts is crucial for gaining a competitive advantage over others in your industry.

Conducting UX research—like interviewing users and running feedback surveys—helps you identify the ways that you can harness the power of AI in UX design. Of course, user feedback doesn’t tell you exactly what to do—but with this feedback and your team’s knowledge, you’re more likely to build the solutions people need before anybody else does.

The benefits of UX research, and the number one reason why you should invest in it, boil down to this: it puts your users at the heart of product decision-making. If you don’t build products, features, and experiences that customers actually want, they’ll leave. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow—but when they see that your competitors care more about their experience than you do, they’ll jump ship.

The benefits of UX research can’t be overstated. It takes the guesswork out of building a product and experience that users love, and gets your customers involved in your development and growth, making them more invested in your success.

Getting started can be simple, too. You don’t need a ten-person team or all the UX books and knowledge in the world—you just need the desire to build a user-centric mindset and a UX research tool to begin.

Maze’s suite of UX research methods facilitates all types of UX research, and automated, visual-rich reports make sharing your findings fast and useful for the whole team. There’s an option for every UX team, including a forever-free plan for those who are just dipping their toes into the ocean of UX research.