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Impact is about more than ROI. Learn how to define impact, measure outcomes, and keep a record of your success.
Lizzy Burnam
Plenty has already been said about the impact of UX research on sales-related metrics like revenue and conversion ratesâbut impact is about more than just ROI.Â
It also comes in the form of: Team alignment around the user, internal process efficiencies, confident decision-making, and even avoiding disastrous product designs (anyone remember Google Glass? No? Me neither.).Â
As Victoria Sosik, Director of UX Research at Verizon, defines it:Â
â[Impact is] when the knowledge generated by UX research influences another person, organization, product, or strategy.... it's always the influence your work has, not the work itself.âÂ
Keeping a record of the impact of your UX research can help:
Despite the clear benefits to doing so, few UX researchers have a formal process in place for tracking the impact of their work.Â
If youâre one of the many UXRs trying to keep track of impact in their own heads, you should know: Thereâs a better way.Â
Here are some tips for getting started.Â
âImpactâ can mean a lot of different things, so itâs important to decide early on how youâll define âimpactâ within your organization.Â
As a user researcher, you probably already have a solid grasp of your companyâs top-level goals and understand how to tie your research to the bottom line (if not, runâdonât walkâover to our guide to conducting stakeholder interviews). However, your work can also influence other areas of your company in important ways.Â
Kanishk Shukla, User Experience Researcher at Alaska Airlines, places impact into two buckets:
With this in mind, you need to define the different types of impact your research can have and decide which ones are important to you and your organization.Â
You might include things like:
Of course, that doesnât mean you shouldnât also track hard metrics like ROI. Tracking which insights influenced which product decisions allows you to quantify the business value of user research.
The best time to record your impact will always be: In the moment.Â
But obviously, thatâs not always possibleâand one of the main challenges with measuring the impact of UX research is that a detectable impact may be slow to emerge.Â
As Tao Dong, UX Researcher at Google says in UX Collective:Â
âThe impact of a study might take some time to realize from its completion. This is especially true for foundational research which is intended to build a baseline understanding of potential users and their needs before the team even starts designing or building a product.â
Dong provides the following framework for thinking about and reviewing the impact of research over time:
By understanding what kind of impact can be realized when, you can set a standardized cadence for reviewing different types of impact throughout the year. This cadence may differ from organization to organization, depending on the frequency of your research and your overall capacity.Â
Whatever frequency you decide on, setting aside dedicated time to review and record your impact ensures this important task will actually get done.Â
One of the simplest ways to identify your impact is to hear it directly from the mouths of those who are most invested in your work: Your stakeholders.Â
As Tomer Sharon, VP User Experience at WeWork, says in UXMatters:
âWhen stakeholders act on the findings of UX research, you can clearly point to the positive effect that the research is having on the organization, its products, and its customers. All you need to do is pay attention and be aware.â
Inform stakeholders of your plan for collecting feedback as early on as possible, so they know to pay attention to how your work is influencing different areas of the business. Including your feedback strategy in your initial user research plan gives stakeholders the chance to approve or propose the feedback methods that theyâre most likely to use.Â
Those methods can range from 1â1 interviews, surveys, emails, spreadsheets, or group meetings. Whichever method you choose, you should include questions like:
With their permission, direct quotes about your impact from stakeholders may be a powerful inclusion in your UX research portfolio. Learn more about building a strong UX research portfolio in this blog by User Experience Career Coach Eniola Abioye.Â
You likely already have a user research repository in some shape or form, be it in Google Drive, Airtable, or one of the many other UX research repository tools out there.Â
By including an impact section in your research repository, you can easily tie research-generated insights to specific outcomes.Â
Victoria Sosik suggests including three key pieces of information in this section:
Standardizing the impact type and scale can help with sorting, organizing, and quantifying your impact later on.Â
Some researchâsuch as discovery studies about who your users are and how they thinkâwill remain true, relevant, and useful for years to come.Â
(Mind you, that doesnât mean theyâll remain useful indefinitelyâbut certainly for a longer time than something like an A/B test, after which the winning feature is implemented and the losing feature tossed out.)
In these cases, research deliverables can be a helpful tool for stakeholders to revisit your findings and continue to drive an impact from your work.Â
These deliverables might include personas, storyboards, customer journey maps, and other reports and presentations. When these deliverables are easily accessible and understood by stakeholders, you can extendâand compoundâthe impact of your research well into the future.Â
If possible, itâs best to link these deliverables directly within your research repository. With everything in one place, you can take a quick, 30,000-foot glance over the work youâve done and how itâs shaped your company, your products, and your users.Â
When you ask any user researcher why they love their work, almost every one of them references the impact theyâve made on users, products, and companies.Â
Ultimately, understanding the impact youâve made (and still can make) strengthens your connection to the purpose of your work. And purpose-driven researchers can act as the guiding force behind better products and better user experiences. (Speaking of purpose-driven researchersâcheck out our User Research Yearbook of 2022, a directory of thought leaders, change makers, and essential voices in user research and design.)
By tracking and categorizing your impact as closely as you do your research insights and deliverables, youâll build confidence in yourself as a professional, improve process efficiencies and research infrastructure, demonstrate the value of research to stakeholders, and more.Â
P.S.âCan we make an impact on the way you work? User Interviews is the fastest way to recruit, manage, and distribute incentives to participants, so you have more time to spend on higher-value work. Sign up for free.Â
Content Marketing Manager
Marketer, writer, poet. Lizzy likes hiking, people-watching, thrift shopping, learning and sharing ideas. Her happiest memory is sitting on the shore of Lake Champlain in the summer of 2020, eating a clementine.
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