Making the Case for Talking to Users
How I helped move an organization from being hesitant to hear from users to using continuous discovery and research to shape what gets built.
When I joined BRG as its first UX Researcher, I expected one of my biggest challenges would be learning a complicated new industry. I didn't expect to discover that I wouldn't be allowed to talk to users.
Leadership was concerned about the potential implications of collecting feedback that documented poor experiences with our products. That left me in an unusual position: I had been hired to establish UX research, but I first needed to demonstrate why talking to users was worth the perceived risk.
My first attempt at low-risk research went nowhere
I started by proposing what seemed like a relatively safe entry point: a mostly closed-ended survey that would give us some control over the type of feedback we collected.
It kept getting delayed. Even this limited form of user feedback was difficult to get approved when the benefit of research wasn't yet clear.
I realized that explaining why research would be valuable wasn't going to be enough. People needed to see what it could do.
We demonstrated research internally instead
My manager and I found a compromise: research with our own employees.
I interviewed around 10 people across engineering, product management, design, client management, and customer success about one of our products. There were already plenty of opinions about what was wrong with it, but no one had systematically gathered those perspectives and looked for patterns.
The research surfaced recurring concerns about the product's performance and ability to scale. More importantly, leadership could see what happened when scattered feedback was brought together in one place where they could evaluate and prioritize it.
After I presented the study, I was given permission to interview actual users for the first time.
That earned us access to users- with restrictions
Leadership initially selected users who had established relationships with the company and were considered unlikely to be overly negative.
Because UX had never been systematically studied on this product, I kept the research broad and focused on users' routine workflows.
We discovered that a workflow receiving significant attention internally became routine for users fairly quickly. Meanwhile, they were spending substantial time on another workflow that hadn't received the same attention. The findings led the product manager and strategy lead to investigate a problem that hadn't previously been a focus.
Some of that research is only now, more than a year later, beginning to appear in roadmap work.
Eventually, we stopped choosing the "safe" users
By the time I returned from maternity leave, the conversation about research had changed.
A new product was launching, and the team wanted ongoing feedback about how users navigated it, where they encountered problems, and what we should prioritize next. This time, I could recruit participants myself.
I used an in-product survey to recruit volunteers, and the product manager and I established a continuous discovery approach. Over roughly three months, we spoke with 22 users and built an ongoing understanding of their experience with the new product.
We had gone from carefully controlling who I could speak with to actively creating a channel for continuous user feedback.
Then teams started asking for research before they built
At the same time, another team was considering several directions for a new reporting product. Instead of choosing among those ideas internally, they asked for research to understand users' reporting needs before deciding what to build.
The product manager ultimately incorporated the needs identified through the research directly into his roadmap, with leadership agreeing that each should be addressed.
Research was no longer something I was trying to get permission to do. It was being requested to help determine what we should build.
Today, continuous discovery is beginning to expand to additional products.
What I learned
What changed people's minds wasn't a better explanation of UX research. It was seeing research work.
Interviewing employees wasn't the research I ultimately wanted to be doing, but it gave me a place to start. Each step opened the door to something we couldn't do before - from internal research, to controlled user interviews, to recruiting our own participants and eventually doing research before development.
If I were doing it again, I don't think I'd fundamentally change the approach. I'd probably just move through it faster.