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Strategic UX Research is the next big thing

Strategic UX Research is how organizations connect their long-term direction and strategy to customers’ and users’ deepest needs. It’s been around for a while but only recently has caught the attention of top executives.

Jared M. Spool
UX Collective
Published in
10 min readJul 7, 2023

A woman in a white jacket and hat faces away from the camera and overlooks the Otago Bay and Peninsula in New Zealand, which has lush blue water and a green landscape.
New Zealand, 2017 — Photo by author

These organization leaders will work with a detailed, shared understanding of their customers’ and users’ experiences. They’ll use that understanding to set the business’s direction, determine where to invest, and focus the organization’s long-term and short-term directions on efforts that dramatically improve those experiences. Strategic UX research changes how senior executives and stakeholders relate with the people who benefit from the organization’s products and services.

Organizations get more done with the same number of people. It delivers superpowers to the senior executives, enabling their organization to be a visionary market leader because the entire team has a better picture of how their product improves people’s lives.

The benefits that…

Written by Jared M. Spool

Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre - UIE. Helping designers everywhere help their organizations deliver well-designed products and services.

Responses (14)

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This sounds like good old service design. You name it, there are so many design disciplines, no need to invent a new one. In the end, all designers should have that strategic mindset, otherwise, they are just mere executors.

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I agree with others here that this is really not a new concept, but rather one that is rarely practiced - or practiced correctly. I have argued for years (and have proven it true with my own activities) that observation activities should be done…

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Thank Jared, this is very insightful.
The benefit of strategic UX Research is unquestionable, but we must acknowledge that senior leadership buy-in is the key enabler for it to happen, and the lack of it a major blocker. I anticipate that any…

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