How to start user research & get stakeholder buy-in

Learn how to build an effective UX research process and get your team on board! In this comprehensive guide, Joe Formica, Design Advocate at Lyssna, shares practical strategies for:

• Building buy-in for research initiatives with skeptical stakeholders.

• Overcoming common objections about time, cost, and uncertain outcomes.

• Starting small and focused to demonstrate value quickly.

• Using real examples from a case study app.

• Connecting research efforts to tangible business goals.

• Making user behavior and feedback visible to drive action.

With over 10 years of experience as a senior product designer, researcher, and educator, Joe breaks down how to launch a strategic, sustainable research process that delivers results. Whether you're a UX designer, product designer, or researcher, you'll learn actionable tips for making research more efficient and impactful.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 - Introduction

• 1:23 - Getting buy-in for research

• 2:18 - Making the case for research

• 4:47 - How to build a research process

• 11:12 - Wrapping up

Resources:

• Sign up for a free Lyssna plan

• Get started with the Lyssna template library

• Read our UX research guide

Transcript

If you're a product designer, UX designer, or researcher, you already know that the key to building a great product is understanding your users. Still, I would bet that at some point you've experienced the uphill battle of trying to get your team or your stakeholders. Onboard and bought into the value of user research.

Maybe you've experienced some pushback or skepticism from decision makers who don't quite see how research is going to lead to a better product. Maybe you've been doing some scrappy ad hoc research and you're ready to ditch that approach and build a process that's going to get results and that your whole team can get on board with.

My name is Joe Formica and I'm the design advocate here at Lyssna. I've been a senior product designer, researcher and educator for about the past 10 years. And in that time, I have definitely seen the challenges and struggles involved in getting a research process off the ground. But I've also seen the success stories and how getting that research process off the ground can lead to some amazing results for your team and your product.

So in this video, we're going to talk about. How to get started and how to begin to build that research process. And we're going to start by focusing on one, especially important area,

Helping your team recognize the value of research and getting everyone on board, I would say is the most important first step in building a research process that is strategic, sustainable, and impactful. So we're going to look at some of the challenges to getting that buy in, and of course, some of the strategies and actionable tips to overcome them.

We're also going to take a look at how tools like Lyssna can help you streamline that process, and how it can help make your research initiatives more efficient, effective, affordable, and really make that connection between the research you're doing and tangible improvements towards your goals. By the end of this video, you'll be able to kickstart a research process that will not only help you and your team build a better product, but will also continuously help build that trust in the research process and all the great outcomes that it can lead to.

All right, now that we know that we have to get ourselves and our team on board and bought into the value of research, we're going to dive into some of the challenges and some of the objections that might be holding your team back from really unlocking the value of research. Let's start by talking about the time and the cost that go into research.

You already know this, but research takes time. And it's not just the time spent talking to users or conducting interviews. It's the time that it takes to plan that research and then afterwards to synthesize it, to try to make sense of it with your team and hope that it leads to some positive outcomes.

Then there's the cost of research. And while I would say that the biggest cost associated with research is your time as a researcher or your salary, there are still additional costs, whether that's compensating participants, tools you're using, or any other expenses that might come up in the process, and that all kind of bundles up into opportunity costs.

It's not uncommon to get pushback from stakeholders because they believe that the time that you're spending doing research is time that you could spend doing other things that might have more direct impact on the success of the product. The second biggest challenge to overcome in getting buy in is the fact that research outcomes are uncertain.

Your stakeholders might think, you know, this is going to be great, to go talk to some customers and some users, learn a little bit more about them. But how are those conversations ultimately going to lead to improvements to our product and to our bottom line? How is it going to lead to business goals that we're pursuing, like growing our user base or boosting a conversion rate?

As you know, research can sometimes feel like a winding road when you first start out. It's not always clear if or how that research is going to lead to tangible improvements. And that uncertainty is going to present some challenges in getting everyone on board. The last challenge is something I like to call out of sight, out of mind.

I mean, if you're not seeing any glaring complaints or visible issues, why dig deeper to learn more. It's easy to assume that everything is going well, but the reality is that there are probably a significant number of issues or areas of opportunity that are going on behind the scenes, but if you're not doing research, you just haven't discovered them yet.

And without research, those issues and opportunities really just stay invisible until it's too late.

Now that we've broken down the challenges to getting that buy in, we're going to shift our focus to solutions. How can we start to overcome these obstacles and build a research process that our team and our stakeholders are going to be invested in? Let's start with an example app that we're going to use to demonstrate some of these solutions.

The app is called Care Connect, and it's an app that allows parents to book babysitters or trusted caregivers for their children right from their phone. Care Connect focuses on personalization and making sure that parents can enter and look through all the details. that are going to help them find a perfect caregiver for their child.

Now I want you to imagine that you're a product designer for CareConnect. Your team is small and scrappy and you're constantly working to make improvements, ship new features, and keep up with all the feedback that you're getting. Recently, you've been tasked with designing a new onboarding experience for CareConnect.

So think of this like a questionnaire. That parents will see when they log into the app that will ask them a couple of questions about them, their children, their preferences, and hopefully direct them to a personalized list of babysitters that would be great for them. So as a product designer, you know that this onboarding process could have a huge impact on the success of the product.

If we can ask the right questions, learn about their situation and direct them to the perfect caregiver, that's going to lead to a better experience for users and a better bottom line for Care Connect. But as you start working on it, you realize that a lot of the decisions that are being made are more based off of assumptions than understanding of your users.

You know that it's time to take a step back, do some research, and learn more, but you just don't have the process in place to do that. So let's look at some strategies to get your research process off the ground. My first tip is to start small and focused with your research. If you're proposing a month long initiative of interviewing parents to learn about their parenting styles, their family situations, their preferences, how they look for a babysitter.

That could be extremely valuable, but a month of interviews is also going to be a tough sell. It's going to take a significant amount of time, resources, and it might be difficult to get your stakeholders on board with such a large undertaking. Instead, start with something that's smaller, more focused, and more likely to get you actionable results.

So, for example, you could create a simple prototype and then use Lyssna to create a study where you're presenting users with those designs, having them walk through it, and offer some feedback specifically on how confident they are that the caregivers that they're being shown are a good fit for them and their child.

This kind of study is easy to launch on Lyssna. It's quick and it would allow you to get really valuable, focused feedback on the onboarding process. Without all of the time, resources, and cost involved in a more lengthy research initiative. Stakeholders would also get to see the connection between research and a clear business goal.

If you're able to get that feedback and use it to improve the onboarding process, that's not only going to directly impact the user experience. But we'll probably also benefit business goals like booking rates and conversions. Sticking with the idea of focus, you want to make sure that the questions that you're answering through research are tied to high impact goals.

You could spend a lot of time running studies and doing research on the visual aspects of the Care Connect onboarding. Things like colors, buttons, images. And while this could improve the look and feel of the process, it's unlikely that it's going to have a huge impact on the user experience or Care Connect's bottom line.

Now I want you to imagine that instead you focus your usability study just on the onboarding process. Maybe you're using Lyssna to create some kind of usability study where you're observing parents walk through that process. And leave feedback on some of the items that improve their confidence in booking a babysitter and also some of the points of friction or frustration.

Maybe you see that users are really confused or unsure about one part of the onboarding experience and it's causing them to lose confidence or drop off. This would be a really high impact discovery. If you were able to identify this drop off point and improve it, that's going to lead to a huge improvement on satisfaction, user experience, and Care Connect's business goals.

By running a study like that, you are directly improving a parent's ability to find a trusted caregiver and CareConnect's ability to turn visitors into paying customers. If out of sight, out of mind is a reason that UX research gets deprioritized, then the solution is to bring user behavior to light.

You and your team know that your product isn't perfect. You know that there are areas where users are feeling frustrated or dropping off. And you might even have a good sense of where those problems are happening or where you're missing certain opportunities. But if it's just a vague understanding of these issues, then digging deeper and ultimately improving them or capitalizing on opportunities is not going to become a priority.

Now, in terms of bringing that user experience to light, imagine running a Lyssna study and returning with quotes, feedbacks, recordings of your customers, your users, real people. who are struggling with your product, running into confusion or expressing ideas that would be hugely valuable to them. You might find that parents aren't confident about babysitter recommendations they're getting.

Maybe that they're confused about the scheduling or availability. Not only are these really valuable insights, but the ability to share them with your team, real quotes, recordings, and feedback that impactful, not only on the performance of your product, but on the buy in that you're getting from your team.

It's going to be a huge wake up call when these vague issues that have existed into the past now have a live human being expressing the challenges, issues, and frustrations with the product. It's going to build a new level of empathy, value, in the research process and we'll start to build a culture where feedback is something that can no longer just be swept under the rug.

Getting started with a research process can feel overwhelming, especially when you have all of these challenges and pushbacks involved in getting the buy in of your team and stakeholders. If you start small, focus on high impact areas, and use tools like Lyssna to make that process more effective and efficient, you'll begin to build a research process that your whole team is on board with.