How evidence-based design is becoming the norm

It’s easy to come up with design ideas that sound great, isn’t it? 

Wouldn’t it be cool to design an interactive product finder to help users find relevant products? Wouldn’t it be great if users had better access to their loyalty points? Don’t you think we would sell a lot more products with a quick buy feature? 

Here’s the pickle. None of these great ideas will deliver results if they’re solving the wrong problem, or a problem that is not important enough to make a difference.  

Jakob Nielsen, the father of UX, said it best 

“Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail”

Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group

We know user research (and research in general) is key to good ecommerce design and our Magento design services. But even today, it doesn’t always make it to the scope of work. 

Why?

Practicalities, usually 

Sometimes the product owner doesn’t want to spend budget that could be used for developing features. After all, what you spend on the research you can’t spend on design or development.

Other times, the product owners might have experience of research that didn’t improve the understanding of the problem (because it was poorly executed) or research that only validates the current thinking (which can be perceived by sceptics as non-valuable, even though it is). 

These are some of the barriers that have clouded the progress of evidence-based user experience design, to the detriment of great customer experience. 

However, there is plenty of evidence that the case for evidence is becoming stronger (see what I did there) and that there are fewer UX designers producing work without meaningful user research to steer their work. 

Interest in UX research has grown dramatically in the last few years. Data from Google Trends shows that search volume for “UX research” has grown impressively in the last few years, and it’s currently experiencing an all-time high (Exhibit 1)

User Interviews (a UX participant recruiting company) have been interviewing UX professionals since 2019 to publish findings into the state of user research. You can access this year’s paper here. Worth a read!  

This year’s findings confirm and give some colour to what we’re seeing in search demand and what we’re experiencing in the culture of agencies and ecommerce companies.

Firstly, buy-in on the importance of research has become a much smaller problem than it used to be. Just under a quarter of UX professionals were “very dissatisfied” with the degree of research buy-in in their organisations in 2020, but this year only 3% of respondents felt this way (Exhibit 2) 

This is a huge difference. 

Because of all of this, investment in UX research is growing. In 2019, as many as 20% of respondents worked in companies with no dedicated UX research professionals, but this year the percentage drops to 5%. 

And finally, we also know that “prep research” (ie, the research instruments that are used to inform the core of the proprietary research such as user interviews) is also very commonplace. 

As many as three-quarters of UX professionals would conduct 1:1 interviews with stakeholders such as product owners, CEOs and marketing departments, and as many as 50% will conduct surveys and workshops. 

Web analytics is also a very popular way to pave the way for good usability studies or generative research, with 42% of UX professionals mining analytics data to spot potential pain points to investigate further. 

This all means we’re now experiencing a culture of investing in research to shed light on roadmaps and iterative improvements to usability and customer experience. Can you feel the winds of change blowing?

Now it’s on all of us to do good research!