Leveraging UX Insights to Influence Product Strategy

Step 3: Designing Our User Research to Focus on Strategic Questions

Once we clearly understand what product strategy is and develop a deep appreciation of how User Experience can support business, we are ready to conduct our user research. To begin with, we should design our research to target strategic questions and resist the temptation to turn the research into a typical design study. Let me illustrate by describing a study that I led, whose intent was to inform the 401(k) strategy for a large asset management site. In addressing a topic like this, a typical approach would be to create some wireframe concepts for the Web site, then take the concepts to users for evaluation. If we were working on design solutions, this would be sufficient. However, at the point when we did the research, the company was still figuring out what Web business model would best support its 401(k) business, so we needed to conduct product strategy research rather than a design study to inform that decision.

In taking on this project, I partnered with a user research agency. When we kicked off the project, we had already identified the target users, who were financial advisors specializing in managing 401(k) investments for investors. Our business goal was to leverage the Web site to sell financial products to those financial advisors. Through extensive interviews with stakeholders, we developed a solid understanding of the business situation, then followed up by performing a competitive analysis of industry trends for 401(k) Web sites. Based on insights from the data we gathered, we identified some research questions that would be important in determining the right strategy. Here is a small sample of the questions:

• Do we want to create a separate Web site for this group of advisors? If so, how would this Web site interact with the company’s main Web site?
• What are the key Web opportunities—for example, Web tools, Web marketing, or having advisors talk to salespeople via the Web—that we should pursue as a business?
• What are the information and analytical needs of those advisors, and what Web solutions could fill the gap?

As you can see, none of these questions is about design. They were business questions we needed to answer before we could determine design requirements. In fact, depending on their answers, we might not even need to do any Web design work.

In answering these strategic questions, we did not create any designs or storyboards in order to get user feedback. Instead, during our one-on-one contextual interviews with 401(k) advisors, we focused on asking the advisors about their investment processes and how the Web fits into those processes. We had them demonstrate their work experience by walking us through their processes. We asked probing questions about the financial Web sites they visited regularly to learn about their online information and analytical needs, as well as about the offline resources they used to get a comprehensive picture. We also asked probing questions about their general investment practice to create persona-like snapshots that would help us to contextualize our research findings. We assessed the business opportunities various Web proposals presented by getting the advisors’ reaction to them. (It would have been even better if we could have conducted an ethnographic study to better understand the advisors’ work environment. Unfortunately, for reasons of compliance, we weren’t able to do that.)

Step 4: Synthesizing and Communicating Strategic Insights

The last step is to synthesize and communicate your insights in a way that supports strategic conversations. This means, as a researcher, you should align your insights with a company’s strategic questions and bring out the business meaning behind user comments. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, because it’s very easy for UX researchers to habitually slip back into making design-centric recommendations rather than strategic product recommendations.

In the case of the site for financial advisors managing 401(k) investments, based on user responses, we proposed a 401(k) Web business model and assessed the business value of various Web solutions. Here are a few sample findings, modified to safeguard confidential information:

• The 401(k) Web presence should support three key initiatives: enabling sales conversations, providing a Web marketing platform, and enabling financial advisors’ self-directed information seeking.
• Instead of integrating content into the company’s main Web site, the company should develop a separate Web site for the 401(k) business.
• A portfolio proposal tool might be valuable for the self-directed use case, but would not be valuable in supporting Web marketing, so the company should integrate the portfolio tool with the proposed 401(k) Web site.

All of these findings speak at the level of the business model, product features, and feature prioritization. They do not directly address design implementation. The business could readily incorporate these findings into its strategic vision for the 401(k) Web presence. In fact, the company’s business leaders quickly adopted these findings as the foundation for their 401(k) Web strategy. The design that will implement this strategy will be under way in the near future.

Challenges and Opportunities

Now that I’ve explained these steps, they might not seem like much or may even be counterintuitive, but they are indeed hard for UX professionals to execute. This is because, while we excel at user experience and design, many of us have a natural tendency to stay within our discipline rather than spontaneously thinking of business strategy. Coming from a hard-core usability and psychological research background, it took me a while to achieve strategic thinking, and I’m still working on improving my ability to do that through ongoing, conscious effort.

As UX professionals, when we express an inspirational product idea, we tend to be too design centered in tone. When we think of user research, we tend to gravitate toward evaluating usability, design patterns, and visual appeal. Because we’re accustomed to representing the voice of users, we sometimes even take it too far and play an antagonist role against business—as if, by definition, it’s not possible to integrate user needs with business needs. However, great products like iPhone, Amazon.com, and Netflix are all the outcome of creatively combining business and user perspectives. To truly influence business through a UX perspective and develop successful products, it is critical that we seamlessly integrate a business perspective with a solid understanding of user needs and design best practices. But achieving this could still be a long journey ahead.

While this article has focused on using formal UX research to influence product strategy, any UX professional intending to drive business value could leverage the ideas I’ve presented here—in particular, steps 1, 2, and 4. For example, when a visual designer works on a Web promotion design, instead of jumping right into design and beautifying the appearance of the promotions, she could step back a bit and try to understand how Web promotions impact the business, then come up with innovative ideas for using the visual design to drive business success. After analyzing the business situation, the designer might choose to use visual design to highlight the brand instead of the content the company is promoting, because there might be more business value in elevating general brand awareness than in promoting a specific idea or product.

Let’s take interaction design as another example: If a company asked an interaction designer to make its Web site experience easy to use, instead of jumping right into applying typical user-interface design principles to improve usability such as simplicity and preventing error, the designer who wants to influence product strategy could ask this question: What is the site’s business objective? If it’s all about providing the highest customer satisfaction to ensure a positive impression of the brand, the designer should, by all means, optimize usability to improve task completion. But if the business model is based on Web advertising—for example, on a news site like time.com—intelligently integrating ads with users’ workflows while still allowing them to complete their tasks efficiently is more important than achieving optimal usability, which would typically mean no ads at all. By having a conversation with business leaders and product managers about such strategic points, a designer can determine the design approach that best aligns with the business model, while still achieving a high degree of usability.

These are but two examples of the countless opportunities that strategic thinking offers. The key to success is thinking not in terms of user experience and design alone, but understanding how to achieve synergy between user experience and business success, then providing solutions that, while based on our expertise in user experience, support this synergy. By consistently delivering high-impact insights like these, we can elevate our discipline’s business impact and help our User Experience organizations become true business influencers.