5 reasons why designers should STOP running customer research

Courtesy of Lara O. Geom

Have you ever caught yourself thinking about solutions, before fully understanding the customers’ problem? I know I have.

And I don’t think it can be avoided. By nature, designers are problem solvers. It’s a trait that we’re born with, and our job only adds more weight to it.

Still, it’s a general expectation from us to carry out the early stages of customer research. And when doing that, we’re expected to leave aside our problem-solving background and talk to users as if we know nothing. Something like Jon Snow.

If only it were as simple as putting all our ideas in the famous “parking lot”. Our mind doesn’t work like that, and our thoughts are not post-its you can put up on a wall. Even though we’re genuinely trying to ignore our ideas, it’s hard to believe we can.

The fact is that humans have more than 100 known logical flaws, and some of these have significant influence over the way we interpret what customers say.

And just because of our problem-solving mindset, I believe we’re most vulnerable to the I-knew-it-all-along effect, also known as the hindsight bias. That is when “[..] subjects, after learning the eventual outcome, give a much higher estimate for the predictability of that outcome than subjects who predict the outcome without advance knowledge. […]” (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks). I believe this works the other way around too. After designing and building so many solutions, we will give a much higher estimate for the odds that our solution is the right one.

And there are other logical flaws such as the Conjunction Fallacy or Confirmation Bias. If you want to know more about these, I recommend you check Yudkowsky’s paper.

So how can we minimise the risks of these biases?

The good news is that we’ve already started doing that. The bad news is that we’re not doing it quite right yet.

The design discipline is maturing, and we’re seeing higher demand for specialised UX Researchers. This role has significantly increased in popularity over the past few years. Especially in companies where design maturity is at least a Level 4 (if we refer to the NNg/ Corporate UX Maturity Stages).

These folks are specialised in gathering in-depth, unbiased insights and problem statements from customers. They have an intrinsic curiosity mindset supported by an ability to truly connect to people and understand behaviours. They care less about solving the problem, and more about understanding the problem.

Flip a coin, and you have the problem-solving mindset of the UX Designers who get a kick out solving problems. After years of doing it at work, it becomes who they are. They can’t help themselves.

And you need both sides of the coin. The researcher to understand the problem and the designer to solve the problem. Working as a perfectly synced duo. That’s what makes collaborative teams so powerful, and UX Designers should not be expected to master all parts of the design process.

The tricky part is around how they’re working together.

I’ve seen UX Designers working hand in hand with UX Researchers to create the topic guides, evaluate the responses and generate the customer insights. This means that the designer is producing and consuming user insights. Which puts the designer in a position where she has a significant influence on the outcome (solution). This is where a logical flaw such as the Hindsight bias can generate confusion.

Here’s a crazy idea: what if designers would stop running research?

I’m not saying designers should ignore customer research, I’m saying designers should stop getting involved in producing customer insights. This means that designers are still using the research findings, but passing on the majority of control to the UX Researcher. Becoming merely a consumer of the research outputs. Still working very closely with UX researchers, but focusing more on solving the problem.

But let’s break this down, and see what kind of benefits can come out of it.

Benefits of researchers running research without designers

1. You stop thinking about solutions before understanding the problem. Probably the most significant advantage of them all. It will make it easier for the teams to stop thinking about solutions until they make sure they understand the customer problems. The beauty of this is that it also makes it easier for the research team to choose the customer problems which are more difficult to solve. Customer problems which will challenge the designers to get out of their comfort zone.
2. Your research work starts being ‘customer centred’ instead of ‘project centred’. When working with designers, it’s very likely that you’re bound by a specific project and timeline. Which means that your research will be focused and narrow. Removing the designers from the picture, would give the team a higher degree of independence. This would also allow them to be project agnostic and dive into research which would otherwise be considered out of scope. That’s where the A-ha moments will show up. At the end of the day, it would give the company a more comprehensive view of customers.
3. The output of your research has better quality. I’m not sure about you, but one-week research sprints don’t seem ideal to me. When you’re dealing with complex user behaviours, different demographics, and multiple countries, working in the same timeframe with a design sprint is challenging. However, I see many companies imposing the same sprint durations on research, as for design or development. This will ultimately affect the quality of the research.
4. Your research becomes more efficient. With the risk of repeating myself, one or two-week sprints don’t always seem possible to me. It’s true that they make research seem effective. But that’s if you only look at one project. If you look at the overall research that your company is running, you will realise that things are actually inefficient. Most likely you’re running research sprints with similar goals. And that happens because you did not allow enough flexibility to do comprehensive research the first time. Separating research sprints from other sprints gives the team more flexibility and will enable them to be overall more efficient. Instead of feeding research into each design sprint, you can create a backlog of customer problems and opportunities for the design team to tackle at their own pace.
5. Your researchers can act as pre-validators before customer testing. Assuming that the researcher is the owner of the customer problem and the designer is the owner of the solution, the researcher can act as a validator in very early stages of Ideation. They would have significant influence over which ideas make it past the post-it stage, and which don’t.

Closing thoughts

You might have noticed that I’ve only explored the bright side of this approach. There are however risks of doing things this way.

The loss of customer empathy is one of them. Designers need to put themselves in the customers’ shoes in a snap of fingers, and they usually build the empathy to do that during research.

But given that we’re living through The Rise of the UX Researcher, we cant take the opportunity to improve our processes and learn how designers and researchers can best work together.

This is a controversial idea with potential drawbacks. However, I’ve decided to share it. I welcome all responses because it’s time we challenge ourselves and in the process, take Design to the next stage.