If you’re considering investing in a UX research practice, you already know the value of research-generated insights in making informed business decisions and gaining a competitive edge. But, simply hiring a few researchers and expecting research insights to filter through the organization and work wonders is not enough.
The success of your UX research practice depends on your organization’s insights mindset, which is your company’s set of beliefs, values, and attitudes about user insights.
Before starting a UX research practice, you need to assess if your company is insights-ready. Many organizations struggle to integrate UX research due to various reasons. Firstly, your company may lack a shared understanding of who your users or customers are. Secondly, there is no general agreement on what “research” is or the function UX research will hold once it comes on board. Lastly, your company has established ways of making decisions, and existing organizational culture and processes do not formally take into account insights from UX research.
Expecting a solo researcher to establish a UX research practice, advocate for a company-wide understanding of users, and change your company’s decision-making processes is setting that researcher up for failure.
To ensure that UX research is the investment you expect it to be, you need to guarantee that your company has an insights-ready mindset.
An insights mindset impacts how you, your colleagues, and your leadership team define, conduct, and integrate research insights in making better business decisions. Without an insights-ready mindset, UX researchers are relegated to a validation function, where they are only called on to “prove” the value of existing ideas, or the company loses out on one of UX researchers’ greatest attributes: their ability to identify crucial opportunities for innovation.
To avoid the cost of researchers being unable to deliver their full potential projects happening in parallel without ideal collaboration, and loss of an invaluable competitive advantage, focus on your insights mindset first. Get insights-ready by assessing and advancing your company’s insights-readiness with a one-day workshop. Then, you can start taking the necessary steps to hire a talented UX research team and build a user insights practice that will help your company thrive.
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