The three roles you need for an impactful UX research
Balance the roles of knowledge Creator, Conveyor, and Campaigner to generate a positive impact as a UX researcher
Have you ever felt frustrated with the results of your research being overlooked, ignored, or misinterpreted, effectively preventing the positive impact you were expecting it could have?
Well, you're not alone. As the UX research field matures, there is a growing trend of debates surrounding the challenges in delivering, measuring, and demonstrating real outcomes from research. One important complicating factor is that the primary responsibility of a UX researcher is to influence the decision-makers, not to make the decisions independently. It’s similar to being in the passenger seat of a vehicle, assisting the driver in reaching their destination — you may suggest the optimal route based on your research, but it is the person driving who ultimately makes the final choice, using or not your advice. In fact, according to a recent study, “how research is used” was one of the main pain points amongst UX researchers, showing that it’s a hot topic.
In this situation, UX researchers must take extra steps to have a significant impact on their companies and users. In my opinion, this calls for a revision of the conventional role of the researcher as solely a generator of knowledge and recognizing communication and engagement strategies as being equally important. In other words, not only being an effective knowledge creator but also fully embracing the roles of knowledge conveyor and knowledge campaigner, giving a higher weight to the activities under these additional roles instead of treating them as an afterthought.
To illustrate, let's say you are investigating the specific needs of a customer segment. As a knowledge creator, your focus is on advancing what is known by your organization or team about this topic. As a knowledge conveyor, your job is to ensure that your team and stakeholders comprehend the topic as you intend them to, generating the alignment needed for appropriate actions. As a knowledge campaigner, you are responsible for ensuring that your insights are used by the right people at the right time and incorporated into the final product without being distorted. As you can see, those are complimentary activities, and if one of them fails, chances are your research efforts will have much less impact than you were expecting or even backfire.
When well-balanced, these roles provide a strong set of habits that simplify the lives of all stakeholders, users, teammates, and of course, yourself. Let’s take a closer look at the distinct traits and practices that enable UX researchers to flourish in each function.
Role #1: Knowledge Creator
The first role seems obvious because it's what researchers are trained for in academic and professional contexts. It's about creating knowledge by carrying out research that yields a fresh understanding of a particular topic.
However, simply conducting research does not ensure the generation of high-quality knowledge —it usually requires a great deal of discipline to be effective and avoid producing redundant or, even worse, misleading results. Of course, that doesn't mean you need academic-level protocols in all you do. It's more like striking a balance between finding the ultimate scientific truth and mitigating/avoiding risks.
Signs that you, as a researcher, are an effective knowledge creator:
#1: You carefully (and creatively) leverage current information and knowledge, considering secondary research — including your own and your colleagues' — before diving too much into more expensive research techniques;
#2: You make sure that your stakeholders' needs, concerns, and perspectives are also taken into account, by managing their assumptions and questions from the beginning;
#3: You employ an interdisciplinary approach, collaborating with specialists in different subjects and areas such as Product Managers, Designers, etc., and proactively looking for fresh viewpoints from diverse angles;
#4: You make sure your findings are because of the things you studied, and not because of something else (a.k.a internal validity);
#5: You resist the temptation of making generalizations for a larger population or other groups of people or situations that you can't prove (a.k.a external validity);
#6: You clearly point out where the contribution of your research is, whether offering a new perspective or framing to existing knowledge or providing entirely original insights;
#7: You're able to explain in simple terms what you have found, the "why" behind it, and its implications, showing that you understand what you're proposing. The Nobel Prize winner and physicist Richard Feynman had a thing or two to say about that;
#8: You have the courage to say “we don’t know, but we can investigate that” for eventual questions about things outside/beyond your initial scope. Hint: If you get questions of this type too often in the later stages of your research, you probably need to pay more attention to item #2 next time.
Role #2: Knowledge Conveyor
Being able to explain your research results in simple terms is an important achievement by itself, but just the start. UX researchers need to take a step further and act like a conveyor, "transporting" knowledge to the people they want to influence and communicating it in a way that promotes empathy and motivates them to take action.
The best way to achieve that is by telling a good story from your results. Storytelling makes research findings relatable and engaging because it communicates at a personal level. The context and background information provided by well-delivered stories helps to make the research findings more comprehensible and easy to remember. That's because humans are hard-wired to figure out the world via stories. As the brain scientist Dr. John Medina points out, "we create and live by stories".
To get inspired, set the bar high. For example, Carl Sagan made convoluted scientific concepts accessible to the general public through his public lectures, books, and captivating television programs. Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician, statistician, and masterful communicator, brought complex data and statistics to life through his TED talks and books.
Signs that you, as a researcher, are an effective knowledge Conveyor:
#1: You plan ahead your strategy for communicating the results of your research, it's not an after-thought;
#2: You reach the right people in the right place at the right time, ideally based on a stakeholder analysis;
#3: You use storytelling techniques and narrative structures that are suitable for your topic, audience, and media, fine-tuning content and style;
#4: You use the right content in the right format for the right media, choosing wisely between written reports, newsletters, presentations, etc;
#5: You test your communication tactics and artifacts, just like any other product, improving them based on feedback and reactions;
#6: When presenting, you acknowledge the Pictorial Superiority Effect and craft visual-oriented decks, not careless dumps of text that torture everyone. After all, blocks of text are just more-complex images for the human brain;
#7: You make sure there are channels in place for your audience to interact with you, asking questions and making comments;
#8: Your audience knows what to do next, or at least has a much better sense of direction after you deliver the message.
Role #3: Knowledge Campaigner
Slide decks and reports are where research insights go to die. That, of course, is if you think your work as a researcher stops when you present/share a research report. Even when telling good stories, researchers still depend on other people's motivation to see action based on their insights, as discussed at the beginning of this article. Your presentation may have fired them up, but the excitement probably won’t last for long, and other pressing duties will likely overtake their focus eventually.
To keep the momentum, engage your team and stakeholders during the entire insight lifecycle, from its creation to its utilization. It's crucial that you take on the role of a campaigner for your research, by constantly promoting it and making it easier to use. This is by far the most overlooked of the three roles and at the same time a secret weapon.
Promoting your research means proactively finding and leveraging new opportunities for your research to be used. What non-obvious communication channels could you use to share your research? Who else could benefit from your insights?
Making your research easy to use means making it accessible both logistically and cognitively. Is it easy to find in your company systems? Does everybody who could benefit from it have access to it? Is it free of technical jargon or insider lingo? Keep in mind that your research is like a product, and your team and stakeholders are your customers. Richard Thaler, a Nobel Prize winner, behavioral economics scientist, and proposer of the Nudge theory put it this way:
"(…) if you want to get somebody to do something, make it easy. If you want to get people to eat healthier foods, then put healthier foods in the cafeteria, and make them easier to find, and make them taste better. So in every meeting I say, 'Make it easy'. It’s kind of obvious, but it’s also easy to miss."
Signs that you, as a researcher, are an effective knowledge campaigner:
#1: You nurture a healthy relationship with your team and stakeholders, in a genuine, respectful, and meaningful way;
#2: You make sure your research findings and insights are in an appropriate granularity, language, and format to drive action, leveraging frameworks such as Jobs To Be Done, Value Proposition Design, etc;
#3: You facilitate or co-facilitate ideation workshops based on your research. After all, people retain information better and more quickly when they put it into practice;
#4: You are an SME (Subject Matter Expert) of user needs and interests in any relevant discussion that pops up in your team and with stakeholders, without being an annoying know-it-all;
#5: You find ways to be involved in important discussions, explicitly asking to be included if needed;
#6: You engage in 1:1 conversations/follow-ups with anyone trying to understand better or use your research or your methods;
#7: You regularly foster discussions by sharing news articles and examples related to your research with your team and stakeholders, making connections and parallels with your research findings when it's the case.
Wrapping up
The best UX researchers I know have consistently shown a good balance between those three aspects. They don't just create high-quality knowledge — they make it drive real value to their organizations and users by applying smart communication tactics and by being activists and advocates of their own research. They also know that generating impactful UX research requires acquiring new habits and letting others go, which takes practice, discipline, and time.
It’s understandable if some of the points in this article appear challenging to implement and sustain. Some of them are indeed difficult to execute consistently, most of the time because of external factors such as organizational UX maturity, lack of minimal conditions, or unnecessary bureaucracy. However, the good news is that you can try to make up for these difficulties by enhancing other areas and achieving a harmonious balance between the three roles. Balance — What a powerful word!
I hope you got some value out of this article. If you’re interested in more of my thoughts on UX Research and Strategy, feel free to give me a follow or connect with me on LinkedIn.
