Unpopular opinions about UX research
Plus gift ideas, podcasts, a panel, and an OKR busting offer.
Hello hello!
Someone on Reddit asked, “what are your unpopular opinions about UX Research?” and when I started answering it all started pouring out. What I said got lots of upvotes and comments, so I think I struck a nerve.
You can see what I said below, but first …
I’ve been having conversations about OKRs recently. The theme has been that teams are spending a lot of (very expensive) time trying to set OKRs, then even more time trying to manage and make sense of them, and even after all that, they’re not seeing the promised benefits. I mean: not a big surprise but you can’t just stop without having something different to try. I’m looking for 5 leaders who have had it with OKRs and are ready to trial something different for operationalising your 2025 strategy. You must lead at least one team that’s up and running and looking for alignment – not a startup. If that’s you, reply with “Let’s go” and I’ll fire you the details.
Need a last minute gift for a facilitator, design snob or researcher type person? I enjoyed nosing through this Gift Guide for Service Designers. And if you are one of those types, you’ll enjoy all of Linn’s newsletter about Service Design.
Need a gift for a bookworm? I enjoyed How Big Things Get Done so much that we recorded a podcast episode about it and then another one.
Need a gift for yourself, or have £119 of L&D budget to use up? Pick up Master Multiverse Mapping and enjoy tales of hawks and otters while learning my ‘desert island’ product method for alignment, prioritisation and communication.
Something to watch: I joined a Product Conversations panel on Friday where we talked about what leaders can do to help cool burnout.
OK enough plugs. Without further ado, my unpopular opinions about UX Research.
As you read through, if you substitute your discipline in place of UX Research, what’s similar, different and surprising? Leave a comment and let us know.
I don’t know about unpopular. I think these might be broadly understood … but here’s what I wish I’d known when I got into this game.
Evidence rarely changes minds. More evidence changes then even less.
Business decision-making is often dressed up as rational and process-based, but it’s almost all political and fear-based under the pageantry.
UX Researchers can sometimes think of ourselves as having a special, uniquely unbiased perspective. We’re just differently biased.
One common bias in UX Researchers is that we tend to see everything that’s wrong with the user experience of products and services. We’re exposed to that a lot more than other disciplines. We often get stuck on the gap between what’s happening and an idealistic vision of what should be happening. In reality, successful projects are all bad in many ways: “just not-wrong enough” in a set of critical areas. It turns out the bar is often a lot lower than we think in the areas we care about, and a lot higher than we think in other areas.
Like all disciplines, we obsess over our craft. This is good, and there’s a lot of depth to learn, a lot of capabilities to master. Some aspects of UX Research are pretty easy once you get the hang of them; others are bottomless and endlessly rewarding to figure out. And — the important bit — nobody else in the business cares about any of it.
Like all disciplines, we tend to see our capabilities as a hammer and every problem as a nail. Our default solution to any situation is often more research. This is partly because you get early success by doing good research, so why wouldn’t more research lead to more success? And partly self-serving: we enjoy doing research and so we want the answer to every problem to be more research. But there’s a ceiling to the effectiveness of more research, and it’s lower than anyone expects. In short: the more strategic (consequential) the decisions you wish to influence, the less it’s about research and the more it’s about power and influence.
Speaking of influence, we stress about how to get our stakeholders to care about UX … but they already do. Stakeholders care about UX exactly as much as they can see it directly affects the things they really care about (some of which they won’t be able or willing to tell you about).
There’s never time, budget or appetite to do research properly. Get used to that, it’s not changing. Do what you can with what you have. Learn to be rigorous AND scrappy. Balance your idealism with pragmatism.
Pick your battles. If you’re perceived as a blocker, people will go around you and you’ll become irrelevant.
Collaborate. Way more. Going off by yourself for a while then delivering the answers seems more efficient, but it’s way less effective and so it turns out to be incredibly inefficient. The job is to figure out how to bring everyone along on the journey without imagining that they’re inherently interested.
All of this means that you’ll very rarely be invited to help with bigger decisions. You mostly have to just do the research you figure out is needed without waiting for permission, so that you can deliver valuable knowledge to the right people in time to help them. This is not easy, and the people involved won’t teach you how to play this game (they only want to play it with people who don’t need to be told.)
And to folks who love research, you’ll see all this and you’ll want to do it anyway.
Boom. So yeah: what’s similar, different and surprising? What else would you add?
Tom x
OKRs: https://tempo.substack.com/p/the-law-of-the-situation-the-powers
Influencing: “https://tempo.substack.com/p/voodoo-chile-slight-return-on-investment”
Reading this as an architect, your perspective resonates with me pretty deeply. Similar patterns show up in my world around "technical craft" and a level of flexible pragmatism is deeply important to make an impact. Your closing paragraph around not waiting for permission but working ahead to deliver valuable knowledge is spot on too. Keep writing, appreciate the insights!