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franhankins
May 155 min read

Why should businesses invest in people-powered progress?

With great creativity comes great responsibility. If you make something that people will use, you’re responsible for the experience that comes with it. Whether it’s software, hardware, a service or a product. Whether it’s for a customer, a service user or an internal colleague.


It might sound odd, but what you put out into the world isn’t as important as how you put it out. Think about it this way, in virtually every industry, there’s tough competition and in some cases it’s completely over-saturated. If you provide a service in a saturated market, what do you think will allow you to stand out and be chosen? More importantly, what do you think will get you chosen repeatedly? Of course, competitive pricing and providing good value for money is important. But outside of simply thinking in financial terms, what will make someone want to keep coming back to you? 


The experience a customer has with your company and the product or service you provide is what can give you an edge. Given that we’re becoming increasingly impatient and expectant of a high class experience as standard, it’s not enough anymore to just be competitive with pricing. You need to give your customers and service users a great experience when they interact with your company and its products and services to keep them coming back. You also need to give your employees and colleagues a great experience to keep and attract the best talent. 


But how do we craft truly wonderful experiences? It’s easier said than done and sometimes it can feel like you have to read minds. This is where experience research can help. By taking some time to get to know your customers, colleagues or clients in a deeper way, we can uncover hidden gems of information. Rich insights that you might not have uncovered through typical market research, can steer you in the ‘right’ direction for each of your diverse audiences. 





Learning about people’s typical behaviours, goals, motivations, preferences, pain points and workarounds when using a product or service offers ‘gold dust’ information. Information that can help you understand how to craft experiences and journeys for your users. What’s more, when you dig a little deeper, you will discover insights you’d never anticipated and that you might never have found online. 


It can be tempting to simply pick a successful company to emulate rather than putting in the time upfront to understand your own people. However, if you do invest time and resources into a research-driven and user-led approach, you’ll learn what you need to do differently to your competitors that wows your users and isn’t easily replicated. Think of it as putting your investigative hat on to get ahead of those who fail to understand their people. Empathy is your magic ‘weapon’. Understanding how your users experience things and make sense of those experiences is key. 


By building a full picture of how your users behave and why, you begin to understand what they need. Not necessarily just what they want. Because let’s face it, as human beings we are notoriously bad at predicting what we’ll need or use in the future and we'll often say we want everything and the kitchen sink. But have you ever tried software that has hundreds of features and bloated functionality when it could have been much simpler in reality? I have. I even abandoned my dream to become an illustrator back in art college because I simply didn’t have the patience to learn how to use Photoshop. Back then, I just didn’t have the concentration span to navigate its endless features. I have much more patience now but a lot less time to learn how to use such a complex product. 


Skipping research and testing means you’re at risk of creating something unnecessarily complex or conversely, something too simplistic. Knowing the sweet spot is crucial for creating a process, product or service that people can follow or interact with seamlessly. 


Conducting research with current and future users of your product or service also allows you to design and build it in a way that’s not informed by your own assumptions. Creating something based on guesswork alone is never a good idea because you run the risk of making something no one will find useful. By having data to lean on, it also reduces the risk of the ‘loudest’ stakeholders from making all the decisions based on their opinions about users. 



Thankfully, there are companies out there that do invest time, money and effort into user experience research and it’s telling when you interact with their services. As a user myself, those experiences keep me coming back and paying for subscriptions. For examples of successful global companies that have benefitted from user experience research, see the UX Design Institute’s case studies article.  


Spotify is a great example of a business that not only believes in user experience research, but they have dedicated an entire department to it. They don’t just do it to tick a box. They are genuinely excited about the process of uncovering secret nuggets of information and applying these to continually improve their offerings. If you’re curious about Spotify’s stance on leveraging research, see their article on benefitting from mixed research methods. 


Monzo is another example of a company that values user experience research and understands just how significant its return on investment is. Their app is highly rated and as a user myself, I agree it's intuitive, convenient to use, and seamless to move through. With something as serious as banking, that’s important. It means you’re less likely to get scammed or accidentally send money to the wrong person! See Monzo’s article on the business benefits of taking a more strategic approach to user research here. 


It’s not just private companies that advocate for user experience research. The UK Government also champions user research and has created an entire manual on the subject. They take an evidence-led approach to building services:


‘When designing a government service, always start by learning about the people who will use it. If you do not understand who they are or what they need from your service, you cannot build the right thing.’


It’s clear how valuable experience research can be for companies and users alike. It’s better late than never to start asking yourself if your business does enough to understand its people. Consider what problems your business needs to solve and where research can help. Experience research can be overwhelming if you’ve never tried it before but fear not, there are so many resources online to guide you. Here are some great places to start if you want to begin empowering your business and end users through experience research:  





If you’d prefer more structure to your learning that’s expert-led, there are lots of great training providers out there that can help you to start embedding experience research in your business. If you don’t have the time or in-house resources to up-skill internally, you might prefer to hire external experts to complete research for you. If you find yourself in this situation, we’re happy to have a free, no obligation advice call. At Rebel Research UK we believe in people-powered progress through research. We strive for a world that’s designed and built for the people, with the people. From software to hardware, products to processes. Reach out if you’d like to chat: hello@rebelresearchuk.co.uk. 



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