How to Shift From Tactical to Strategic UX Research

Metadata

Key takeaways

  • Strategic research is key to accomplishing business and user goals. Strategic research can help us deliver the most value to the user, without which user goals
  • Shift from tactical (low level, reactive) to strategic research (high level, situationally aware).
  • Shift from outputs (solutions/deliverables) to UX outcomes (what is the impact/change in people's lives?).
  • Increase key decision makers exposure to users. Not videos of research, but firsthand repeated involvement in research sessions to see the frustration of users.
  • Increase UX research maturity by shifting from only asking if you built the right things (tactical) to fist asking if you are solving the right problem (strategic).
  • [[!Qualitative research]] is essential to strategic UX research. [[!Quantitative research]] is a tactical back up.
  • Active vs latent needs: Shift focus from active needs (what customers ask for) to latent needs (the underlying problems that customers cannot or do not voice). That is where the value (business and user) is.

Strategy vs Tactics in UX research

A strategy is our high level plan for accomplishing whatever our goal is. Both strategy and tactics are important. When starting out in research, we generally start tactically learning the mechanics of research. However becoming too tactically minded can get us stuck in a reactionary cycle and grinding away at the same mistakes.

Tactics

  • Low level plan. Conducting a research session / planning several research session.
  • Tactics are usually situationally agnostic. We probably do them the same way every time. For example, how we prep a usability testing session.
  • May start career here but don't get stuck here.

Strategy

  • High level plan. How we're going to apply research to critical decisions our company faces.
  • Strategy is incredibly situationally aware. It must account for people and many different elements. When one changes, the strategy needs to be reevaluated.
  • Strategy tells us which tactics we need and how to apply them.

Shifting from tactics to strategy

  • Need to shift toolchest. Need different tools for the higher strategic level vs tactical research planning.
  • Need different skillsets. Tactically researchers are facilitating, strategically researchers need facilitating, delivering, leadership, storytelling.
  • Need to shift our mindset. Tactics lock us into reacting and serving: ex: how can we research this new project?

Outputs --> outcomes

Tactics focus on outputs (we deliver a mockup, a study, etc.). We need to shift focus to outcomes. Outputs don't have any sense of quality. We need to think about the change/impact we see in the world because of the output. That's the outcome. That's the strategy. The change we want to see in the world because we deliver X, Y, Z. Whose lives do we improve and how do we improve them?

UX outcomes

A UX outcome's role is to answer a question: when we do a great job on X, how do we improve someone's life?

UX outcomes are human-centred outcomes. We can have business-centred outcomes working alongside those, but need to improve someone's life for it to be a UX outcome.

Identifying UX outcomes

A UX outcome is an improvement. How do we set those goals? Look at the current experience. Measure and map the customer experience journey. If we understand current experiences, it becomes easy to identify outcomes when we look for patterns. Then we can ask what would it look if we can improve those disappointing areas? Those become outcomes.

"The medium of UX people is behaviour."

Ask why people aren't getting from the current experience today to the outcome? That is the problem.

  1. Study current experience
  2. Identify problem to solve
  3. Identify solution
  4. Reach UX outcome

Iterative design happens most at 2-3. The world of research lives in 1-2, studying the experience and understanding and identifying the problem.

Right problem > Right solution > Right build

Jen Cardello's strategic research framework. Tactical asks are we building things right? Strategic asks are we building the right thing?

Right problem (strategic research) --> Right solution --> Build it right (tactical research)?

Increase exposure

Insulation builds up in an organisation. The people dealing with customers on a daily basis often aren't the people at the top making decisions.

UX has to make a strategic shift to increase exposure to users and research. Video does not work. Would you rather go to Disneyland or watch a trip of someone else's trip to Disneyland? You need to actually get people in front of users as they are delighted and frustrated.

Inflection point: Get each key decision maker to spend 2 hours per 6 weeks with users.

Repetitive exposure helps cement that the things that our business top priorities aren't solving the problems users have.

Maturity stages of UX research

0 Tactical --> 6 Strategic

  • Stage 0: No research
  • Stage 1: Basic usability (are we building it right?)
  • Stage 1.5: +customer support driven tasks
  • Stage 2: Usability + interview-based tasks
  • Stage 3: Basic field research (are we building the right solution?)
  • Stage 4: Focused field research where we can control the context
  • Stage 5: Field research across longer periods of time across the entire experience
  • Stage 6: Strategic research (are we building the right problem). Builds on everything below but now focused on business strategy and understanding the problems no one is solving.

Qualitative vs quantitative research

From a UX research [[!Qualitative research]] has far more strategic value. It can tell you what is happening and why. [[!Quantitative research]] is more like tactical backup. It can give us a sense of scale. Both are necessary but to become strategic, we have to start with [[!Qualitative research]] and back it up with [[!Quantitative research]]

The language and tasks as we understand them are not the same as how users understand them.

Shift focus from active to latent needs

"The more latent needs we identify, the more value we add."

Active needs are when customers bring us problems (ex: I need data export. Give me data export). Latent needs are where the value is. The customer doesn't know about the solution and cannot tell you what it is. Until you realise there is a problem, you can't ask for a solution.

Homework exercise

  • Work through the different stages:
    • Reflection: assess current situation
    • Planning: plan next steps + what success looks like