9 bogus reasons why some designers claim UX Research is a waste
Designers who don’t include research can harm the UX industry
I spent most of my career persuading technical people who didn’t understand design. In the last few years, they finally started to acknowledge the value of UX. So I thought that my days of design activism were over.
Sadly, we’ve now reached the stage where I must fight against my own design peers. Some of them seem to miss the essence of UX themselves.
I see an increasing amount of LinkedIn posts about the lack of purpose of UX research. Obviously, any random person on social media can write something incoherent and nonsensical. That’s the beauty of the internet. I’m not claiming to have a monopoly on the truth, either.
The issue I have is not with the writer who rejects UX research. The problem lies with the sheer number of people who endorse these claims. It seems that the more BS a post is, the more reach via likes and reposts is accomplished.
It’s not even a surprise. MIT scholars found that fake news spreads 7x faster than the truth.
So let’s sort out some fake UX news!
1. The Henry Ford excuse
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford
You hear this one all the time. I also heard a similar one:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said bigger candles.” - Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb
It’s improbable that either of the two historical figures ever said this. It doesn’t matter. Everyone can grasp the message in this one-liner. It’s an easy one to use as a claim against UX research.
The issue… if you use this quote to illustrate why we shouldn’t do interviews, you don’t understand UX research. Researchers will never ask what the user wants. It’s not their job. Instead, they should identify which issues the users have.
Finding the pain points allows you, the designer, to use your creativity to see how these pain points can be resolved.
If Henry Ford had been a UX researcher, he would have asked: “how do you feel about your morning commute?” He’d then discover that horses are slow, unreliable, smelly, and uncomfortable.
That would be a great starting point for some ideation.
If you really insist on using the faster horses quote… you actually can.
It describes quite well why you shouldn’t listen to a product manager or business contact.
“Hey designer, give me faster horses!”
They shouldn’t give you a solution but a business objective instead.
“Hey designer, design something that makes my commute less long!”
You, the designer, are the one who should come up with the solution. Ideally, together with others in ideation workshops.
2. UX research frustrates innovation
“We shouldn’t listen to research findings. It limits our imagination. We need to have an open mind for bold ideas.”
I hate to say it, but UX design is not much about innovation.
99% of the UX industry works on UIs that allow us to smoothly:
- Enter information (tax declaration, administrative form, appointment)
- Order a product (meal, taxi, hotel)
- Find information (map, wiki, birthday)
That’s what most of us do. Enter information, find information, and send information. No need for bold ideas. We just try to make the lives of the user as painless as possible.
Only if you’d work on a product with a global adoption (Google, Facebook), can you afford to create new interaction conventions. If not, you’d violate the user’s mental model and unnecessarily complicate your app.
Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you are designing a Ford Model T.
But even then… think about the most significant innovations of the last 20 years. Which ones would that be?
The majority of them are not even ‘invented’ on the UX level. Most innovation is the result of technological breakthroughs. And otherwise, it’s product, not UX, that comes up with the ideas.
On top of that… all those innovations were the response to a pain point that was identified by UX research.
Of course, as UX designers, we have our micro-innovations. But we usually cause small evolutions, rather than revolutions.
I happen to have worked for the organization (CERN) that invented the touch screen and the world wide web.
The touch screen was invented because the control rooms became so complicated that they sought to simplify the operator’s life. The web was the response to scientists' inability to share their studies in bulk quickly.
Some other significant innovations were the iPhone, swipe gestures, Spotify (all product innovation), or wearables, AI, VR (technological breakthroughs).
Which innovations did really come from UX designers? Maybe Facebook’s like button and Instagram stories? But even those were a reaction to user research. I might miss a few, so please post them in the comments.
So does UX research inhibit innovation? Probably on the contrary. We can conclude that UX research fosters innovation.
Initial research sets the stage for brainstorming, allowing us to develop brilliant ideas that improve lives. Afterwards, we need more research to optimise our ideas and ensure they are market ready.
Innovation is a UX research sandwich.
3. UX research limits creativity
We’re now entering the territories of complete UX insanity. I’ve seriously heard this:
“UX research limits my creativity”
What was meant by this is that research findings could question artistic choices. For instance, research can point out that colourblind people have issues with the used colours.
Some designers get even more frustrated when you remind them of the WCAG standards. Obviously, we should respect colour contrast ratios.
As a UX designer, you are not an artist.
Kafka, van Gogh, and Leonard Cohen were artists. They created something that would allow you to think about its meaning for ages. As UX designers, you want to achieve the exact opposite.
Every unnecessary calorie of cognitive capacity that goes into processing your design is one too many.
Blue on green might look cool, but it can be a nightmare for certain people. Respect the colour ratios.
Unconventional interactions, strange shapes, unnecessary animations… forget about it. It’s harming, not helping.
Think of yourself as an architect.
There’s probably less creativity in architecture than you might think. You need to comply with safety regulations, wheelchair accessibility (the exact same thing as web accessibility), neighbourhood aesthetics (branding), and building structure concepts that prevent the building from collapsing.
UX research is not limiting you in your designs, it helps you by pointing out how your building is sustainable and usable for everyone.
4. UX Research is just a way to ramp up billings
A common misunderstanding is that researchers deliver reports. They do not. User insights are what researchers provide.
How these findings are delivered depends on the organization and context of the study.
A few post-its on a wall can be enough. It can help the product team advance and resolve the issues. That’s basically all they need.
Sometimes, transcribed video snippets in a tool like Dovetail are useful. Especially when certain stakeholders need to be convinced.
If you want to keep track of all your research, you might want to create a repository. This will take time too, but it gives the advantage of being able to go back in time and see patterns in your findings.
What about the reports, then?
Reports are the most tangible way to present your research. Agencies love to spend ages on reports because, for them, the PDF is what they sell. They need to leave something concrete in order to justify their invoices. I guess the stigma about ramping up billings comes from them.
If you wonder if research is worth the investment… all major tech companies are listed on Wall Street. They employ armies of researchers. These companies are almost only driven by profit, so if researchers wouldn’t add value, they would never be hired.
So is research a cost centre? No.
Research will save your company money by ensuring that you build the right thing, and build the thing right.
5. The Designer’s Ego
We get it. Finding out that your work wasn’t so great is not much fun. In fact, it can be quite painful. But it will make you a much, much better designer.
You can only learn to ski if you feel comfortable falling down.
And you need to fall a lot. But by doing so, you will learn not to make the same mistakes again.
The more you expose your designs to usability testing, the better your future designs will become. And the fewer testing sessions your future projects need to reach a satisfactory result.
You can know all the Figma shortcuts, have a great symbols library, and use gazillion plugins, but if this ultra-optimised workflow doesn’t produce designs that serve the objectives, it’s worthless.
Be vulnerable. Embrace the feedback that you get on your designs. The best designers are the ones who are most comfortable with failure, and who learn from it.
6. The time excuse
“Release! MVP! Velocity, velocity, velocity!!!”
In some bizarre Product Management universe, velocity is THE measure of success. This is an obvious sign of a lack of real metrics. Therefore, the only thing that can be easily tracked becomes the holy grail of performance.
Teams are shipping shiploads of new features. The term MVP is then used as an excuse to deliver reduced quality. UX research is ignored because “No time… MVP… but the roadmap… let’s see.”
We all know that iterations during the next sprints don’t happen. The team is already frantically working on the next suboptimal feature.
This will ultimately lead to a pile of design debt.
Steve Bromley covers this issue in his article “5 excuses for not running user research, and how to overcome them”
waiting until it’s ‘ready’ usually means waiting until it’s too late to fix issues. The cost of making changes increases over time — it’s much cheaper to change an ‘idea’ than an almost completed app. If the core idea of the app is misguided (and it frequently is), learning that just before launch is much too late.
You will ultimately end up in a spiral of death. Features are not tested because they need to be shipped, but because they are already built, they are complicated to fix, and, therefore, not fixed.
7. Not statistically significant
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
- Joseph Stalin (but probably not really)
There are numerous people who don’t understand the difference between qualitative and quantitative research.
Arguments like “we can’t make decisions based on the input of 5 users” are popular to disregard the value of proper UX research.
Let’s cover the basics again by quoting the Nielsen Norman Group:
Studies that are qualitative in nature generate data about behaviors or attitudes based on observing them directly, whereas in quantitative studies, the data about the behavior or attitudes in question are gathered indirectly, through a measurement or an instrument such as a survey or an analytics tool.
[…]
Qualitative methods are much better suited for answering questions about why or how to fix a problem, whereas quantitative methods do a much better job answering how many and how much types of questions.
In essence, quantitative research can show us where the problems exist, and qualitative research can identify the cause of the problems and how we can fix them.
We probably know this, but we should continue explaining this to our environment to stop people from using arguments like “it’s not statistically significant”.
A quote from Fabricio Teixeira’s article “Most common excuses for not doing user research:”
Most user research methods are actually focused on gathering qualitative learnings about your users. You are looking for insights, not statistics.
8. We’ve done empathy methods — we know the user
“We’ve done personas, journey mapping, empathy mapping, and even proxy testing with some of the colleagues in the corridor. We understand the user well enough.”
No, you don't.
You can’t read other people’s minds.
You might be able to use some UX methods to understand the user better. But frankly, many of those methods are misused by not including the user in the first place. If your personas are not based on input from real users, they are proto-personas.
Some exercises, like empathy mapping, are a great method to get started, but they still don’t replace real users.
Ian Batterbee summarises the issues well in his article “Debunking seven common reasons for not needing UX research”
“There are no magic shoes to understand what people are thinking and feeling. Empathy comes from speaking with people face-to-face and by observing their behaviours.”
9. No need to ask the user, just ask AI
It was just a matter of time before we would have this discussion. But it’s finally here: AI replaces us all, including our users. And our user tests.
A magic black box algorithm, no one understands, knows the answer to everything, including:
- The issues a just divorced freelancer from Thailand has, when declaring his capital gains tax on the house he had to sell
- The struggles of a carless old Swiss lady, that uses public transport to go grocery shopping, just across the border in France
- The complications someone with limited cognitive abilities from Zimbabwe has, when trying to understand the daily news
A “smart” language model is not going to give you insights into these cases. Most of our UX challenges are highly individual and specific and need to be treated that way. AI is not going to help you.
Sure, it can be helpful in some cases. AI can analyse data, and might even move you in the right direction regarding user insights.
However, good products perform much better than their mediocre competitors because the designers deeply understand how the user behaves.
Strangely or not, the only way to understand the users is to meet them. It’s user experience research, not artificial intelligence research.
Is UX research always needed?
It’s well known that the more you test doesn’t mean, the better the outcome. In fact, the more experienced I’ve become, the less testing I need.
Low-hanging fruit can be picked before bothering the users.
I’m shocked to see how often I come across products that violate fundamental design conventions like Norman’s signifiers and affordances or the Gestalt proximity principles.
These are basic heuristics that should be in order before you start testing, not things you’d find during your tests.
You also don’t have to over-test. Good enough is good enough. You’ll clearly see when you find the point of diminishing returns. There are more than enough ways to monitor, and improve, the product’s performance once it’s life.
Some other reasons why you might not want to conduct, or conduct less, UX research:
- You can find the information you seek in other ways (existing market research, surveys, etc).
- Your company just uses your research to confirm their beliefs, and if you find contradicting insights, your study will be ignored.
- There is a really tight release deadline (eg. urgent change).
- You’ve done similar designs so often that you are confident that your MVP is actually viable.
Be aware: when reducing your research, you must ensure your product is safe. You can deploy whenever you want if your users aren’t at risk. The real world can be an experiment, but not at the expense of your user's physical or emotional safety.
Oh, and in case you are the mastermind behind the next iPhone or other digital revolution… ignore conventional usability testing, follow your gut and take a risk. So yes, if you have really really bold ideas, just go for it!
UX Research ignorance
During my career, I’ve worked with a great amount of very talented designers. However, I see more and more junior designers that fail to understand what design is really about.
I sincerely wonder what they are taught at uni.
It’s explainable that people who don’t have a UX background have a problem understanding the value of research. But, it’s unforgivable for well-educated and decently-paid UX people to think that they can survive without research.
If they want to exercise their full artistic potential, I suggest they buy an easel, join a contemporary dance group, or get piano lessons.
During their job, they need to realise it’s UX design, not designer centred design.
If you made it this far into the article, you are probably not one of the research value deniers. I might have been sharing things you already know quite well.
Nevertheless, I hope some of it gave you some ammunition to challenge your design colleagues who are sceptical about research.
The UX industry wouldn’t be where it is today without research.
Sources
- MIT news — Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories
- WCAG color contrast
- Steve Bromley — 5 excuses for not running user research, and how to overcome them
- Fabricio Teixeira — Most common excuses for not doing user research
- Ian Batterbee — Debunking seven common reasons for not needing UX research
- Nielsen Norman Group — When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods (PDF)
- Images: Midjourney (commercial licence)
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